United States Military History

First published more than 100 years ago, Hard Tack and Coffee is John Billings' absorbing account of the everyday life of a US Army soldier during the Civil War. It is written by a person who would know the material best, a genuine Civil War soldier.

When we look back on our nation's history, the American Revolution can feel almost like a foregone conclusion. In reality, the first weeks of the war were much more tenuous, and a fractured and ragtag group of colonial militias had to coalesce to have even the slimmest chance of toppling the mighty British Army. American Spring follows a fledgling nation from Paul Revere's little-known ride of December 1774 and the first shots fired on Lexington Green through the catastrophic Battle of Bunker Hill.

A revisionist view of the Revolution's most crucial year...it explodes many of the myths surrounding Burgoyne's Canadian expedition and Howe's Pennsylvania campaign. There is a wealth of fascinating detail in this book, including information on arms and supplies, rations for women camp followers, and even the numbers of carts (30-odd) carrying Burgoyne's luggage.

No part of the country was more contested during the American Revolution than the Hudson River. In 1776 King George III sent the largest amphibious force ever assembled to seize Manhattan and use it as a base from which to push up the Hudson River Valley for a rendezvous at Albany with an impressive army driving down from Canada. George Washington and other patriot leaders shared the king's fixation with the Hudson.

In the grand tradition of John Keegan's enduring classic The Face of Battle comes a searing, unforgettable chronicle of war through the eyes of the American soldiers who fought in three of our most iconic battles: Bunker Hill, Gettysburg, and Iwo Jima. This is not a book about how great generals won their battles, nor is it a study in grand strategy. Men of War is instead a riveting, visceral, and astonishingly original look at ordinary soldiers under fire.

Throughout history, from antiquity to the present, service in the armed forces of one's country has provided an almost endless source of material to entertain and even enlighten listeners. Military life has usually been a unique and peculiar experience for most civilians exposed to it. Originally published in 1888, Hard Tack and Coffee is the fascinating account of the everyday life of a footsoldier in the U.S. Army of 100 years ago.

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.

At once panoramic and intimate, Regular Army O! uses the testimony of enlisted soldiers - drawn from more than 350 diaries, letters, and memoirs - to create a vivid picture of life in an evolving army on the western frontier. In this richly drawn, uniquely authentic view, men black and white, veteran and tenderfoot, fill in the details of the frontier soldier’s experience, giving voice to history in the making.

There have been numerous books about the why, when, and where of slavery in America, but there is a dearth of material exposing what slavery was actually like. In The Great Stain, researcher Noel Rae frames firsthand accounts from former slaves, slave owners, and even African slavers. Rae exposes the commerce and culture of slavery, not only from an economic or moral standpoint but also through multitudinous perspectives within it: a young girl is beaten after being accused of stealing a piece of candy, a slave ship's surgeon recounts brutal treatment and squalid conditions.

Rethinking American Grand Strategy assembles a roster of leading historians to examine America's place in the world. Its innovative chapters reexamine familiar figures, such as John Quincy Adams, George Kennan, and Henry Kissinger, while also revealing the forgotten episodes and hidden voices of American grand strategy. They expand the scope of diplomatic and military history by placing the grand strategies of public health, race, gender, humanitarianism, and the law alongside military and diplomatic affairs to reveal hidden strategists as well as strategies.

The Battle of the Rosebud may well be the largest Indian battle ever fought in the American West. The monumental clash on June 17, 1876, along Rosebud Creek in southeastern Montana, pitted George Crook and his Shoshone and Crow allies against Sioux and Northern Cheyennes under Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. It set the stage for the battle that occurred eight days later when, just 25 miles away, George Armstrong Custer blundered into the very same village that had outmatched Crook.

When the Revolutionary War began, Congress established a national army and appointed George Washington its commander in chief. Congress then took it upon itself to choose numerous subordinate generals to lead the army’s various departments, divisions, and brigades. How this worked out in the end is well known.

The Complete Idiots Guide to World War II features coverage of the fateful D-Day invasion, a critical timeline of major WW II events, and a WWII timeline highlighting the crucial and most important events of the war. It also includes details about major battles on land, in the air, and on the sea; starting with Hitler's rise to power and his goal of European conquest; to Japan's bombing of Pearl Harbor; to the decisive battles such as D-Day and the Battle of the Midway, which turned they tides of the war toward the Allies.

For America, the gun is a story of innovation, power, violence, character, and freedom. From the founding of the nation to the pioneering of the West, from the freeing of the slaves to the urbanization of the 20th century, our country has had a complex and lasting relationship with firearms. Now, in First Freedom, nationally syndicated columnist and veteran writer David Harsanyi explores the ways in which firearms have helped preserve our religious, economic, and cultural institutions for more than two centuries.

During the Civil War his movements from battlefield to battlefield were followed in the North and in the South nearly as closely as those of generals, though he was not in the military. After the war, his swift response to Ku Klux Klan violence sparked passage of a landmark civil rights law, though he was not a politician. When he died newspapers reported his death from coast to coast, yet he's unknown today. He was the man who delivered the most valuable ingredient in United States soldiers' fighting spirit during those terrible war years—letters between the front lines and the home front.

After the Japanese military bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941, Japanese Americans became the subject of racism and discrimination within the United States. Many were rounded up and put in concentration camps. But even while this was happening, there were many Japanese American soldiers who fought to ensure that all Americans were safe during the biggest conflict in world history. Facing the Mountain is the story of three Japanese American soldiers: Rudy Tokiwa, Fred Shiosaki, and Kats Miho, who volunteered for the 442nd Regimental Combat Team to fight for their country in World War II.

His name is carved in granite, his likeness cast in bronze, his legend as large as the role he played as America's first president. But before he was a commander-in-chief, George Washington was a general in a revolution that would decide the future of the people and land he called his own. Author Paul Vickery tracks the unlikely rise of Washington, a man whose stature in command of a young army became prelude to a presidency. As Vickery writes, "He learned to become the father of our country by first being the father of our military."

The Spurgin family of North Carolina experienced the cataclysm of the American Revolution in the most dramatic ways—and from different sides. This engrossing book tells the story of Jane Welborn Spurgin, a patriot who welcomed General Nathanael Greene to her home and aided Continental forces while her loyalist husband was fighting for the king as an officer in the Tory militia.

Long called by some the “Andersonville of the North”, the prisoner of war camp in Elmira, New York, is remembered as the most notorious of all Union-run POW camps. It existed for only a year - from the summer of 1864 to July 1865 - but in that time, and for long after, it became darkly emblematic of man’s inhumanity to man. Confederate prisoners called it “Hellmira”. Derek Maxfield contextualizes the rise of prison camps during the Civil War, explores the failed exchange of prisoners, and tells the tale of the creation and evolution of the prison camp in Elmira.

During the brutal winter of 1775-1776, an untested Boston bookseller named Henry Knox commandeered an oxen train hauling 60 tons of cannons and other artillery from Fort Ticonderoga near the Canadian border. He and his men journeyed some 300 miles south and east over frozen, often treacherous terrain to supply George Washington for his attack of British troops occupying Boston. The result was the British surrender of Boston and the first major victory for the Colonial Army.