American Military History

Joseph Plumb Martin (1760-1850) was a soldier in the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War. Martin participated in the Battles of Brooklyn, the White Plains and Monmouth, and the siege of Fort Mifflin, and the Battle of Monmouth. The Adventures of a Revolutionary Soldier relates the adventures of a young private serving his country under terrible conditions. There are engaging accounts of army life, adventures, dangers, and suffering during the years 1776-1783.

How do good people find the courage to resist and end the greatest evil in their country? An untold story of the Civil War Era: pacifists in Boston who led the fight to end slavery without violence and war.

We Band of Angelsis the story of women searching for adventure, caught up in the drama and danger of war. On the same day the Japanese Imperial Navy launched its surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, it also struck American bases in the Far East, chief among them the Philippines. That raid led to the first major land battle for America in World War II and, in the end, to the largest defeat and surrender of American forces.

They came by boat from a starving land, and by the Underground Railroad from Southern chains, seeking refuge in a crowded, filthy corner of hell at the bottom of a great metropolis. But in the terrible July of 1863, the poor and desperate of Paradise Alley would face a new catastrophe, as flames from the war that was tearing America in two reached out to set their city on fire.

1861: The Lost Peace is the story of President Lincoln’s difficult and courageous decision at a time when the country wrestled with deep moral questions of epic proportions.

Mary Edwards Walker (1832-1919) defied the conventions of her era. Born and raised on a farm in Oswego, New York, Walker became one of a handful of female physicians in the nation - as well as a passionate believer in the rights of women. She campaigned for women's suffrage and against traditional male-dominated marriage vows, and any issue involving the sublimation of her sex. From the outset of the Civil War, Walker volunteered her services as a physician.

In February 1865, the end was clearly in sight for the Confederate government. Lee’s defeat at Gettysburg had dashed the hopes of the Confederate army, and Grant’s victory at Vicksburg had cut the South in two. An Honorable Defeat is the story of the four months that saw the surrender of the South and the assassination of Lincoln by Southern partisans.

George Washington, Paul Revere, and Thomas Jefferson are remembered as heroes of the American Revolution, but they were only a few of many men and women who risked their lives for independence. Learn more about the heroes, both American and European, who were key to the colonists’ success in the American Revolution.

One of the most studied and written about episodes in US history, the American Civil War remains the subject of cultural and historiographical debate. The conflict was one of the earliest industrial wars in which mass-produced weapons were employed. The mobilization of civilian factories, shipyards, transportation, and food supplies all foreshadowed the impact of industrialization in World War I, World War II, and subsequent conflicts.

A former editor of American Heritage, Stephen W. Sears has collected a wealth of new sources for this definitive portrait of one of the most dramatic battles of the Civil War. Using scores of letters and diaries written by soldiers from both Union and Confederate armies, Sears’ narrative history seeks to strip away the gloss of later commentary and restore the battle of Chancellorsville to its original voices.

General Robert E. Lee is well known as a major figure in the Civil War. However, by removing Lee from the delimiting frame of the Civil War and placing him in the context of the Republic's total history, Dowdey shows the "eternal relevance" of this tragic figure to the American heritage. With access to hundreds of personal letters, Dowdey brings fresh insights into Lee's background and personal relationships and examines the factors which made Lee that rare specimen, a "complete person."

The fascinating, true origin story of baseball - how America’s first great sport developed and how it conquered a nation.

A biography of William T. Sherman by the military theorist and author of Scipio Africanus: Greater Than Napoleon.

Move over, Scarlett O'Hara! It's New England, 1861, and the troubles in the southern states seem a long way off for Jack Edgerton, the spoiled son of a prominent Vermont family. Howver, when he meets and falls in love with Aaron Johnson, the sexy son of a slave on the run from Virginia, Edgerton's world is turned upside down.

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning scholar, a timely history of the constitutional changes that built equality into the nation's foundation and how those guarantees have been shaken over time.

North Korea is one of the most troubled societies on earth. The country's 24 million people live under a violent dictatorship led by a single family, which relentlessly pursues the development of nuclear arms, which periodically incites risky military clashes with the larger, richer, liberal South, and which forces each and every person to play a role in the "theater state" even as it pays little more than lip service to the wellbeing of the overwhelming majority.

This audiobook exposes the misconceptions, half-truths, and outright lies that have shaped the still dominant but largely mythical version of what happened in the White House during those harrowing two weeks of secret Cuban missile crisis deliberations. A half-century after the event it is surely time to demonstrate, once and for all, that RFK's Thirteen Days and the personal memoirs of other ExComm members cannot be taken seriously.

From the 1930s to the 1960s, the United States knowingly used and discarded an entire tribe of people. The Navajo worked unprotected in the uranium mines that fueled the Manhattan Project and the Cold War. Long after these mines were abandoned, Navajos in all four corners of the Reservation (which borders Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona) continued grazing their animals on sagebrush flats riddled with uranium that had been blasted from the ground.

“With the fate of the free world hanging in the balance, women pilots went aloft to serve their nation. . . . A soaring tale in which, at long last, these daring World War II pilots gain the credit they deserve.”—Liza Mundy, New York Times bestselling author of Code Girls “A powerful...

The consensus view of the Civil War - that it was first and foremost a war to restore the Union, and an antislavery war only later when it became necessary for Union victory - dies here. James Oakes’s groundbreaking history shows how deftly Lincoln and congressional Republicans pursued antislavery throughout the war, pragmatic in policy but steadfast on principle. In the disloyal South the federal government quickly began freeing slaves, immediately and without slaveholder compensation, as they fled to Union lines.