English Civil War

In this riveting landmark autobiography, which reads like a novel, Academy Award and Emmy winner Louis Gossett, Jr., masterfully transports us to 1840s New York; Washington, D.C.; and Louisiana to experience the kidnapping and 12 years of bondage of Solomon Northup, a free man of color. Twelve Years a Slave, published in 1853, was an immediate bombshell in the national debate over slavery leading up to the Civil War.

Union soldier John Chenneville suffered a traumatic head wound in battle. His recovery took the better part of a year as he struggled to regain his senses and mobility. By the time he returned home, the Civil War was over, but tragedy awaited. John’s beloved sister and her family had been brutally murdered. Their killer goes by many names. He fought for the North in the late unpleasantness, and wore a badge in the name of the law. But the man John knows as A. J. Dodd is little more than a rabid animal, slaughtering without reason or remorse, needing to be put down.

"I am alone in the dark, turning the world around in my head as I struggle through another bout of insomnia, another white night in the great American wilderness." So begins Paul Auster's brilliant, devastating tale about the many realities we inhabit as wars flame all around us. Seventy-two-year-old August Brill is recovering from a car accident in his daughter's house in Vermont. When sleep refuses to come, he lies in bed and tells himself stories, struggling to push back thoughts about things he would prefer to forget—his wife's recent death and the murder of his granddaughter's boyfriend.

As the civil rights movement blazed through America, more than 300,000 Black troops were drafted and sent to fight in the Vietnam War. These soldiers, often from disadvantaged backgrounds and subjected to the brutalities of racism back home, found themselves thrust onto the frontlines of a war many saw as unjust. On the homefront, Black antiwar activists faced another battle: Opposition to the Vietnam War, vilified by key allies in the media and government as anti-American, jeopardized the fight for civil rights.

We view the long, horrifying struggle from the vantage of the White House as Lincoln copes with incompetent generals, hostile congressmen, and his raucous cabinet. He overcomes these obstacles by winning the respect of his former competitors, and in the case of Seward, finds a loyal and crucial friend to see him through. This brilliant multiple biography is centered on Lincoln's mastery of men and how it shaped the most significant presidency in the nation's history.

They were women whose lives began in slavery, who weathered the Civil War, and who grappled with the contradictions of emancipation through the turbulent early years of the 20th century. Through it all, they fought to unite their family and forge success on their own terms.

Chancellorsville is the fourth book in a series of historical novels spanning the Civil War and describing its effects on one southern family.

As the Civil War sweeps across the country, it finds the most wayfaring member of the Brannon family of Culpeper County, Virginia, working as a wharf rat at the Mississippi River port of New Madrid, Missouri. Caught up in a bar fight he tried to avoid, Cory Brannon is rescued by Captain Zeke Farrell, of the riverboat Missouri Zephyr, who offers him a job as part of his crew.

The last half of 1863 has taken a toll on the Brannon family, but a Christmas lull in the fighting brings home Mac and Will as well as Titus, the son believed to have been killed in the war. Though his return is joyous news, Titus is devastated when he finds his wife remarried and pregnant. In his bitterness, he unleashes a personal war on the new family.

Storm clouds are approaching Culpeper County, Virginia, in early January 1861. The troublesome Fogarty brothers have been raising havoc across the countryside, and when the local lawman, Will Brannon, returns from another futile attempt to track them down, he finds the townspeople abuzz. South Carolina has seceded from the Union, and rumor has it more states will follow, perhaps even Virginia.

The Southern setbacks of July 1863 have fallen hard on the Brannons, for two sons were with Lee in Pennsylvania and one was at Vicksburg. They still mourn the loss of another, Titus, presumed dead but actually interned in a Northern prison camp for seven months.

Stonewall Jackson was dead, but Confederate morale was never higher. Will and Mac, the two eldest Brannon sons, are in the ranks of the Stonewall Brigade and Jeb Stuart's cavalry. As Jackson’s former corps marches up the Shenandoah Valley, Lee's army follows, and they eventually clash at Gettysburg. Will is kept in the thick of the combat around Culp's Hill, while Mac sees action with the Southern cavalry at Hanover.

Vicksburg is the fifth book in a series of novels spanning the Civil War and describing its effects on one southern family.

From the butchery of the Crater, where stunning success collapsed into a massacre, through near-constant battles fought by heat-stricken soldiers to the crucial election of 1864, The Damned of Petersburg resurrects the American Civil War's hard reality, as plumes and sabers gave way to miles of trenches.

Antietam is the third book of eight spanning the Civil War and describing its effect on one southern family. The Brannon brothers answer the call to arms at different times, and the family finds itself struggling with dilemmas it never had considered.

With the conclusion of the ten-volume Civil War Battle Series, the multiple strands of the story are woven toward their resolution. Members of the Brannon family are involved in battles spread across the country. In the Shenandoah Valley, Mac and Titus fight alongside Fitzhugh Lee. Nathan Hatcher wears the Union blue in the Dakota Territory, while in the Deep South, Cory fights against William T. Sherman and Henry rides with Nathan Bedford Forrest in Alabama.

Prairie Fire is a guide for Red Counties to survive and thrive during what looks to be another Civil War brewing. Drawing on his experience in Special Forces with counterinsurgency, the author creates a step-by-step road map to making it out alive. Featuring the same gallows humor mixed with real-world examples as Concrete Jungle: A Green Beret's Guide to Urban Survival, Prairie Fire is the spiritual successor made specifically for those in rural areas.

It is July 10, 1863, and Baltimore is in the hands of the Army of Northern Virginia under the command of Robert E. Lee. Shattered remnants of the Army of the Potomac have fallen back into Washington, digging in, preparing to make a desperate stand. Six days earlier, General Ulysses S. Grant and his army of 60,000 had taken Vicksburg. The last telegram out of Washington before the rebels cut the line changed all that.

The 12 essays in Wars within a War explore the internal stresses that posed serious challenges to the viability of the opposing sides in the Civil War as well as some of the ways in which wartime disputes and cultural fissures carried over into the postwar years and beyond.Comprised of contributions from leading scholars, this volume extends the discussion of controversies far past the death of the Confederacy in the spring of 1865.

The murder of Abraham Lincoln set off the greatest manhunt in American history, the pursuit and capture of John Wilkes Booth. From April 14 to April 26, 1865, the assassin led Union cavalry and detectives on a wild 12-day chase through the streets of Washington, D.C., across the swamps of Maryland, and into the forests of Virginia, while the nation, still reeling from the just-ended Civil War, watched in horror and sadness.