War History America

The Irish-American story, with all its twists and triumphs, is told through the improbable life of one man. A dashing young orator during the Great Famine of the 1840s, in which a million of his Irish countrymen died, Thomas Francis Meagher led a failed uprising against British rule, for which he was banished to a Tasmanian prison colony. He escaped and six months later was heralded in the streets of New York - the revolutionary hero, back from the dead, at the dawn of the great Irish immigration to America.

The Dead Hand is the suspense-filled story of the people who sought to brake the speeding locomotive of the arms race, then rushed to secure the nuclear and biological weapons left behind by the collapse of the Soviet Union—a dangerous legacy that haunts us even today.The Cold War was an epoch of massive overkill.

When the war broke out, Union soldiers assumed Confederate women would be innocent noncombatants. Experience soon challenged this simplistic belief. Stephanie McCurry reveals the vital and sometimes confounding roles women played on and off the battlefield. In this groundbreaking reconsideration of the Civil War, the award-winning author of Confederate Reckoning invites us to see America's bloodiest conflict not just as pitting brother against brother but as a woman's war.

The French and Indian War: 1660-1763 covers much more than the few years during which the English and French fought over the division of the North American continent in one of the most neglected periods of American history. In this volume in the Drama of American History series, authors Christopher Collier and James Lincoln Collier trace how England’s other rivals for control of America were eliminated over this period until the only source of conflict left would be between the British and their own colonists.

April 14, 1865. A famous actor pulls a trigger in the presidential balcony, leaps to the stage, and escapes, as the president lies fatally wounded. In the panic that follows, forty-six terrified people scatter in and around Ford's Theater as soldiers take up stations by the doors and the audience surges into the streets chanting, "Burn the place down!" This is the untold story of Lincoln's assassination: The forty-six stage hands, actors, and theater workers on hand for the bewildering events in the theater that night.

When you need to mislead the enemy, who are you going to call? The Ghost Army of course! During World War II, this top secret group of artists and special effects experts worked to deceive German forces on the front lines. Using fake combat vehicles and artillery, dummies dressed as soldiers, and broadcasting the sounds of troops and equipment, the Ghost Army often tricked the Germans into believing U.S. forces were about to attack in one place while the real troops moved against another target.

From the authors of the New York Times best-selling The Heart of Everything That Is and Halsey's Typhoon comes the dramatic untold story of a daredevil bomber pilot and his misfit crew who fly their lone B-17 into the teeth of the Japanese Empire in 1943, engage in the longest dogfight in history, and change the momentum of the war in the Pacific - but not without making the ultimate sacrifice.

In The Day Wall Street Exploded, Beverly Gage tells the story of a once infamous but now largely forgotten terrorist attack. On September 16, 1920, a horse-drawn cart packed with dynamite exploded in a spray of metal and fire, turning the busiest corner of America's financial center into a war zone. Based on thousands of pages of Bureau of Investigation reports, this historical detective saga traces the four-year hunt for the perpetrators, a worldwide effort that spread as far as Italy and the new Soviet nation.

It didn't seem possible. Four college students shot dead May 4, 1970, by Ohio National Guardsmen during a protest against the Vietnam War. The shootings at Kent State University would shock the nation and spark a mass student strike across the country, the only one in U.S. history.

Originally published in six volumes, which sold more than one million copies, Carl Sandburg’s Abraham Lincoln was praised as the most noteworthy historical biography of Sandburg’s generation. He later distilled this monumental work into one volume that critics and readers alike consider his greatest work of nonfiction, as well as the most distinguished, authoritative biography of Lincoln ever published.

Growing up in an Illinois prairie town, Sandburg listened to stories of old-timers who had known Lincoln. By the time this single-volume edition was competed, he had spent a lifetime studying, researching, and writing about our 16th president.

The dramatic, pulse-pounding story of Harry Truman's first four months in office, when this unlikely president had to take on Germany, Japan, Stalin, and the atomic bomb, with the fate of the world hanging in the balance.

The Chosen Wars tells the dramatic story of how Judaism redefined itself in America in the 18th and 19th centuries - the personalities that fought each other and shaped its evolution and, importantly, the force of the American dynamic that prevailed over an ancient religion. Determined to take their places as equals in the young nation, American Jews rejected identity as a separate nation and embraced a secular America. Judaism became an American religion.

The crack epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s is arguably the least examined crisis in American history. Beginning with the myths inspired by Reagan’s war on drugs, journalist Donovan X. Ramsey’s exacting analysis traces the path from the last triumphs of the Civil Rights Movement to the devastating realities we live with today: a racist criminal justice system, continued mass incarceration and gentrification, and increased police brutality.

During the winter of 1864, more than 3,000 Federal prisoners of war escaped from Confederate prison camps into South Carolina and North Carolina, often with the aid of local slaves. Their flight created, in the words of contemporary observers, a "Yankee plague", heralding a grim end to the Confederate cause. Blending rich analysis with an engaging narrative, Foote uses these ragged Union escapees as a lens with which to assess the dying Confederate States, providing a new window into the South's ultimate defeat.

The first twenty-one months of the American Revolution—which began at Lexington and ended at Princeton—was the story of a ragged group of militiamen and soldiers fighting to forge a new nation. By the winter of 1777, the exhausted Continental Army could claim only that it had escaped annihilation by the world’s most formidable fighting force. Two years into the war, George III is as determined as ever to bring his rebellious colonies to heel.

From the acclaimed Civil War historian, a brilliant new history–the most intimate and richly readable account we have had–of the climactic three-day battle of Gettysburg (July 1–3, 1863), which draws the reader into the heat, smoke, and grime of Gettysburg alongside the ordinary soldier, and depicts the combination of personalities and circumstances that produced the greatest battle of the Civil War, and one of the greatest in human history.

As eleven-year-old Peter Nottage stood in the yard, watching in disbelief, a group of Japanese fighter planes swooped down, spraying machine-gun fire across the water. Then the first bomb dropped - and in minutes, Kaneohe Bay was a sea of smoke and flames. To the south, at Pearl Harbor, the huge ships of the American fleet were ablaze. This was no drill. This was war!

When three colleagues die violently during a single wartime election day in Central America, two female journalists, best friends, are hurled into a torrent of change in their personal and professional lives and in their relationship with each other. The author, bedeviled by stress and feelings of abandonment, hangs on by her fingernails to reporting while her dear friend "just can't take another picture of a dead body" and throws herself into teaching photography to children who live in a garbage dump.

Reminiscences of the Civil War is John Brown Gordon’s firsthand account of the war as seen through the eyes of the prominent officer. Gordon was trusted and admired by many, including Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis. The work begins with him being elected as the commander of the “Raccoon Roughs” and his recollection of the Battle of Manassas. He also describes the South’s surrender at Appomattox, in which he participated. He recounts his role in individual battles such as Antietam, Chancellorsville, Spotsylvania, and Gettysburg.

On September 13, 1759, a battle was fought on the Plains of Abraham outside the old city of Québec. It was one of the turning-point battles in world history. Thanks to the British victory and the events that followed, Canada went from being a colony of France (New France) to being a colony of Great Britain. This permanently changed Canadian history.