Alana


Monica Barrie - 1986
    The Civil War ravaged her plantation, her life and the man she was to marry before the war, but could not take away her dreams. Alana Belfores vowed to rebuild her plantation, Riverbend, no matter the cost! But it was not until Rafe Montgomery rode into her lonely life, bringing her fiancé home, broken in mind and body, did she know the touch that sears...the kiss that devours...and the ecstasy that consumes the body and damns the soul.TAGS: Historical Romance, Romance, Civil War, plantations, Slavery, Antebellum, Charleston, The South, Love Story, Epic Romance

Stonewall of the West: Patrick Cleburne and the Civil War


Craig L. Symonds - 1997
    Lee, he was a meteor shining from a clouded sky; and to Braxton Bragg, he was an officer ever alive to a success. He was Patrick Ronayne Cleburne, one of the greatest of all Confederate field commanders.An Irishman by birth, Cleburne emigrated to the United States in 1849 at the age of 21. He achieved only modest success in the peacetime South, but rose rapidly in the wartime army to become the Confederacy's finest division commander. He was admired by peers and subordinates alike for his leadership, loyalty, honesty, and fearlessness in the face of enemy fire. The valor of his command was so inspirational that his unit alone was allowed to carry its own distinctive battle flag.In Stonewall of the West, Craig Symonds offers the first full-scale critical biography of this compelling figure. He explores all the sources of Cleburne's commitment to the Southern cause, his growth as a combat leader from Shiloh to Chickamauga, and his emergence as one of the Confederacy's most effective field commanders at Missionary Ridge, Ringgold Gap, and Pickett's Mill. In addition, Symonds unravels the mystery of Spring Hill and recounts Cleburne's dramatic and untimely death (at the age of 36) at Franklin, Tennessee, where he charged the enemy line on foot after having two horses shot from under him.Symonds also explores Cleburne's role in the complicated personal politics of the Army of Tennessee, as well as his astonishing proposal that the decimated Confederate ranks be filled by ending slavery and arming blacks against the Union.Symonds' definitive and immensely readable narrative casts new light on Cleburne, on the Army of Tennessee, and on the Civil War in the West. It finally and firmly establishes Cleburne's rightful place in the pantheon of Southern military heroes.

The Optimist's Guide to Letting Go


Amy E. Reichert - 2018
    Seven days. One big secret. The author of The Coincidence of Coconut Cake unfolds a mother-daughter story told by three women whose time to reckon with a life-altering secret is running out.Gina Zoberski wants to make it through one day without her fastidious mother, Lorraine, cataloguing all her faults, and her sullen teenage daughter, May, snubbing her. Too bad there’s no chance of that. Her relentlessly sunny disposition annoys them both, no matter how hard she tries. Instead, Gina finds order and comfort in obsessive list-making and her work at Grilled G’s, the gourmet grilled cheese food truck built by her late husband.But when Lorraine suffers a sudden stroke, Gina stumbles upon a family secret Lorraine's kept hidden for forty years. In the face of her mother’s failing health and her daughter’s rebellion, this optimist might find that piecing together the truth is the push she needs to let go...

The Fate of Their Country: Politicians, Slavery Extension, and the Coming of the Civil War


Michael F. Holt - 2004
    Holt convincingly offers a disturbingly contemporary answer: partisan politics. In this brilliant and succinct book, Holt distills a lifetime of scholarship to demonstrate that secession and war did not arise from two irreconcilable economies any more than from moral objections to slavery. Short-sighted politicians were to blame. Rarely looking beyond the next election, the two dominant political parties used the emotionally charged and largely chimerical issue of slavery's extension westward to pursue reelection and settle political scores, all the while inexorably dragging the nation towards disunion.Despite the majority opinion (held in both the North and South) that slavery could never flourish in the areas that sparked the most contention from 1845 to 1861-the Mexican Cession, Oregon, and Kansas-politicians in Washington, especially members of Congress, realized the partisan value of the issue and acted on short-term political calculations with minimal regard for sectional comity. War was the result.Including select speeches by Lincoln and others, The Fate of Their Country openly challenges us to rethink a seminal moment in America's history.

Secret Missions of the Civil War


Philip Van Doren Stern - 1959
    Prominent Civil War historian has woven a compelling history of the Civil War from first hand accounts by men and women who undertook secret missions and were involved in underground activities for both sides. Discussions of codes and ciphers used during this war. 320 pages. 6 X 9.

TIME MAGE


Rob Nolan - 2019
     Rylan can slow down time, then act while the rest of the world is frozen. He can pluck arrows from the air, win any fist fight, save innocents from certain death. Then a goblin army attacked his village. When a beautiful female mage helps him save his people, Rylan has a choice to make: Go with her to an academy of mages to learn how to control his power… Or stand by and let the evil Overlord, a creature with the power to influence others’ minds, take over the world of Voth one kingdom at a time. Rylan will romance gorgeous women, face incredible dangers, and learn to control his powers in ways he’d never dreamed - all to prepare himself for the day he must battle the Overlord. The world of Voth has more than enough sorcerers and wizards. What they need is a hero… And a Time Mage. Warning: this book contains harem elements and adult situations.

Frederick Douglass: Self-Made Man


Timothy Sandefur - 2018
    Unlike other leading abolitionists, however, Douglass embraced the U.S. Constitution, insisting that it was an essentially anti-slavery document and that its guarantees for individual rights belonged to all Americans, of whatever race. As the nation pauses to remember Douglass on his bicentennial, Frederick Douglass: Self-Made Man gives us an insightful glimpse into the mind of one of America’s greatest thinkers.

The Jungle Book ; Just So Stories


Rudyard Kipling - 1894
    Kipling's own illustrations that make Just So Stories one of the few enduring classics of children's literature that G. K. Chesterton called 'Fairy tales told to men in the morning of the world.'This new impression includes Kipling's well-loved The Jungle Book, a quite different set of stories that introduce the orphan Mowgli who runs with a wolf pack, and tells of his friends and adversaries such as Shere Khan the tiger, the python Kaa, Baloo the sleepy brown bear and Bagheera, the black panther. A separate story describes the deadly duel between the mongoose, Rikki-tikki-tavi and Nag the cobra.

Madness Rules the Hour: Charleston, 1860 and the Mania for War


Paul Starobin - 2017
    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.In Madness Rules the Hour, Paul Starobin tells the story of how Charleston succumbed to a fever for war and charts the contagion's relentless progress and bizarre turns. In doing so, he examines the wily propagandists, the ambitious politicians, the gentlemen merchants and their wives and daughters, the compliant pastors, and the white workingmen who waged a violent and exuberant revolution in the name of slavery and Southern independence. They devoured the Mercury, the incendiary newspaper run by a fanatical father and son; made holy the deceased John C. Calhoun; and adopted "Le Marseillaise" as a rebellious anthem. Madness Rules the Hour is a portrait of a culture in crisis and an insightful investigation into the folly that fractured the Union and started the Civil War.

Abraham Lincoln, Slavery, and the Civil War: Selected Writings and Speeches


Abraham Lincoln - 2000
    Classics like the Kansas-Nebraska speech, the Lincoln-Douglas Debates, and the Gettysburg Address, along with less familiar writings — poignant letters to individual voters, notes to generals on military strategy, and stirring public speeches — show the development of Lincoln's thought on free labor, slavery, secession, the Civil War, and emancipation. Johnson provides historical context by weaving an engaging narrative around Lincoln’s own words, making this volume the most accessible collection of Lincoln’s writings available. Also included are 14 illustrations, relevant Civil War maps, a Lincoln chronology, reading questions, a bibliography, and an index.