United States Military History

In this gripping tale, Jerome A. Greene-renowned specialist on the Indian wars-explores why the bloody engagement happened and demonstrates how it became a brutal massacre. Epic in scope and poignant in its recounting of human suffering, American Carnage presents the reality-and denial-of our nation's last frontier massacre.

Jefferson, Adams, and Franklin are known to all; men like Morgan, Greene, and Wayne are less familiar. Yet the dreams of the politicians and theorists became real only because fighting men were willing to take on the grim, risky, brutal work of war. The soldiers of the American Revolution were a diverse lot: merchants and mechanics, farmers and fishermen, paragons and drunkards. Most were ardent amateurs.

In the grand tradition of John Keegan's enduring classic The Face of Battle comes a searing, unforgettable chronicle of war through the eyes of the American soldiers who fought in three of our most iconic battles: Bunker Hill, Gettysburg, and Iwo Jima. This is not a book about how great generals won their battles, nor is it a study in grand strategy. Men of War is instead a riveting, visceral, and astonishingly original look at ordinary soldiers under fire.

In 1781, the new United States was nearly bankrupt. As the American and French armies under Generals Washington and Rochambeau surrounded General Cornwallis and the British at Yorktown, James Lovell, Congressman, examined a captured, soiled letter. The numbers in General Cornwallis’s ciphered message might hold the key to the defeat of the British. Expert in encryption, James Lovell knew the answer to British loss could lie in his hands.

Despite great limits of money and manpower, George Washington sought to wage an aggressive war in 1779. He launched the Sullivan-Clinton campaign against Britain’s Iroquois allies in upstate New York, and in response to British attacks up the Hudson River and against coastal Connecticut, he authorized raids on British outposts at Stony Point and Paulus Hook. But given power by Congress to plan and execute operations with the French on a continental scale, Washington planned his boldest campaign.

The Mosquito Fleet is a documentary about America's small but strategically important fleet of PT boats during the Second World War. After Pearl Harbor, the American Naval Fleet was at a severe disadvantage to the mighty Japanese fleet. Enter the PT or patrol torpedo boat of the US Navy. Built for speed and carrying four torpedoes, the wooden craft proved to be a significant "irritant" to the enemy in terms of their effectiveness in combat.

Long called by some the “Andersonville of the North”, the prisoner of war camp in Elmira, New York, is remembered as the most notorious of all Union-run POW camps. It existed for only a year - from the summer of 1864 to July 1865 - but in that time, and for long after, it became darkly emblematic of man’s inhumanity to man. Confederate prisoners called it “Hellmira”. Derek Maxfield contextualizes the rise of prison camps during the Civil War, explores the failed exchange of prisoners, and tells the tale of the creation and evolution of the prison camp in Elmira.

Spring of 1864 brought a whole new war to the Western Theater, with new commanders and what would become a new style of warfare. Federal armies, perched in Chattanooga, Tennessee, after their stunning victories there the previous fall, poised on the edge of Georgia for the first time in the war. Atlanta sat in the far distance. Major General William T. Sherman, newly elevated to command the Union’s western armies, eyed it covetously - the South’s last great untouched prize.

This is an account of the Civil War from the perspective of the ordinary soldier. Wilkeson lived on the frontlines of the conflict and provides an unbiased view of this bloody war. He joined the Union Army in 1864 and experienced some of the ferocious battles of Grant’s Overland Campaign.

Offering a fresh look at the various surrenders that ended the war, To the Bitter End: Appomattox, Bennett Place, and the Surrenders of the Confederacy by Robert M. Dunkerly brings to light little-known facts and covers often-overlooked events. Each surrender - starting at Appomattox and continuing through Greensboro, Citronelle, and the Trans-Mississippi - unfolded on its own course. Many involved confusing and chaotic twists and turns.

The costliest battle in the history of the North American continent had begun. July 1, 1863 remains the most overlooked phase of the battle of Gettysburg, yet it set the stage for all the fateful events that followed. Bringing decades of familiarity to the discussion, historians Chris Mackowski, Kristopher D. White, and Daniel T. Davis, in their engaging style, recount the action of that first day of battle and explore the profound implications in Fight Like the Devil.

This volume focuses on the two important delaying actions conducted by mounted Union soldiers at Reed’s and Alexander’s bridges on the first day of Chickamauga. A cavalry brigade under Col. Robert H. G. Minty and Col. John T. Wilder’s legendary “Lightning Brigade” of mounted infantry made stout stands at a pair of chokepoints crossing Chickamauga Creek.

Invalid teenager Leroy Wiley Gresham left a seven-volume diary spanning the years of secession and the Civil War. He was just 12 when he began, and he died at 17, just weeks after the war ended. LeRoy’s diary offers an inside look at a fateful journey that robbed an energetic and likeable young man of his youth and life. I Am Perhaps Dying adds considerably to the medical literature by increasing our understanding of how tuberculosis attacked a young body over time, how it was treated in the middle 19th century, and the effectiveness of those treatments.

From early slave rebels to radical reformers of the Civil War era and beyond, the struggle to end slavery was a diverse, dynamic, and ramifying social movement. In this succinct narrative, Richard S. Newman examines the key people, themes, and ideas that animated abolitionism in the 18th and 19th centuries in the United States and internationally. Filled with portraits of key abolitionists - including Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Anthony Benezet, Toussaint L'Ouverture, Elizabeth Heyrick, Richard Allen, and Angelina Grimke - the book highlights abolitionists' focus on social and political action.

Though the Shawnee chief Tecumseh attempted to form a confederacy of tribes to stem the tide of white settlement in the Old Northwest, in November of 1811, the Americans marched to his village at the mouth of Tippecanoe Creek. The ensuing battle ended all hope of an Indian federation and had far-reaching effects on American and British relations. The British, blamed for providing the Indians with arms, drew the ire of hawks in Congress, who clamored ever more loudly for a war to end England’s power in North America.

On April Fourth, 1945, United States Army units from the 89th Infantry Division and the Fourth Armored Division seized Ohrdruf, the first of many Nazi concentration camps to be liberated in Germany. In the weeks that followed, as more camps were discovered, thousands of soldiers came face to face with the monstrous reality of Hitler's Germany. These men discovered the very depths of human-imposed cruelty and depravity.

Sergeant Charles Windolph was the last white survivor of the Battle of Little Big Horn when he told his story nearly 70 years later. A six-year veteran in the Seventh Cavalry, Windolph rode in the 1873 Yellowstone Expedition, and the 1874 Black Hills Expedition. He fought in Captain Benteen's troops on the fatal Sunday, and vividly recalls the battle that wiped out Custer's command. Equally vivid is the evidence marshaled by historians Frazier and Robert Hunt.

Of the three surgeons who accompanied Custer's Seventh Cavalry on June 25, 1876, only the youngest, 28-year-old Henry Porter, survived that day's ordeal, riding through a gauntlet of Indian attackers and up the steep bluffs to Major Marcus Reno's hilltop position. But the story of Dr. Porter's wartime exploits goes far beyond the battle itself.

With all the immediacy of an eyewitness account, Anthony Pitch recounts the dramatic story of the British invasion of Washington, D.C. in the summer of 1814. The British torched the Capitol, the White House, and other buildings, setting off an inferno that illuminated the countryside for miles around and sent President James Madison galloping out of town. The author's gripping account also describes the valiant defense of nearby Fort McHenry and the story of the writing of The Star Spangled Banner.

11 Days in December tells the unforgettable story of one of the grimmest points of World War II and its Christmas Eve turn toward victory. In December 1944, the Allied forces thought their campaign for securing Europe was in its final stages. But Germany had one last great surprise attack still planned, leading to some of the most intense fighting in World War II: the Battle of the Bulge.