United States Military History

From an acclaimed military historian, a bold reappraisal of young George Washington, an ambitious if reckless soldier destined to become the legendary general who took on the British and, through his leadership, defined the American character.

Soldiers called it one of the “waste places of nature” and “a region of gloom” - the wilderness of Virginia, 70 square miles of dense second-growth forest known as “the dark, close wood”. Here, in the spring of 1864, the Civil War escalated to a new level of horror. Ulysses S. Grant, commanding all Federal armies, opened the campaign with a vow to never turn back. Robert E. Lee, commanding the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, moved into the wilderness to block Grant’s advance. Immovable object intercepted irresistible force - and the wilderness burst into flame.

Early on the morning of December 7, 1941, Japanese aircraft and ships attacked the US military base at Pearl Harbor in Oahu, Hawaii. Following the attack, the United States would officially enter World War II, and people around the country would join together to support the war effort. But for those at Pearl Harbor, the war began when the attack did. Pilots, navy officers, nurses, and civilians quickly took action. These brave heroes worked to defend Pearl Harbor. They cared for casualties and worked to repair the damage.

Considered by some to be far too old for one attempting to rejuvenate the career of a soldier, Baron Johann von de Kalb was a keen student of war with a steady mind and hand. Once able to prove his worth to the Continental Congress, he rose immediately to the rank of brigadier general under George Washington, served with distinction, and died heroically in the Battle of Camden, a battle in the South that foretold the eventual surrender of Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown.

Baron Johann de Kalb: The Life and Legacy of the German Major General Who Fought in the American Revolution profiles one of the Revolutionary War’s most famous soldiers. You will learn about de Kalb like never before.

Benjamin Grierson’s Union cavalry thrusting through Mississippi is one of the most well-known operations of the Civil War. Based upon years of research and presented in gripping, fast-paced prose, Timothy B. Smith’s The Real Horse Soldiers captures the high drama and tension of the 1863 horse soldiers in a modern, comprehensive, academic study.

The recent Hollywood film Hidden Figures presents a portrait of how African American women shaped the US effort in aerospace during the height of Jim Crow. In Storming the Heavens, Gerald Horne presents the necessary back story to this account and goes further to detail the earlier struggle of African Americans to gain the right to fly.

G. Ward Hubbs uses a stark and iconic political cartoon to illuminate postwar conflicts over the meaning of freedom in the American South. The cartoon first appeared in the Tuskaloosa Independent Monitor, published by local Ku Klux Klan boss Ryland Randolph, as a swaggering threat aimed at three individuals. The four men associated with the cartoon were archetypes of those who were seeking to rebuild a South shattered by war. Their lives, but especially their four very different understandings of freedom, help to explain many of the conflicts of the 1860s.

Invalid teenager Leroy Wiley Gresham left a seven-volume diary spanning the years of secession and the Civil War. He was just 12 when he began, and he died at 17, just weeks after the war ended. LeRoy’s diary offers an inside look at a fateful journey that robbed an energetic and likeable young man of his youth and life. I Am Perhaps Dying adds considerably to the medical literature by increasing our understanding of how tuberculosis attacked a young body over time, how it was treated in the middle 19th century, and the effectiveness of those treatments.

The Dunker Church is one of the most iconic structures of the American Civil War. Surprisingly, few people know much if anything about its fascinating story or the role it played within the community of Sharpsburg and its importance during and after the Battle of Antietam. September Mourn: The Dunker Church of Antietam by Alann D. Schmidt and Terry W. Barkley rectifies this oversight in the first book-length study of its kind. On September 17, 1862, two mighty armies grappled across the rolling hills, fields, and woodlots surrounding Sharpsburg, Maryland.

From early slave rebels to radical reformers of the Civil War era and beyond, the struggle to end slavery was a diverse, dynamic, and ramifying social movement. In this succinct narrative, Richard S. Newman examines the key people, themes, and ideas that animated abolitionism in the 18th and 19th centuries in the United States and internationally. Filled with portraits of key abolitionists - including Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Anthony Benezet, Toussaint L'Ouverture, Elizabeth Heyrick, Richard Allen, and Angelina Grimke - the book highlights abolitionists' focus on social and political action.

Abraham Lincoln began his presidency admitting that he knew "but little of ships," but he quickly came to preside over the largest national armada to that time, not eclipsed until World War I. Naval historian Craig L. Symonds' Lincoln and His Admirals unveils an aspect of Lincoln's presidency unexamined by historians until now, revealing how he managed the men who ran the naval side of the Civil War, and how the activities of the Union Navy ultimately affected the course of history.

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.

Today, streets, bridges, monuments, and even neighborhoods bear Tadeusz Kościuszko’s name across the country, and in Polish communities, he is often hailed as a hero equal to General Washington himself. Tadeusz Kościuszko: The Life and Legacy of Poland’s Most Famous General profiles one of the Revolutionary War’s most important figures.

At the time of the Revolutionary War, nations such as France undoubtedly had an elevating effect on America’s capacity to make formal war, and Lafayette is the most famous foreigner to serve in the Continental Army, but some of the most important individuals who fought for the colonists came from Poland. One of the most important individuals who arrived at George Washington’s door was Polish aristocrat Kazimierz Michal Wladyslaw Wiktor Pulaski, known to future generations as the “Father of the American Cavalry”, while Tadeusz Kosciuszko perceived the American conflict as the test of a new universal paradigm.

These stories begin with brief family histories that bring the Peltier and the Scottish Keillor families together. John was the fifth of the 12 children that Wilburn and Barbara Peltier raised on the flat salt grass prairie of Southeast Texas after they married. The life they created for their family on their rice farm and cattle ranch provided fertile ground for the life experiences that are shared in these settings. At the age of 19, naïve and fresh from the farm, John was drafted into the US Army. After surviving boot camp and medical corpsman training, he found himself in Vietnam.

Many Americans labor under the misconception that the nation’s colonial and national heritage was almost wholly accomplished by an English migration, and the notion of early American diversity ends at an acknowledgment of the slave trade conducted between Southern buyers, Northern shippers, the African continent, and the Caribbean region. However, early America witnessed the development of New York by the Dutch, the southernmost regions by Spain, and what would become eastern Canada by the French after lengthy battles with Britain.

Lincoln's Last Hours describe the assassination and last moments of President Lincoln's life. They were written by Dr. Charles Leale, the first doctor to attend to Lincoln after he was shot.

In 2000, The Patriot, starring Mel Gibson, captured the nation's attention with the highly dramatized story of an American patriot fighting the British in South Carolina during the American Revolution. As viewers learned that Gibson's character was loosely based on General Francis Marion, nicknamed the "Swamp Fox" by his enemies, people took a new interest in this often forgotten soldier.

Yorktown was a former tobacco trading post now in decline, not much bigger than a large village. But Yorktown was tucked away on the northern edge of the York peninsula in rural Virginia, and in 1781 it became the site of a brief siege between two small armies, fought with all the decorum and formality of 18th century European warfare. About 5,000 British and Germans faced perhaps 18,000 Americans and French. After only three weeks the smaller garrison surrendered, tired and low on ammunition.