Civil War Military History

Authoritative American history meets a fun listening experience in the first volume of The Seven-Day Scholar series, which chronicles significant moments in our nation’s heroic tragedy. Each of the short entries here, which sound like historical fiction, covers crucial political decisions, unforgettable people, key battlefield moments, scholarly debates, what-ifs of the war, and struggles on the home front.

Betrothed to Major Samuel Prescott, Amanda sympathizes with the Union, but Alice struggles to forgive the Northern forces that nearly destroyed their home. To make ends meet, Alice smuggles medical supplies for the Confederacy, and she falls in love with Amanda's former beau, Colonel William Jackson. Meanwhile, two opposing armies, devastated by the clash at Fredericksburg, wait for the spring campaign on the banks of the Rappahannock River.

Occupied by Union forces, Fredericksburg lies in ruins. After four years of devastating conflict, sisters Amanda and Alice are plunged into the turbulent world of the war's aftermath. Amanda struggles to maintain harmony in her home life, while her husband, Union Colonel Samuel Prescott, strives for order in the newly reunited country.

In the Civil War, the United States and the Confederate States of America engaged in combat to defend distinct legal regimes and the social order they embodied and protected. Depending on whose side's arguments one accepted, the Constitution either demanded the Union's continuance or allowed for its dissolution. The eminent legal historian Peter Charles Hoffer's Uncivil Warriors focuses on these lawyers' civil war: on the legal professionals who plotted the course of the war from seats of power, the scenes of battle, and the home front.

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 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.

In Lincoln and the Power of the Press, Harold Holzer shows us an activist Lincoln through journalists who covered him from his start to the night of his assassination. In a wholly original way, Holzer shows us politicized newspaper editors battling for power and a masterly president who used the press to speak directly to the people and shape the nation.

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.

The era known as Reconstruction is one of the unhappiest times in American history. It succeeded in reuniting the nation politically after the Civil War but in little else. Conflict shifted from the battlefield to the Capitol as Congress warred with President Andrew Johnson over just what to do with the South. Johnson's plan of Presidential Reconstruction, which was sympathetic to the former Confederacy, would ultimately lead to his impeachment and the institution of Radical Reconstruction.

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.

The Civil War battle waged on September 17, 1862, at Antietam Creek, Maryland, was one of the bloodiest in the nation's history: On this single day, the battle claimed nearly 23,000 casualties. In Landscape Turned Red, the renowned historian Stephen Sears draws on a remarkable cache of diaries, dispatches, and letters to recreate the vivid drama of Antietam as experienced not only by its leaders but also by its soldiers, both Union and Confederate.

On the North American continent, Native American tribes carried out abductions against the new European settlers from the time they first set foot on eastern shores. Some of the women taken in the colonial to early American period went on to become respected figures in their new environments, while others lived out their lives as slaves.

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.

In July 1883, just a few days after the 20th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, a group of editors at the Century magazine engaged in a lively argument: Which Civil War battle was the bloodiest battle of them all? One claimed it was Chickamauga, another Cold Harbor. The argument inspired a brainstorm: Why not let the magazine’s 125,000 readers in on the conversation by offering “a series of papers on some of the great battles of the war, to be written by officers in command on both sides.”

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.

The half-century before the Civil War was beset with conflict over equality as well as freedom. Beginning in 1803, many free states, claiming the authority to maintain the domestic peace, enacted laws that discouraged free African Americans from settling their boundaries and restricted the rights to testify in court, move freely from place to place, work, vote, and attend public school. But over time, African American activists and their white allies, often facing mob violence, courageously built a movement to fight these racist laws.

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.

The American Civil War, fought from 1861 to 1865, remains one of the most significant conflicts in American history. It erupted as a result of deep-rooted divisions between the Northern states, which favored the abolition of slavery, and the Southern states, which relied heavily on the institution for their agrarian economy.

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.