English Civil

With a unique, witty, and conversational voice historian Robert O'Connell breaks down the often paradoxical, easily caricatured character of General William T. Sherman for the most well-rounded portrait of the man yet written. There were many Shermans, according to O'Connell. Most prominently was Sherman the military strategist (indeed, one of the greatest strategists of all time), who gained an appreciation of geography from early campaigns out west and applied it to his famed Civil War march.

In 1966 in a small town in Louisiana, a 19-year-old Black man named Gary Duncan pulled his car off the road to stop a fight. Duncan was arrested a few minutes later for the crime of putting his hand on the arm of a White child. Rather than accepting his fate, Duncan found Richard Sobol, a brilliant, 29-year-old lawyer from New York who was the only White attorney at "the most radical law firm" in New Orleans. Against them stood one of the most powerful white supremacists in the South, a man called simply "The Judge".

One of the nation's preeminent scholars and a New York Times bestselling author, Eddie S. Glaude Jr., makes the case that the hard work of becoming a better person should be a critical feature of Black politics. Through virtuoso interpretations of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Ella Baker, Glaude shows how we have the power to be the heroes that our democracy so desperately requires.

The Great Partnership has the power to change how we think about Confederate strategic decision-making and the value of personal relationships among senior leaders responsible for organizational survival. Those relationships in the Confederate high command were particularly critical for victory, especially the one that existed between the two great Army of Northern Virginia generals.

Free speech as we know it comes less from the First Amendment than from a most unexpected source: Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. A lifelong skeptic, he disdained all individual rights, including the right to express one's political views. But in 1919, it was Holmes who wrote a dissenting opinion that would become the canonical affirmation of free speech in the United States.

When planes crash, bridges collapse, and automobile gas tanks explode, we are quick to blame poor design. But Henry Petroski says we must look beyond design for causes and corrections. Known for his masterly explanations of engineering successes and failures, Petroski here takes his analysis a step further, to consider the larger context in which accidents occur. In To Forgive Design he surveys some of the most infamous failures of our time.

They say that history is written by the victors. But not in the case of the most famous dissenter on the Supreme Court. Almost a century after his death, John Marshall Harlan’s words helped end segregation and gave us our civil rights and our modern economic freedom. But his legacy would not have been possible without the courage of Robert Harlan, a slave who John’s father raised like a son in the same household.

Before 1862, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain had rarely left his home state of Maine, where he was a trained minister and mild-mannered professor at Bowdoin College. His colleagues were shocked when he volunteered for the Union army, but he was undeterred and later became known as one of the North’s greatest heroes: On the second day at Gettysburg, after running out of ammunition at Little Round Top, he ordered his men to wield their bayonets in a desperate charge down a rocky slope that routed the Confederate attackers.

June 28, 2019 marks the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, which is considered the most significant event in the gay liberation movement, and the catalyst for the modern fight for LGBTQ rights in the United States. Drawing from the New York Public Library's archives, The Stonewall Reader is a collection of first accounts, diaries, periodic literature, and articles from LGBTQ magazines and newspapers that documented both the years leading up to and the years following the riots.

In 1994, Nelson Mandela became the first president of democratic South Africa. Five years later, he stood down. In that time, he and his government wrought the most extraordinary transformation, turning a nation riven by centuries of colonialism and apartheid into a fully functioning democracy in which all South Africa’s citizens, black and white, were equal before the law. Dare Not Linger is the story of Mandela’s presidency, drawing heavily on the memoir he began to write as he prepared to finish his term as president, but was unable to finish

American History, Volume 1 surveys the broad sweep of American history from the first Native American societies to the end of the Reconstruction period, following the Civil War. Drawing on a deep range of research and years of classroom teaching experience, Thomas S. Kidd offers students an engaging overview of the first half of American history. The volume features illuminating stories of people from well known presidents and generals, to lesser-known men and women who struggled under slavery and other forms of oppression to make their place in American life.

Focusing on disparities in employment, housing, education and health care, Wise argues that racism is indeed still an acute problem in the United States today and that colorblind policies actually worsen the problem of racial injustice. Colorblind presents a timely and provocative look at contemporary racism and offers fresh ideas on what can be done to achieve true social justice and economic equality.

For well over a century, traditional Civil War histories have concluded in 1865, with a bitterly won peace and Union soldiers returning triumphantly home. In a landmark work that challenges sterilized portraits accepted for generations, Civil War historian Brian Matthew Jordan creates an entirely new narrative.

The Civil War battle waged on September 17, 1862, at Antietam Creek, Maryland, was one of the bloodiest in the nation's history: On this single day, the battle claimed nearly 23,000 casualties. In Landscape Turned Red, the renowned historian Stephen Sears draws on a remarkable cache of diaries, dispatches, and letters to recreate the vivid drama of Antietam as experienced not only by its leaders but also by its soldiers, both Union and Confederate.

One of the most important African-American leaders of the 20th century and perhaps the most influential woman in the civil rights movement, Ella Baker (1903-1986) was an activist whose remarkable career spanned 50 years and touched thousands of lives. A gifted grassroots organizer, Baker shunned the spotlight in favor of vital behind-the-scenes work that helped power the Black freedom struggle.

So many thousands of books deifying Abraham Lincoln have been published that it is nearly impossible for the average citizen to learn much of anything that is truthful about Lincoln’s presidency. You’ll learn that the real reason why Lincoln launched an invasion of his own country (he never admitted that secession was legal or legitimate) was to destroy the voluntary union of the founders and replace it with a coerced union held together by violence and threats of violence, much more like the old Soviet Union than the original American union.

The events of that day are now tragically familiar: on May 25, 2020, George Floyd became the latest Black person to die at the hands of the police, murdered outside of a Minneapolis convenience store by White officer Derek Chauvin. The video recording of his death set off the largest protest movement in the history of the United States, awakening millions to the pervasiveness of racial injustice.

At 26, Bushrod Carter is already an old soldier, a veteran of all his regiment's campaigns since Shiloh. Now, on an Indian summer afternoon in 1864, Bushrod finds himself in the line of battle once again, on a plain below the obscure village of Franklin, Tennessee. The dark flower of his destiny is opening in the twilight, just as it has on other fields, and Bushrod must pass once again under its shadow if he is to see tomorrow.

Drawing on Black intellectual and grassroots organizing traditions, including the Haitian Revolution, the US civil rights movement, and LGBTQ rights and feminist movements, Unapologetic challenges all of us engaged in the social justice struggle to make the movement for Black liberation more radical, more queer, and more feminist. This audiobook provides a vision for how social justice movements can become sharper and more effective through principled struggle, healing justice, and leadership development.

In this groundbreaking historical expose, Douglas A. Blackmon brings to light one of the most shameful chapters in American history - an Age of Neoslavery that thrived from the aftermath of the Civil War through the dawn of World War II.