Showing titles in American Civil War

Groundbreaking, compelling, and poignant, The Slaves' War delivers an unprecedented vision of the nation's bloodiest conflict. An acclaimed historian of 19th-century and African American history, Andrew Ward gives us the first narrative of the Civil War told from the perspective of those whose destiny it decided.

African American Slave Medicine offers a critical examination of how African American slaves' medical needs were addressed during the years before and surrounding the Civil War. Drawing upon ex-slave interviews conducted during the 1930s and 1940s by the Works Project Administration (WPA), Dr. Herbert C. Covey inventories many of the herbal, plant, and non-plant remedies used by African American folk practitioners during slavery.

In the summer of 1866, Colonel Henry B. Carrington set out from Fort Laramie to establish a series of forts along the Bozeman Trail with the goal of protecting migrants moving along the trail. The Bozeman Trail ran through the Powder River country, which included the traditional hunting grounds of Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho peoples. Carrington had about 1,000 people in his column, of which about 700 were soldiers and 300 were civilians, likely soldiers' families and migrants.

On September 17th, 1862, US President Abraham Lincoln got the great victory he had desired ever since the outbreak of the American Civil War over a year before. Declaring victory would give him the political breathing space he needed to do something that he had been pondering for some time — freeing the slaves. The great victory Lincoln wanted took place near Antietam Creek in Maryland, near the town of Sharpsburg. The Union called it “The Battle of Antietam".

These are the memoirs of the wife of Confederate General James Chesnut, Jr., who was an advisor to President Jefferson Davis. It is a fascinating account of all the years of the American Civil War. It focuses on the daily lives and adversities of all who suffered through the war, from ordinary people to the Confederacy's generals and political elite. Mary Chesnut's prose has lost none of its provocative bite through the ages!

You may never visit the Gettysburg battlefield, but understanding historic lessons from Battle Tested! will have a profound influence on not only your leadership abilities, but also your life, organizations, and career.

"Forget the Titanic; this sub wreck is hot," says the Wall Street Journal. Award-winning journalists Hicks and Kropf offer new insights into the dramatic history and mysterious disappearance of the Hunley, the first submersible to sink another ship. The Hunley represented one of the major technological breakthroughs of the Civil War, and it has fascinated many to the point of obsession ever since its disappearance.

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.

In this revelatory study, award-winning historian Leonard L. Richards outlines the links between the Gold Rush and the Civil War. He explains that Southerners envisioned California as a new market for slaves, schemed to tie California to the South via railroad, and imagined splitting off the state's southern half as a slave state. Richards recounts the political battles and the fiery California feuds, duels, and, perhaps, outright murders as the state came shockingly close to being divided in two.

In 1860, Charleston, South Carolina, embodied the combustible spirit of the South. No city was more fervently attached to slavery, and no city was seen by the North as a greater threat to the bonds barely holding together the Union. And so, with Abraham Lincoln's election looming, Charleston's leaders faced a climactic decision: They could submit to abolition - or they could drive South Carolina out of the Union and hope that the rest of the South would follow.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it.

Against the backdrop of bloody battles and political maneuvering, thousands of African Americans spent the Civil War trying to hold their families together. Whether enslaved or free, they strove not only to survive but also to cultivate bonds of family, friendship, and community. This moving book illuminates that struggle through the letters exchanged by African Americans before, during, and just after the war.

Gen. Robert E. Lee began moving part of his Army of Northern Virginia from the Old Dominion toward Pennsylvania on June 3, 1863. Lee believed his army needed to win a major victory on Northern soil if the South was to have a chance at winning the war. Transferring the fighting out of war-torn Virginia would allow the state time to heal while he supplied his army from untapped farms and stores in Maryland and the Keystone State. Lee had also convinced Pres. Jefferson Davis that his offensive would interfere with the Union effort to take Vicksburg in Mississippi.

Following Lincoln from his humble origins in Kentucky to his assassination in Washington, D.C., Brookhiser shows us every side of the man: laborer, lawyer, congressman, president; storyteller, wit, lover of ribald jokes; depressive, poet, friend, visionary. And he shows that despite his many roles and his varied life, Lincoln returned time and time again to the Founders.

For almost two decades, through the War of 1812, James Wilkinson was the senior general in the United States Army. Amazingly, he was also Agent 13 in the Spanish secret service at a time when Spain's empire dominated North America. Wilkinson's audacious career as a double agent is all the more remarkable because it was an open secret, circulated regularly in newspapers and pamphlets. His saga illuminates just how fragile and vulnerable the young republic was.

With an entirely fresh take on presidential history, James Swanson, author of the New York Times best-selling, Edgar Award-winning Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer, shares the story of his lifelong obsession with the murder of America’s most revered president and the frantic hunt for his assassin. The renowned Lincoln scholar treats listeners to an audible “walking tour” of the people, places, events, and artifacts that tell the story of those horrible days in April 1865.

For the majority of Southern Catholics, religion and politics were not a point of tension. Devout Catholics were also devoted Confederates, including nuns who served as nurses; their deep involvement in the Confederate cause as medics confirms the all-encompassing nature of Catholic involvement in the Confederacy, a fact greatly underplayed by scholars of Civil war religion and American Catholicism.

Author William S. Kiser reshapes the history of the Southwest, underlining the role of the military not just in obtaining territory but in retaining it.

Two of the great themes of the Civil War are how Lincoln found his war-winning general in Ulysses Grant and how Grant finally defeated Lee. Grant's Victory intertwines these two threads in a grand narrative that shows how Grant made the difference in the war.

Author John F. Wasik tracks Lincoln from his time in the 1830s as a young Illinois state legislator pushing for internal improvements; through his work as a lawyer representing the Illinois Central Railroad in the 1840s; to his presidential fight for the Transcontinental Railroad; and his support of land-grant colleges that educated a nation. These brick-and-mortar developments were essential to how the nation could lift citizens above poverty and its isolating origins.