United States Military

This audiobook is the classic one-volume history of the American Civil War by Pulitzer Prize winner Bruce Catton. Covering events from the prelude of the conflict to the death of Lincoln, Catton blends a gripping narrative with deep, yet unassuming, scholarship to bring the war alive in an almost novelistic way. It is this gift for narrative that led contemporary critics to compare this book to War and Peace, and call it a "modern Iliad." Now over 50 years old, This Hallowed Ground remains one of the best-loved and admired general Civil War books.

Kiss the Boys Goodbye convincingly shows that a legacy of shame remains from America’s ill-fated involvement in Vietnam even though that conflict ended over 35 years ago. Until US government policy on POW/MIAs changes, it remains one of the most crucial issues for any American soldier who fights for home and country, particularly when we are engaged with an enemy who doesn't adhere to the international standards for the treatment of prisoners - or any American hostage...

The definitive refutation of the New York Times’ 1619 Project, this volume includes original essays, lectures, and interviews with historians. Topics addressed include the complex development of slavery in the New World, the American Revolution, the sectional crisis over slavery and the Civil War, the struggle for social equality in the 20th century, and the class politics of racial identity in the present.

The Battle of Little Bighorn in Montana in 1876 has become known as the quintessential clash of cultures between the Lakota Sioux and whites. The men who led the battle, Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, and Colonel George A. Custer, have become the stuff of legends.

In January Moon, Jerome Greene draws from extensive research and fieldwork to explore a signal - and appallingly brutal - event in American history: The desperate flight of Chief Dull Knife’s Northern Cheyenne Indians from imprisonment at Fort Robinson, Nebraska. In the wake of the Great Sioux War of 1876 - 77, the U.S. government expelled most Northern Cheyennes from their northern plains homeland to Indian Territory, in present-day Oklahoma. Following mounting hardships, many of those people, under Chiefs Dull Knife and Little Wolf, broke away, seeking to return north.

More than 150 years after the end of the Civil War, scores of websites, articles, and organizations repeat claims that anywhere between 500 and 100,000 free and enslaved African Americans fought willingly as soldiers in the Confederate army. But as Kevin M. Levin argues in this carefully researched book, such claims would have shocked anyone who served in the army during the war itself. Levin explains that imprecise contemporary accounts, poorly understood primary-source material, and other misrepresentations helped fuel the rise of the black Confederate myth.

In Dreams of El Dorado, H. W. Brands tells the thrilling, panoramic story of the settling of the American West. He takes us from John Jacob Astor's fur trading outpost in Oregon to the Texas Revolution, from the California gold rush to the Oklahoma land rush. He shows how the migrants' dreams drove them to feats of courage and perseverance that put their stay-at-home cousins to shame - and how those same dreams also drove them to outrageous acts of violence against indigenous peoples and one another. El Dorado was at least as elusive in the West as it ever was in the East.

The autobiography of the famous Apache war chief, Geronimo. A shout of "Geronimo!!!" is still evoked to show courage. Hear, in his own words, the war story of Geronimo and his Chiricahua band of Apache Indians.

Today the Glock pistol has been embraced by two-thirds of all U.S. police departments, glamorized in countless Hollywood movies, and featured as a ubiquitous presence on prime-time TV. It has been rhapsodized by hip-hop artists, and coveted by cops and crooks alike. Created in 1982 by Gaston Glock, an obscure Austrian curtain-rod manufacturer, and swiftly adopted by the Austrian army, the Glock pistol, with its lightweight plastic frame and large-capacity spring-action magazine, arrived in America at a fortuitous time.

The majority of Jewish immigrants who made their way to the United States between 1820 and 1924 arrived nearly penniless; yet today their descendants stand out as exceptionally successful. How can we explain their dramatic economic ascent? Have Jews been successful because of cultural factors distinct to them as a group, or because of the particular circumstances that they encountered in America?

In 1812, Americans held two distinctly different visions of their country. These incompatible visions of America were held by two opposing political parties. The two halves of America also had incompatible views on the necessity of war that year.

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian James M. McPherson considers why the Civil War remains so deeply embedded in our national psyche and identity. The drama and tragedy of the war help explain why the Civil War remains a topic of interest. But the legacy of the war extends far beyond historical interest or scholarly attention.

A profound new rendering of the struggle by African Americans for equality after the Civil War and the violent counterrevolution that resubjugated them, as seen through the prism of the war of images and ideas that have left an enduring racist stain on the American mind.

In 2005, historian Jason Emerson discovered a steamer trunk formerly owned by Robert Todd Lincoln's lawyer and stowed in an attic for 40 years. The trunk contained a rare find: 25 letters pertaining to Mary Todd Lincoln's life and insanity case, letters assumed long destroyed by the Lincoln family. Mary wrote 20 of the letters herself, more than half from the insane asylum to which her son Robert had her committed, and many in the months and years after. The Madness of Mary Lincoln is the first examination of Mary Lincoln's mental illness based on the lost letters in 20 years.

Today the United States is the world’s great super­power, and yet we also wrestle with the government Franklin and Washington created more than two centuries ago - the power of the executive branch, the principle of checks and balances, the electoral college - as well as the wounds of their compromise over slavery. Now, as the founding institutions appear under new stress, it is time to understand their origins through the fresh lens of Larson’s Franklin & Washington, a major addition to the literature of the founding era.

On May 15, 2003, David McCullough presented "The Course of Human Events" as The 2003 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities in Washington, DC. The Jefferson Lecture is a tribute to McCullough's lifetime investigation of history.

Perhaps no conflict in American history is more important yet more overlooked and misunderstood than the War of 1812. At the climax of the war, inspired by the defeat of Napoleon in early 1814 and the perceived illegality of the Louisiana Purchase, the British devised a plan to launch a three-pronged attack against the Northern, Eastern, and Southern US borders.

With a bit of insight into the Native American culture, paired with a larger understanding of how the settlers of the west actually lived, you'll be able to decipher what happened to the Oatman family of your own accord, empowering an honest understanding of this history. In The Captivity of the Oatman Girls, you’ll discover powerful insight into the truth of the relations between the settlers and the Plains Indians of North America, why the actions of the colonists in the late 18th century bordered genocide - and how this shifted the landscape forever, and more.

In September 1776, the vulnerable Continental army under an unsure George Washington evacuated New York after a devastating defeat by the British army. Three weeks later, near the Canadian border, one of his favorite generals, Benedict Arnold, miraculously succeeded in postponing the British naval advance down Lake Champlain that might have lost the war. As this book ends, four years later, Washington has vanquished his demons, and Arnold has fled to the enemy. America was forced at last to realize that the real threat to its liberties might not come from without but from within.

In December 1774, Benjamin Franklin met Caroline Howe, the sister of British General Sir William Howe and Richard Admiral Lord Howe, in a London drawing room for “half a dozen Games of Chess”. But as historian Julie Flavell reveals, these meetings were about much more than board games: They were cover for a last-ditch attempt to forestall the outbreak of the American War of Independence.