Civil War Military History

“Fun and gossipy.” —The Wall Street Journal * “A masterful history.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) * “Engaging.” —Newsweek A “brisk, insightful, and deliciously detailed take” (Kirkus Reviews) on a transformative decade on Broadway, featuring behind-the-scenes...

In the South of the 1890s, Booker T. Washington stood as the often controversial personification of the aspirations of the Black masses. The Civil War had ended, casting uneducated Blacks adrift or, equally tenuous, creating a class of sharecroppers still dependent on the whims of their former owners. Black Reconstruction, for all its outward trimming, had failed to deliver its promised economic and political empowerment.

Distinguished historian Orville Vernon Burton suggests that, while abolishing slavery was the age's most extraordinary accomplishment, it was the inscribing of personal liberty into the nation's millennial aspirations that was its most profound achievement. He shows how the president's authentic Southerness empowered him to conduct a civil war that redefined freedom as a personal right to be expanded to all Americans.

In a sweeping account, Atlantic Wars explores how warfare shaped the experiences of the peoples living in the watershed of the Atlantic Ocean between the late Middle Ages and the Age of Revolution.

LA Times Book Award winner and expert on the past and present Japan, Ian Buruma examines the transformation of a country. Following Japan's history from its opening to the West in 1853 to its hosting of the 1964 Olympics, Buruma focuses on how figures such as Commodore Matthew Perry, Douglas MacArthur, and Emperor Mitsushito helped shape this complex country.

A thrilling dive into the little-known, darker side of a revered president’s history, Lincoln’s Lie untangles the threads behind a mysterious 1864 newspaper article to reveal how Lincoln manipulated the media during the Civil War, shining new light onto today’s issues of fake news and presidential conflict with the press.

The United States in 1865 was a dramatically different country from the one that went to the polls in 1860. It and the world were transformed by the Civil War - a political struggle between sections of the country for a Union without slavery or slavery without a Union. Let We Are All Americans take you back 150 years to experience this dramatic and profound transformation as it happened.

From 1845 to 1865 the Gulf of Mexico was at the center of American expansion and southern imperialism. A Continuous State of War tells the story of several communities as well as countries such as Mexico and Cuba, to uncover the way that wars within the upper rim of the Gulf of Mexico facilitated American and southern attempts to conquer Latin American nations. In the push for westward expansion that preceded the Civil War, white southerners along with other Americans engaged in violent conquest in Latin America and the American West.

A seaside village, an English country house, a family of wealthy eccentrics, a determined detective - all the ingredients are here for a cozy Agatha Christie-style whodunit. But wait. Edward "Mitch" Mitchell is no Hercule Poirot, and The Back Passage is no Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Mitch is a handsome, insatiable 22-year-old hunk who never lets a clue stand in the way of a steamy encounter, whether it's with the local constabulary, the house secretary, or his school chum and fellow athlete Boy Morgan, who becomes his Watson when they're not busy boffing each other.

Eric Foner gives us the definitive history of Abraham Lincoln and the end of slavery in America. Foner's Lincoln emerges as a leader, one whose greatness lies in his capacity for moral and political growth through real engagement with allies and critics alike. This powerful work will transform our understanding of the nation's greatest president and the issue that mattered most.

The title of Iron Brigade has been given to a number of different US Army brigades over the last century and a half, but it has become almost entirely synonymous with the Civil War soldiers who fought in the brigade for the Army of the Potomac. Also known as the Iron Brigade of the West, Rufus King’s Brigade and the Black Hat Brigade, the Iron Brigade was comprised of the 2nd, 6th, and 7th Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry Regiments, the 19th Indiana, Battery B of the 4th US Light Artillery, and later, the 24th Michigan.

This contemporary classic explores the role of boys who fought in the Civil War. No listener's vision of America’s most brutal and bloody war will be the same after listening to this audiobook.

Where previous Lincoln biographers describe his temperament as "moderate", "passive", or even "conservative", historian Richard Striner offers a stunningly original perspective that will shed significant new light on one of the most studied figures in American history. Striner shows Lincoln's audacity as no other book has ever done. By emphasizing the workings of Lincoln's mind - stressing his cunning, his overall honesty, strategic thinking - even his ability to change his mind - Striner looks anew at many topics and themes important to Lincoln's story....

The unlikely man at the roiling center of this intrigue was Robert Bunch, an American-born Englishman who had maneuvered his way to the position of British consul in Charleston, South Carolina, and grew to loathe slavery and the righteousness of its practitioners. Bunch used his unique perch and boundless ambition to become a key player, sending reams of dispatches to the home government and eventually becoming the Crown's best secret source on the Confederacy.

The name Allan Pinkerton was for decades synonymous with private detective; indeed, the work “Pinkerton” was generally used for any private detective whether or not they were associated with the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. The all-seeing eye that served as the symbol of his company and the slogan - “We Never Sleep” - projected an image of a detective working tirelessly to pursue a desperate criminal and bring them to justice.

For well over a century, traditional Civil War histories have concluded in 1865, with a bitterly won peace and Union soldiers returning triumphantly home. In a landmark work that challenges sterilized portraits accepted for generations, Civil War historian Brian Matthew Jordan creates an entirely new narrative.

In the fall of 1865, the United States Army executed Confederate guerrilla Champ Ferguson for his role in murdering fifty-three loyal citizens of Kentucky and Tennessee during the Civil War. Long remembered as the most unforgiving and inglorious warrior of the Confederacy, Ferguson has often been dismissed by historians as a cold-blooded killer. Here, biographer Brian D. McKnight demonstrates how such a simple judgment ignores the complexity of this legendary character.

The service of African-American soldiers during the Civil War is one of that conflict's most stirring, if still not completely understood, aspects. Riders in the Storm covers the story of the African-American cavalrymen of the 5th Massachusetts. Where the infantry regiments recruited largely free Blacks from the North, the 5th focused on escaped slaves, who it was believed would be better horsemen. Not only would the former slaves be fighting for themselves, but they would be fighting to liberate loved ones still enslaved.

While the Civil War is mainly remembered for its epic battles between the Northern and Southern armies, the Union was simultaneously waging another campaign - dubbed "Anaconda" - that was gradually depriving the South of industry and commerce, thus rendering the exploits of its field armies moot. When an independent Dixie finally met the dustbin of history, it was the North's coastal campaign, as much as the achievements of its main forces, that was primarily responsible.

A major new collection of modern commentary - from scholars, historians, and Civil War buffs - on the significant events of the Civil War, culled from The New York Times' popular Disunion online journal.