Civil War Biography

The Real Custer takes a good hard look at the life and storied military career of George Armstrong Custer - from cutting his teeth at Bull Run in the Civil War, to his famous and untimely death at Little Bighorn in the Indian Wars. Author James Robbins demonstrates that Custer, having graduated last in his class at West Point, went on to prove himself again and again as an extremely skilled cavalry leader.

Our most revered president gets a unique and uniquely engaging biography fashioned from the answers to the most frequent, and most unusual and surprising, questions asked about Abraham Lincoln that Gerald J. Prokopowicz was asked during the nine years he served as scholar-in-residence at the Lincoln Museum in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Prokopowicz's authoritative, often surprising responses illuminate facets of Abraham Lincoln's life, work, and legacy about which people remain endlessly curious.

Stonewall Jackson was a military genius, at once peculiar and perfect, a fearless soldier in battle but a God-fearing man who hesitated to kill on Sunday. He broke the rules of war to win, and yet his tactics are studied in military academies the world over. From the remarkable Valley Campaign through the Seven Days, Manassas, Antietam, Fredericksburg, and the masterful though tragic sweep at Chancellorsville, where Jackson was felled by one of his own soldiers, this is a compelling narrative of men and war.

Lincoln struggles to form a new party to take the place of the defunct Whig party. He has strong doubts that a peaceful end to slavery is possible. Joining with anti-slavery, anti-nativist forces, Lincoln launches the Republican Party of Illinois and the first Republican convention takes place. When the Dred Scott case is decided, Lincoln publicly denounces the court decision.

Taken from George Armstrong Custer's own writings, An Autobiography of General Custer is the “true story” of one of the most praised, most despised, but surely most remembered American military heroes. Indeed, few figures in our history were - in their own time, as well as in our own - so wildly cheered and so roundly hated.

Gettysburg Rebels is the gripping true story of five young men who grew up in Gettysburg, moved south to Virginia in the 1850s, joined the Confederate army - and returned "home" as foreign invaders for the great battle in July 1863. Drawing on rarely seen documents and family histories, as well as military service records and contemporary accounts, Tom McMillan delves into the backgrounds of Wesley Culp, Henry Wentz, and the three Hoffman brothers in a riveting tale of Civil War drama and intrigue.

Lt. Benjamin Loring (1824-1902) lived the life of an everyman Civil War sailor. He commanded no armies and devised no grand strategies. Loring was a sailor who just wanted to return home, where the biggest story of his life awaited him. Covering almost a year of Loring’s service, I Held Lincoln describes the lieutenant’s command of the gunboat USS Wave, the Battle of Calcasieu Pass, the surrender of his ship, and his capture by the Confederates.

From the critically acclaimed author of The Borden Murders comes the thrilling story of Mary Surratt, the first woman to be executed by the US government, for her alleged involvement in the plot to assassinate Abraham Lincoln. A dubious distinction belongs to Mary Surratt: on July 7, 1865, she...

The remarkable and inspiring story of William Still, an unknown abolitionist who dedicated his life to managing a critical section of the Underground Railroad in Philadelphia—the free state directly north of the Mason-Dixon Line—helping hundreds of people escape from slavery. Born free in...

The extraordinary life of Priscilla Joyner and her quest—along with other formerly enslaved people—to define freedom after the Civil War. Priscilla Joyner was born into the world of slavery in 1858 North Carolina and came of age at the dawn of emancipation. Raised by a white slaveholding...

The long journey of an American song, passed down from generation to generation, bridging a nation’s fraught disconnect between history and warped illusion, revealing the country's ever evolving self. MY OLD KENTUCKY HOME, from its enormous success in the early 1850s, written by a white man...

Having flown an astonishing 400 different aircraft, as a licensed Category 1 test pilot and flight test instructor for both airplanes and helicopters, Chris Taylor is arguably one of the best qualified and widely experienced test pilots working today anywhere in the world. After obtaining his private pilot’s license at the age of 17, Chris began his service flying career with the Royal Navy. He flew Wasp and Lynx helicopters from warships around the world under all kinds of circumstances.

Born into slavery, Henrietta Wood was taken to Cincinnati and legally freed in 1848. In 1853, a Kentucky deputy sheriff named Zebulon Ward colluded with Wood's employer, abducted her, and sold her back into bondage. She remained enslaved throughout the Civil War, giving birth to a son in Mississippi and never forgetting who had put her in this position. By 1869, Wood had obtained her freedom for a second time and returned to Cincinnati, where she sued Ward for damages in 1870. Astonishingly, after eight years of litigation, Wood won her case: In 1878, a Federal jury awarded her $2,500.

In his own captivating words, General Ulysses S. Grant describes the Wilderness Campaign, the almost anti-climactic surrender of General Robert E. Lee at Appomattox, and the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. His depiction of the most crucial and hardest-fought battles of the Civil War, the near-disasters, and the bloody triumphs reveals a highly intelligent, profound, thinking man. Grant wrote his memoirs as he lay dying of cancer and completed the manuscript only a week before his death.

Every memoir of the American Civil War provides us with another view of the catastrophe that changed the country forever. The Other Side of the War reveals the war as experienced by the thousands of women volunteered to work in hospitals and for the Sanitary Commission, the organization that advocated better practices and lobbied for increased supplies. Katharine Prescott Wormeley was one of those volunteers, an American nurse in the Civil War, as well as author, editor, and and one of America’s best-known translators of French language literary works.

Boomer: In the Theater of Fearful Tragedies is a nonfiction account of the life of Colonel George B. Boomer, a little-known bridge builder and combat veteran who served in the Civil War of the United States. He was the son of a Baptist minister from Sutton, Massachusetts, who struggled with his Christian faith while searching for God's plan for his life. While his formal education was limited by a youthful disability of the eyes, he became a self-taught master bridge builder who learned to speak multiple languages while living in the state of Missouri.

In early November 1834, an aristocratic young couple from Savannah and South Carolina sailed from New York and began a seventeen-year odyssey in West Africa. Leighton and Jane Wilson sailed along what was for them an exotic coastline, visited cities and villages, and sometimes ventured up great rivers and followed ancient paths.

Fitzhugh Lee was a Confederate cavalry general during the Civil War. He was the nephew of Robert E. Lee, and the author of the most famous biography of his uncle.

In A Just and Generous Nation, the eminent historian Harold Holzer and the noted economist Norton Garfinkle present a groundbreaking new account of the beliefs that inspired our 16th president to go to war when the Southern states seceded from the Union. Rather than a commitment to eradicating slavery or a defense of the Union, they argue that Lincoln's guiding principle was the defense of equal economic opportunity.

During World War II, Heinz Drossel saved Soviet prisoners of war and several Jews, including Marianne Hirschfeld. Again and again, he wasn't afraid to risk his own life when others' safety was at risk. Nearly all of Hirschfeld's family members were murdered by Nazis; she survived in hiding - and met Heinz again by coincidence after the war was over. They married in 1946. At that time, starting over was difficult. In the judicial service, Drossel witnessed Nazis continuing with their careers....