Union History

In this powerful and moving narrative, Christopher Somerville skilfully links personal testimonies to present an epic which embraces comedy and tragedy, pride and degradation, close comradeship and stark racial prejudice, devotion to the benign Mother Country and a burning desire to see the back of her. Many of the veterans had never previously talked of their experiences, even to close loved ones.

During its single year of existence, more money was expended on the Elmira prison than in any of the other Union Stockades. Even with this record spending, a more ignominious figure was attached to Elmira: of the more than 12,000 Confederates imprisoned there, nearly 3,000 die while in captivity - the highest rate among all the Northern prisons. The authors conclusions are based on new, little-known, or never used archival materials. In a similar vein, his description of the prison culture is especially illuminating.

In The Browns of California, journalist and scholar Miriam Pawel weaves a narrative history that spans four generations, from August Schuckman, the Prussian immigrant who crossed the Plains in 1852 and settled on a northern California ranch, to his great-grandson Jerry Brown, who reclaimed the family homestead 140 years later. Through the prism of their lives, we gain an essential understanding of California and an appreciation of its importance.

How did Civil War soldiers endure the brutal and unpredictable existence of army life during the conflict? This question is at the heart of Peter S. Carmichael's sweeping new study of men at war.

Fort Sumter is popularly remembered today as the first fighting of the Civil War, and a relatively painless battle at that, but much of the history before April 12 that led to the shelling of the fort is often overlooked. The Greatest Civil War Battles: The Battle of Fort Sumter comprehensively covers the events that led up to the battle, the fighting itself, and the aftermath of the battle. Accounts of the battle by important participants like P.G.T. Beauregard, Robert Anderson, and Abner Doubleday are also included.

This book is an extraordinary day-to-day documentary of the Civil War's most infamous Confederate prison, Camp Sumter, better known as Andersonville.

Interweaving thrilling personal stories with the politics of slavery and abolition, Bound for Canaan shows how the Underground Railroad gave birth to this country's first racially integrated, religiously inspired movement for social change.

In this newest addition to the Great Generals Series, John Mosier brings to life the brilliant military strategist Ulysses S. Grant. A modest and unassuming man, Grant never lost a battle, leading the Union to victory over the Confederacy during the Civil War, ultimately becoming president of the reunited states. Grant revolutionized military warfare by creating new leadership strategies and by integrating new technologies in classical military strategy.

Chris Brabson hates the Union troops. Yankee riders in the Tennessee mountains have stolen his family's newly harvested crops and their only horse. In spite of this, Chris' brother joins the Union army, and his parents refuse to take either side. But Chris has no doubts, he would fight for the Confederacy. The Perilous Road, a Newbery Honor book, powerfully illustrates the senseless waste of war and the true meaning of courage and tolerance.

Uri Shulevitz, one of FSG BYR’s most acclaimed picture-book creators, details the eight-year odyssey of how he and his Jewish family escaped the terrors of the Nazis by fleeing Warsaw for the Soviet Union in Chance. It was during those years, with threats at every turn, that the young Uri experienced his awakening as an artist, an experience that played a key role during this difficult time. By turns dreamlike and nightmarish, this account of determination, courage, family loyalty, and the luck of coincidence is a true publishing event.

On April 14, 1860, the day Fort Sumter fell to Confederate forces, Washington, D.C. - surrounded by slave states and minimally defended - was ripe for invasion. In The Siege of Washington, John and Charles Lockwood offer a heart-pounding, minute-by-minute account of the first twelve days of the Civil War, when the fate of the Union hung in the balance. The fall of Washington would have been a disaster: it would have crippled the federal government, left the remaining Northern states in disarray, and almost certainly triggered the secession of Maryland.

Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln had only three meetings, but their exchanges profoundly influenced the course of slavery and the outcome of the Civil War. Although Abraham Lincoln deeply opposed the institution of slavery, he saw the Civil War at its onset as being primarily about preserving the Union. Frederick Douglass, himself a former slave, by contrast saw the Wars mission to be the total and permanent abolition of slavery.

The Mexican War introduced vast new territories into the United States, among them California and the present-day Southwest. When gold was discovered in California in the great Gold Rush of 1849, the population swelled, and settlers petitioned for admission to the Union. But the U.S. Senate was precariously balanced with 15 free states and 15 slave states. Up to this point, states had been admitted in pairs, one free and one slave, to preserve that tenuous balance in the Senate.

This book explores the powers, activities, and accountability of MI5 from the end of the Second World War to 1964. It argues that MI5 acted with neither statutory authority nor statutory powers, and with no obvious forms of statutory accountability. It was established as a counter-espionage agency, yet was beset by espionage scandals on a frequency that suggested if not high levels of incompetence, then high levels of distraction and the squandering of resources.

Michal Goleniewski, cover name Sniper, was one of the most important spies of the early Cold War. For two and a half years at the end of the 1950s, as a Lt. Colonel at the top of Poland’s espionage service, he smuggled more than 5,000 top-secret Soviet bloc intelligence and military documents, as well as 160 rolls of microfilm, out from behind the Iron Curtain. In January 1961, he abandoned his wife and children and made a dramatic defection across divided Berlin with his East German mistress to the safety of American territory.

Tony Silber's account starts on April 14, 1861, with President Lincoln's call for seventy-five thousand militia troops. Washington, a Southern slaveholding city, was the focal point. The capital was barely defended, by about two thousand local militia troops of dubious training and loyalty. In Charleston, the Confederates had an organized army that was larger and ready to fight.

On May 25, 1863, after driving the Confederate army into defensive lines surrounding Vicksburg, Mississippi, Union major general Ulysses S. Grant and his Army of the Tennessee laid siege to the fortress city. With no reinforcements and dwindling supplies, the Army of Vicksburg finally surrendered on July 4, yielding command of the Mississippi River to Union forces and effectively severing the Confederacy.

SHADOWBOSSES unfolds like an organized crime novel, but it's actually a true story of how labor unions are infiltrating our government and corrupting our political process. This compelling and insightful book exposes how unions have organized federal, state, and local government employees without their consent, and how government employee unions are now a threat to our workers' freedoms, our free and fair elections, and even our American way of life.

We all know about the famous generals and the major battles of the Civil War. But for the soldiers who actually fought, the war was all too real. It was especially traumatic for the thousands of soldiers who ranged in age from 10 to 15. Some young soldiers joined the fray to escape the boredom of farm work or to "set the South straight". Many of them kept diaries and wrote letters home. Through their eyes, we see what life was like on the edge of chaos.

From the early fall of 1941 until the winter of 1944, the Soviet city of Leningrad (today’s St. Petersburg) was almost completely surrounded by the forces of Nazi Germany and Finland. Though the siege lasted just under 900 days, to the citizens of the Soviet Union (and Russia today), this event is referred to as the “900-Day Siege”. The losses in Leningrad (both civilian and military) amounted to over one million deaths, according to American military historian David Glantz. If you want to discover the captivating history of the Siege of Leningrad, buy this book today.