English Civil War

46 BC. Pompey is dead, Egypt is settled and Rome is controlled by the loyal Marcus Antonius. As the new year looms, Rome's greatest general and dictator Julius Caesar moves precipitously to take on the last stronghold of the rebel faction: Africa. Crossing against all advice in the middle of winter, with minimal forces and little forward planning, the campaign almost dies before it begins, legions scattered across the sea by vicious storms, the general putting ashore with just a single legion and his most trusted veteran commander: Marcus Falerius Fronto.

At the start of the 1860 presidential campaign, a handful of fired-up young Northerners appeared as bodyguards to defend anti-slavery stump speakers from frequent attacks. The group called themselves the Wide Awakes. Soon, hundreds of thousands of young White and Black men, and a number of women, were organizing boisterous, uniformed, torch-bearing brigades of their own. These Wide Awakes--mostly working-class Americans in their twenties--became one of the largest, most spectacular, and most influential political movements in our history.

It is 1978 in Beirut, Lebanon, partway through that country's Civil War. On a torn-up street in the city's Christian enclave, we meet an eccentric young man named Pavlov, the son of a local undertaker. When his father meets a sudden and untimely death, Pavlov is approached by a colorful member of the mysterious Hellfire Society - a secret group to which his father had belonged. The Society's purpose is to arrange burial or cremation for those who for various reasons have been outcast and abandoned by family, clergy, and state.

Upon his election to the presidency, Abraham Lincoln inherited a country in crisis. Even before the Confederacy’s secession, the United States Treasury had run out of money. The government had no authority to raise taxes, no federal bank, no currency. But amid unprecedented troubles Lincoln saw opportunity—the chance to legislate in the centralizing spirit of the “more perfect union” that had first drawn him to politics.

Before Shelby Foote undertook his epic history of the Civil War, he wrote this fictional chronicle, "a landscape in narrative", of Jordan County, Mississippi, a place where the traumas of slavery, war, and Reconstruction are as tangible as rock formations.

Zach Cobb is haunted by bitter Civil War memories, but his fighting experience makes him a formidable Wells Fargo agent. When a series of payroll holdups rocks the Mojave Desert, Zach follows a trail of clues deep into the criminal underworld, where shady figures battle for control of the opium trade. Thoughts of his beloved Jenny Hays keep Zach warm at night, and maybe with a little help from above he'll crack the case and find himself some peace.

Late on the evening of October 16, 1859, John Brown and his band of 18 raiders descended on Harpers Ferry at the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers. In an ill-fated attempt to incite a slave insurrection, they seized the federal arsenal, took hostages, and retreated to a fire engine house. The raiders were routed, and several were captured. Soon after, they were tried, convicted, and hanged. Among Brown's raiders were five African Americans whose lives and deaths have long been overshadowed by their martyred leader and, even today, are little remembered.

On a Mississippi morning in 1859, Emily Matthews begs her father to save a slave, Nathan, about to be auctioned away from his family. Judge Matthews is an abolitionist who runs an illegal school for his slaves, hoping to eventually set them free. One, a woman named Ginny, has become Emily's companion and often her conscience - and understands all too well the hazards an educated slave must face. Yet even Ginny could not predict the tangled, tragic string of events set in motion as Nathan's family arrives at the Matthews farm.

In a transformed mid-19th-century America dominated by plantation owners and kept in line by Southern military forces, a mild-mannered academic from Maine, Professor Joshua Chamberlain, stands accused of crimes against the nation. In court alongside him is Abraham Lincoln, whose fiery rhetoric brands him a "threat to the security of the United States of America". Convicted, Chamberlain is sentenced to 40 years hard labor, while Lincoln's fate is indefinite detention at Fortress Monroe.

From crawling lice and deadly diseases to bloody battles and crammed prison camps, life was truly terrible for Union and Confederate soldiers. Get ready to explore the nasty side of life during the US Civil War.

Madrid, 1957. Under the fascist dictatorship of General Francisco Franco, Spain is hiding a dark secret. Meanwhile, tourists and foreign businessmen flood into Spain under the welcoming promise of sunshine and wine. Among them is 18-year-old Daniel Matheson, the son of an oil tycoon, who arrives in Madrid with his parents hoping to connect with the country of his mother's birth through the lens of his camera. Photography - and fate - introduce him to Ana, whose family's interweaving obstacles reveal the lingering grasp of the Spanish Civil War.

Ordered to hold an abandoned army post, John Dunbar found himself alone, beyond the edge of civilization. Thievery and survival soon forced him into the Indian camp, where he began a dangerous adventure that changed his life forever. Set in 1863, the novel follows Lieutenant John Dunbar on a magical journey from the ravages of the Civil War to the far reaches of the imperiled American frontier, a frontier he naively wants to see "before it is gone".

In 1871, the Franco-Prussian War was raging. The workers of Paris, fed up with a government that had begun the hated war, and the exploitation, repression, and abuse of "their" government, took matters into their own hands. They instituted the Paris Commune - of, by, and for the workers. Observing these events through news reports of the time, one of the foremost thinkers of the 19th century, Karl Marx, made three speeches to the International Workmen's Association.

The Civil War posed a critical test of the young nation's character, endurance, and will to survive. Coming only two generations after the nation's founding, the secession of Southern states challenged the very existence of the United States. "America's most monumental drama and morality tale" comes alive in this brilliant collection from America's leading history magazine, as selected by its current editor-in-chief, Edwin S. Grosvenor.

This book examines the complexities of life for African Americans in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley from the antebellum period through Reconstruction. Although the Valley was a site of fierce conflicts during the Civil War and its military activity has been extensively studied, scholars have largely ignored the Black experience in the region until now.

You may know of Abraham Lincoln, but there is more to his story. Learn about life in the time that Lincoln lived, and how he impacted the US Civil War.

The first major history of the International Brigades: a tale of blood, ideals and tragedy in the fight against fascism. The Spanish Civil War was the first armed battle in the fight against fascism, and a rallying cry for a generation. Over 35,000 volunteers from 61 countries around the world came to defend democracy against the troops of Franco, Hitler and Mussolini. Ill-equipped and disorderly, yet fuelled by a shared sense of purpose and potential glory, disparate groups of idealistic young men and women banded together to form a volunteer army.

Loyal Americans marched off to war in 1861 not to conquer the South but to liberate it. So argues Elizabeth R. Varon in Armies of Deliverance, a sweeping narrative of the Civil War and a bold new interpretation of Union and Confederate war aims. Northerners imagined the war as a crusade to deliver the Southern masses from slaveholder domination and to bring democracy, prosperity, and education to the region. As the war escalated, Lincoln and his allies built the case that emancipation would secure military victory and benefit the North and South alike.

Jack and Annie are whisked back to the Civil War, where they meet Clara Barton and save the life of their very own great-great-great-grand-father.

In The Cause of All Nations, distinguished historian Don H. Doyle explains that the Civil War was more than an internal American conflict; it was a struggle that spanned the Atlantic Ocean. This audiobook follows the agents of the North and South who went abroad to tell the world what they were fighting for, and the foreign politicians, journalists, and intellectuals who told America and the world what they thought this war was really about - or ought to be about.