Civil War Military History

The story of the American Civil War is not complete without examining the extraordinary and influential lives of Jessie Frémont, Nelly McClellan, Ellen Sherman, and Julia Grant, the wives of Abraham Lincoln's top generals. They were their husbands' closest confidantes and had a profound impact on the generals' ambitions and actions. Most important, the women's own attitudes toward and relationships with Lincoln had major historical significance.

July 1863 was a momentous month in the Civil War. News of Gettysburg and Vicksburg electrified the North and devastated the South. Sandwiched geographically between those victories and lost in the heady tumult of events was news that William S. Rosecrans' Army of the Cumberland had driven Braxton Bragg's Army of Tennessee entirely out of Middle Tennessee. The brilliant campaign nearly cleared the state of Rebels and changed the calculus of the Civil War in the Western Theater. Despite its decisive significance, few people even today know of these events.

The Battle of Chancellorsville took place in 1863. One hundred and fifty-seven years later, what Robert E. Lee and Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson did on that battlefield in Virginia is still being taught at the United States Military Academy, also known as West Point, and other military schools around the world. This battle, more than any other in the Civil War, cemented these two Southern military leaders as legends and as bold and innovative battlefield commanders.

In this spellbinding new history, David Goldfield offers the first major new interpretation of the Civil War era since James M. McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom. Where past scholars have interpreted the war as a triumph of freedom, Goldfield sees it as America's greatest failure: the result of a breakdown caused by the infusion of evangelical religion into the public sphere.

Union General Ulysses S. Grant’s Vicksburg campaign was the most outlandish maneuver of the American Civil War and included the largest amphibious military approach until the advent of the Second World War. The Siege of Vicksburg, which happened in tandem with the Battle of Gettysburg that concluded the day before on July 3, 1863, is considered the most pivotal moment in the Civil War, as it was the turning point from which the South could never recover.

The heart of the Southern secessionist movement was in Charleston, South Carolina. This bustling harbor town on the southeastern coast of America was home to politicians, civilians, and militia loyal to the newly formed Confederate States of America. These “Rebels”, as they were known to the Northern Yankees, were just itching to start a real fight with the federal government. The Confederates considered President Abraham Lincoln’s government to be tyrannical in its intentions to abolish slavery and permanently alter the Southern way of life.

Sickles at Gettysburg by licensed battlefield guide James Hessler, is the most deeply-researched, full-length biography to appear on this remarkable American icon. No individual who fought at Gettysburg was more controversial, both personally and professionally, than Major General Daniel E. Sickles. By 1863, Sickles was notorious as a disgraced former Congressman who murdered his wife’s lover on the streets of Washington and used America’s first temporary insanity defense to escape justice.

After clearing Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley of Federal troops, Gen. Robert E. Lee’s bold invasion into the North reached the Maryland shore of the Potomac River on June 15, 1863. A week later, the Confederate infantry crossed into lower Pennsylvania, where they had their first sustained interactions with the civilian population in a solidly pro-Union state. The interactions along the way further laid bare the enormous cultural gulf that separated the two sides in the war. Ewell and his top commanders constantly struggled to control the desire among the troops to seek retribution.

La detallada radiografía de un episodio que marcó el devenir de nuestra historia contemporánea y de la del resto del mundo. Una herida abierta en el centro de Europa, de lenta curación. Íñigo Bolinaga nos presenta en este audio libro una visión completa del conflicto armado más determinante en la historia española contemporánea.

This fictional recreation of the Battle of Shiloh in April 1862 is a stunning work of imaginative history, from Shelby Foote, beloved historian of the Civil War. Shiloh conveys not only the bloody choreography of Union and Confederate troops through the woods near Pittsburg Landing, Tennessee, but the inner movements of the combatants' hearts and minds.

Excellent biographies have been written about Clara Barton, Sarah Josepha Hale, Julia Ward Howe, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Harriet Tubman, but their lives have never been looked at together as they intertwined with the Civil War narrative. Plumb compares and contrasts the qualities of the women to discover their common attributes for success and what was unique to each woman. Without leading troops in battle or wielding political power, these five women profoundly influenced the start of the war and its conduct throughout as North and South clashed.

Most histories of wounded Civil War veterans construe them as feminized men whose manhood has suffered due to their inability to provide for and raise families or engage in business. Wounded for Life complicates this picture by examining how seven veterans—six soldiers and one physician—coped with their changed bodies in their postwar lives. Through these intimate stories, author Robert D. Hicks looks at the veteran's body as shaped by the trauma of the battlefield and hospital and the construction of a postwar identity in relation to that trauma.

In 1862, Ulysses S. Grant achieved what President Lincoln had sought since the start of the War: the first decisive Union victory. Fought on the western edge of the theater, the Forts Henry and Donelson campaign was a gruesome omen of what was to come.

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.

No person excited greater emotion in Kansas than James Henry Lane, the US senator who led a volunteer brigade in 1861-1862. In fighting numerous skirmishes and liberating hundreds of slaves, Lane and his brigade garnered national attention. Bryce Benedict draws on a wealth of previously unexploited sources, including letters by brigade members, to dramatically re-create the violence along the Kansas-Missouri border and challenge some of the time-honored depictions of Lane’s unit as bloodthirsty and indiscriminately violent.

All for the Union is the astonishing and eloquent diary of Elisha Hunt Rhodes, the Union soldier featured in Ken Burns' highly acclaimed PBS television documentary The Civil War. Enlisting as a private in the 2nd Rhode Island Infantry, Rhodes fought in every major campaign waged by the Army of the Potomac, from Bull Run to Appomattox. Here, in his own powerfully moving words, Rhodes reveals why he was willing to die to preserve his beloved Union.

In May 1861, Virginian Thomas Henry Carter raised an artillery battery and joined the Confederate Army. Over the next four years, he rose steadily in rank from captain to colonel, placing him among the senior artillerists in Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. During the war, Carter wrote more than 100 revealing letters to his wife, Susan, about his service. His interactions with prominent officers - including Lee, Jubal A.Early, John B. Gordon, Robert E. Rodes, and others - come to life in Carter's astute comments about their conduct and personalities.

In Fateful Lightning, two-time Lincoln Prize-winning historian Allen C. Guelzo offers a marvelous portrait of the Civil War and its era, covering not only the major figures and epic battles, but also politics, religion, gender, race, diplomacy, and technology. He examines the strategy, the tactics, and the logistics of the Civil War and brings the most recent historical thinking to bear on emancipation, the presidency and the war powers, the blockade and international law, and the role of intellectuals, North and South.

In Thunder at the Gates, Douglas R. Egerton chronicles the formation and battlefield triumphs of the 54th and 55th Massachusetts Infantry and the 5th Massachusetts Cavalry - regiments led by whites, but composed of black men born free or into slavery. He argues that the most important battles of all were won on the field of public opinion, for in fighting with distinction, the regiments realized the long-derided idea of full and equal citizenship for blacks.

With Abraham Lincoln's assassination, his "team of rivals" was left adrift. President Andrew Johnson, a former slave owner from Tennessee, was challenged by Northern Congressmen, Radical Republicans led by Thaddeus Stephens and Charles Sumner, who wanted to punish the defeated South. When Johnson's policies placated the rebels at the expense of the freed black men, radicals in the House impeached him for trying to fire Secretary of War Edwin Stanton.