English Civil

Written by the officer who became General Longstreet’s most trusted associate, this collection of firsthand accounts, memoirs, and diaries grants the listener an inside view into the workings of the Confederate army staff - the unknown soldiers, the well-known commanders, politicians, nurses, and civilians - relating the events of the Civil War as Lt. Colonel Gilbert Moxley Sorrel experienced it.

It is the summer of 1862 and the Northern army is threatening to capture Richmond, the Confederate capital. Bloodied but victorious at the battles of Ball's Bluff and Seven Pines, Nate suddenly finds himself accused of being a Yankee spy. Proving his innocence and finding the real spy will require courage and endurance rarely seen even in the brutal fog of war. Failure could mean the fall of Richmond and a career-ending defeat for Robert E. Lee.

The Civil War: 1860 - 1865 examines the people and events involved in the bloody war that pitted the Northern states against those that seceded to form the Confederacy.

In 1848, a year of international democratic revolt, a young, enslaved couple, Ellen and William Craft, achieved one of the boldest feats of self-emancipation in American history. Posing as master and slave, while sustained by their love as husband and wife, they made their escape together across more than 1,000 miles, riding out in the open on steamboats, carriages, and trains that took them from bondage in Georgia to the free states of the North.

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.

A major American intellectual makes the historical case that the reforms of the 1960s, reforms intended to make the nation more just and humane, instead left many Americans feeling alienated, despised, misled - and ready to put an adventurer in the White House. Christopher Caldwell has spent years studying the liberal uprising of the 1960s and its unforeseen consequences. Even the reforms that Americans love best have come with costs that are staggeringly high - in wealth, freedom, and social stability - and that have been spread unevenly among classes and generations.

In the fall of 1863, the Union army is in control of the Mississippi river. Much of Louisiana, including New Orleans and Baton Rouge, is occupied. The Confederate army is in disarray, corrupt structures are falling apart, and enslaved men and women are beginning to glimpse freedom. When Hannah Laveau, a formerly enslaved woman working on the Lufkin plantation, is accused of murder, she goes on the run with Florence Milton, an abolitionist schoolteacher, dodging the local constable and the slavecatchers that prowl the bayous.

“The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line,” writes Du Bois, in one of the most prophetic works in all of American literature. First published in 1903, this collection of 15 essays dared to describe the racism that prevailed at that time in America—and to demand an end to it. Du Bois’ writing draws on his early experiences, from teaching in the hills of Tennessee, to the death of his infant son, to his historic break with the conciliatory position of Booker T. Washington.

It is impossible to imagine New Orleans, and by extension American history, without the vibrant and singular Creole culture. In the face of an oppressive white society, members of the Société d’Economie et d’Assistance Mutuelle built a community and held it together through the era of slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow terrorism. Economy Hall: The Hidden History of a Free Black Brotherhood follows Ludger Boguille, his family, and friends through landmark events that shaped New Orleans and the United States.

Even without the right to vote, members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy proved to have enormous social and political influence throughout the South - all in the name of preserving Confederate culture. Karen L. Cox's history of the UDC, an organization founded in 1894 to vindicate the Confederate generation and honor the Lost Cause, shows why myths surrounding the Confederacy continue to endure.

On the sparkling morning of June 25, 1876, 611 men of the US 7th Cavalry rode toward the banks of the Little Bighorn in the Montana Territory, where 3,000 Indians stood waiting for battle. The lives of two great warriors would soon be forever linked throughout history: Crazy Horse, leader of the Oglala Sioux, and General George Armstrong Custer.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Battle Cry of Freedom and many other award-winning books, James M. McPherson is America's preeminent Civil War historian. Now, in this collection of provocative and illuminating essays, McPherson offers fresh insight into many of the most enduring questions about one of the defining moments in our nation's history.

In Slavery and the Coming of the Civil War, the authors explain the occurrences in America during the thirty years between 1831 and 1861. This book discusses the attitudes and events that led up to and caused the Civil War in America, particularly the institution of slavery, the Abolitionist movement, and the rise of Abraham Lincoln.

Battle lines have been drawn between the North and the South, pitting state against state - and brother against brother. For the three brothers, the Civil War would change not only their lives, but the destinies of future generations. Jacob, the eldest, defies his father's wishes and enlists with the Union, a decision that wins him the love of an officer's daughter - and the hatred of a dangerous childhood rival.

A provocative, lively deep dive into the meaning of America's first Black president and first Black presidency, from "one of the most graceful and lucid intellectuals writing on race and politics today" (

Vanity Fair).

In this classic work, Leo Strauss examines the problem of natural right and argues that there is a firm foundation in reality for the distinction between right and wrong in ethics and politics. On the centenary of Strauss's birth, and the fiftieth anniversary of the Walgreen Lectures which spawned the work, Natural Right and History remains as controversial and essential as ever.

Among the autobiographies of great military figures, Ulysses S. Grant’s is certainly one of the finest, and it is arguably the most notable literary achievement of any American president: a lucid, compelling, and brutally honest chronicle of triumph and failure. From his frontier boyhood, to his heroics in battle, to the grinding poverty from which the Civil War ironically rescued him, these memoirs are a mesmerizing, deeply moving account of a brilliant man told with great courage.

Few wars have been fought by each side with greater intensity of conviction in the rightness of its cause or with more abundant personal heroism than the War Between the States. The story begins with a great responsibility falling on Vincent Wingfield, the teenage son of a widowed Virginia plantation owner. Vincent must decide what course of action he should take when a problem arises on the plantation.

First published in 1971, Rules for Radicals is Saul Alinsky's impassioned counsel to young radicals on how to effect constructive social change and know "the difference between being a realistic radical and being a rhetorical one."

In the century after the Civil War, an economic revolution improved the American standard of living in ways previously unimaginable. Electric lighting, indoor plumbing, home appliances, motor vehicles, air travel, air conditioning, and television transformed households and workplaces. With medical advances, life expectancy between 1870 and 1970 grew from 45 to 72 years. The Rise and Fall of American Growth provides an in-depth account of this momentous era.