Having given birth to daughter after daughter after daughter, she becomes desperate and turns to the first of her mystical advisors, Msgr. Philippe, who persuades her, among other things, that she is invisible.And then comes the moment of her greatest triumph with the birth of her son and the heir to the throne of all the Russias, the Tsarevich Alexei.All four volumes are (planned) as follows:1. 'The Funeral Bride' 1884-1894 - published November 20152. 'The Empress of Tears' 1895-1904 - published March 20163. 'The Pride of Eagles' 1905-1914 - to be published by November 20164. 'No Greater Crown' 1914-1918 - to be published by April 2017

    Lee and Me challenges the myths and lies of the Confederate legacy—and explores why some of this country’s oldest wounds have never healed.Ty Seidule grew up revering Robert E. Lee. From his southern childhood to his service in the U.S. Army, every part of his life reinforced the Lost Cause myth: that Lee was the greatest man who ever lived, and that the Confederates were underdogs who lost the Civil War with honor. Now, as a retired brigadier general and Professor Emeritus of History at West Point, his view has radically changed. From a soldier, a scholar, and a southerner, Ty Seidule believes that American history demands a reckoning.In a unique blend of history and reflection, Seidule deconstructs the truth about the Confederacy—that its undisputed primary goal was the subjugation and enslavement of Black Americans—and directly challenges the idea of honoring those who labored to preserve that system and committed treason in their failed attempt to achieve it. Through the arc of Seidule’s own life, as well as the culture that formed him, he seeks a path to understanding why the facts of the Civil War have remained buried beneath layers of myth and even outright lies—and how they embody a cultural gulf that separates millions of Americans to this day.Part history lecture, part meditation on the Civil War and its fallout, and part memoir, Robert E. Lee and Me challenges the deeply-held legends and myths of the Confederacy—and provides a surprising interpretation of essential truths that our country still has a difficult time articulating and accepting.

    Raised on a farm by a father who would have preferred a son, Emma can ride, shoot, and hunt as well as any man. She defies convention to become a soldier, an army nurse, even a spy. Dangers surround her, from enemy fire in battle to the risk of discovery by her friends, which would end in court-martial and disgrace. Always she seeks to reconcile the necessity of deception with her deeply-held values, but her greatest challenge arises when her friendship with a fellow-soldier becomes so close that she is tempted to confess the truth and risk everything for a chance at love. Based on the true adventures of Sarah Emma Edmonds, who served for two years in the 2nd Michigan Volunteers as Private Frank Thompson.

    In 1855, a Kentucky businessman named Zebulon Ward colluded with Wood's employer, abducted her, and sold her back into bondage. She remained enslaved through the Civil War, and for two years after it had ended. In 1867, she obtained her freedom for a second time and returned to Cincinnati, where she sued Ward for damages. Astonishingly, after ten years of litigation, Wood won her case: in 1878, a Federal jury awarded her $2,500. The decision stuck on appeal. More important than the amount—the largest to date ever awarded by an American court as restitution for slavery—was the fact that any money was awarded at all. Against all odds, Wood had triumphed over Ward, who had become a prison warden, amassing wealth off the labor of convicts who were former slaves. Wood went on to live until 1912.McDaniel's book tells an epic tale, that of a black woman who struggled against a monolithic system of oppression and achieved more than merely a moral victory over it. Above all, Sweet Taste of Liberty is a tribute to and a portrait of an extraordinary individual.

    The Reconstruction amendments abolished slavery, guaranteed due process and the equal protection of the law, and equipped black men with the right to vote. The federal government, not the states, was put in charge of enforcement. By grafting the principle of equality onto the Constitution, the amendments marked the second founding of the United States.Eric Foner’s rich, insightful history conveys the dramatic origins of these revolutionary amendments in citizen meetings and political negotiations. He explores the momentous court decisions that then narrowed and even nullified the rights guaranteed in these amendments. Today, issues of birthright citizenship, voting rights, due process, and equal protection are still in dispute, the ideal of equality yet to be achieved.

    W. Brands comes the riveting story of how, in nineteenth-century America, a new set of political giants battled to complete the unfinished work of the Founding Fathers and decide the future of our democracyIn the early 1800s, three young men strode onto the national stage, elected to Congress at a moment when the Founding Fathers were beginning to retire to their farms. Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, a champion orator known for his eloquence, spoke for the North and its business class. Henry Clay of Kentucky, as dashing as he was ambitious, embodied the hopes of the rising West. South Carolina's John Calhoun, with piercing eyes and an even more piercing intellect, defended the South and slavery. Together these heirs of Washington, Jefferson and Adams took the country to war, battled one another for the presidency and set themselves the task of finishing the work the Founders had left undone. Their rise was marked by dramatic duels, fierce debates, scandal and political betrayal. Yet each in his own way sought to remedy the two glaring flaws in the Constitution: its refusal to specify where authority ultimately rested, with the states or the nation, and its unwillingness to address the essential incompatibility of republicanism and slavery. They wrestled with these issues for four decades, arguing bitterly and hammering out political compromises that held the Union together, but only just. Then, in 1850, when California moved to join the Union as a free state, "the immortal trio" had one last chance to save the country from the real risk of civil war. But, by that point, they had never been further apart. Thrillingly and authoritatively, H. W. Brands narrates an epic American rivalry and the little-known drama of the dangerous early years of our democracy.

    One frigid night in Pennsylvania, that changed forever. They tore her family apart. They put her in chains. They never expected her to fight back. In 1837, Margaret Morgan was kidnapped from her home in Pennsylvania and sold into slavery. The state of Pennsylvania charged her kidnapper with the crime, but the conviction was later overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court. It was the first time a major branch of the federal government had made a pro-slavery stand, and the ruling in Prigg v. Pennsylvania sewed the bitter seeds of the states' rights battle that eventually would lead to the Civil War. Yet, the heart of this story is not a historic Supreme Court ruling. It is the remarkable, unforgettable Margaret Morgan. Her life would never be the same. Her family had been torn apart. Uncaring forces abused her body and her heart. But she refused to give up, refused to stop fighting, refused to allow her soul to be enslaved.

    She boldly embraces this calling after being told the shocking news that she can’t bear children, but as the country steers toward bloody civil war, Sarah faces difficult sacrifices that could put all she loves in peril.   Eden, a modern woman desperate to conceive a child with her husband, moves to an old house in the suburbs and discovers a porcelain head hidden in the root cellar—the remains of an Underground Railroad doll with an extraordinary past of secret messages, danger and deliverance.    Ingeniously plotted to a riveting end, Sarah and Eden’s woven lives connect the past to the present, forcing each of them to define courage, family, love, and legacy in a new way.

    He is a slave, a preacher, and the leader of the only effective slave revolt in the history of 'that peculiar institution'. William Styron's ambitious and stunningly accomplished novel is Turner's confession, made to his jailers under the duress of his God. Encompasses the betrayals, cruelties and humiliations that made up slavery - and that still sear the collective psyches of both races.

    Altsheler, which describe the American civil war (1861-1865) from the beginning to the end. The novels can be also read as independent works:THE GUNS OF BULL RUN (A STORY OF THE CIVIL WAR'S EVE)THE GUNS OF SHILOH (A STORY OF THE GREAT WESTERN CAMPAIGN)THE SCOUTS OF STONEWALL (THE STORY OF THE GREAT VALLEY CAMPAIGN)THE SWORD OF ANTIETAM (A STORY OF THE NATION'S CRISIS)THE STAR OF GETTYSBURG (A STORY OF SOUTHERN HIGH TIDE)THE ROCK OF CHICKAMAUGA (A STORY OF THE WESTERN CRISIS)THE SHADES OF THE WILDERNESS (A STORY OF LEE'S GREAT STAND)THE TREE OF APPOMATTOX (A STORY OF THE CIVIL WAR'S CLOSE)

    His actions helped determine the fate of a nation.As the United States threatened to break into civil war, the Southern states found themselves in an impossible position: Their economic survival would require reopening the slave trade, banned in America since 1807, but the future of the Confederacy could not be secured without official recognition from Great Britain, which would never countenance such a move. How, then, could the first be achieved without dooming the possibility of the second? Believing their cotton monopoly would provide sufficient leverage, the Southerners publically declared the slave trade dead, even as rapacious traders quickly landed more and more ships on the American coast.The unlikely man at the roiling center of this intrigue was Robert Bunch, the ambitious young British consul in Charleston, S.C. As he soured on the self-righteousness of his slave-loving neighbors, Bunch used his unique perch to thwart their plans, sending reams of damning dispatches to the Foreign Office in London and eventually becoming the Crown's best secret source on the Confederacy—even as he convinced those neighbors that he was one of them.In this masterfully told story, Christopher Dickey introduces Consul Bunch as a key figure in the pitched battle between those who wished to reopen the floodgates of bondage and misery, and those who wished to dam the tide forever. Featuring a remarkable cast of diplomats, journalists, senators, and spies, Our Man in Charleston captures the intricate, intense relationship between great powers as one stood on the brink of warFrom the Hardcover edition.

    The Civil War, as seen through the eyes of young Vincent Wingfield, a spirited teenager from the South and heir to a southern slave plantation, who staunchly supports the rights of slaves but, because of fidelity to the state of Virginia, joins Lee's cavalry and fights for the Confederacy.

    By exposing the painful past she has created a beautiful, timely, and uplifting book with unforgettable characters who kept me guessing.--Donna Hylton, author of A Little Piece of Light: A Memoir of Hope, Prison, and a Life UnboundDeirdre Sinnott is an extraordinary writer whose eye misses nothing. This compelling story is a must read--and it couldn't be more timely.--David Black, award-winning journalist, novelist, screenwriter, and producerA fast-paced excursion into Utica, New York, in the mid-1830s, The Third Mrs. Galway captures the true-life antiabolition riots against the New York Anti-Slavery Society. With lively and enjoyable prose, Deirdre Sinnott brings the story of emancipation alive.--Paul Stewart, cofounder of the Underground Railroad History ProjectThe Third Mrs. Galway offers readers romance, adventure, and poignant family drama while also providing insight into the complexity of antislavery attitudes before the Civil War. This is a historical page-turner that both enlightens and entertains.--Barbara Weisberg, author of Talking to the Dead: Kate and Maggie Fox and the Rise of SpiritualismWith historical accuracy, Deirdre Sinnott brings to life the surprising drama of freedom-seekers and slave-catchers in Oneida County. This book animates the history of the region and the larger Underground Railroad phenomenon in a way that street signs and public lectures cannot.--Jan DeAmicis, cochair of the Oneida County Freedom Trail CommissionThe Third Mrs. Galway reads like Balzac, with fear, desire, terror, and love intertwined in this gripping work of historical fiction. Deirdre Sinnott weaves the stories of a cross-section of 1835 Utica, New York, into an impressive and fascinating narrative that contemplates race, class, history, and the search for justice and humanity. ReadThe Third Mrs. Galway to be swept into the uncertain, violent time of 1830s New York and to see in new ways how that moment still affects our own.--Taylor M. Polites, author of The Rebel WifeIt's 1835 in Utica, New York, and newlywed Helen Galway discovers a frightening secret: two runaway slaves are hiding in the shack behind her husband's house. Suddenly, she is at the center of not only the era's greatest moral dilemma, but her own as well. Should she be a good wife and report the fugitives to her husband? Or will she defy convention and come to the aid of the least of her brethren?Within her home, Helen is haunted by the previous Mrs. Galway, recently deceased but still an oppressive presence. Her husband, injured by a drunken tumble off his horse, is assisted by a doctor of questionable ambitions who keeps a close eye on Helen. In charge of all things domestic is Maggie--formerly enslaved by the Galway family and freed when emancipation came to New York eight years earlier.At the same time, Utica is at the center of emancipation efforts as abolitionists arrive for the founding meeting of the New York State Anti-Slavery Society. Those who plead for an immediate end to enslavement are attacked by newspapers accusing them of being insurrectionists and traitors to the Constitution. Everyone faces dangerous choices as they navigate this intensely heated personal and political landscape.

    In Auburn, New York, in the mid-nineteenth century, Martha Wright and Frances Seward, inspired by Harriet Tubman’s rescues in the dangerous territory of Eastern Maryland, opened their basement kitchens as stations on the Underground Railroad. Tubman was enslaved, Wright was a middle-class Quaker mother of seven, and Seward was the aristocratic wife and moral conscience of her husband, William H. Seward, who served as Lincoln’s Secretary of State. All three refused to abide by laws that denied them the rights granted to white men, and they supported each other as they worked to overturn slavery and achieve full citizenship for blacks and women. The Agitators opens when Tubman is enslaved and Wright and Seward are young women bridling against their traditional roles. It ends decades later, after Wright’s and Seward’s sons—and Tubman herself—have taken part in three of the defining engagements of the Civil War. Through the sardonic and anguished accounts of the protagonists, reconstructed from their letters, diaries, and public appearances, we see the most explosive debates of the time, and portraits of the men and women whose paths they crossed: Lincoln, Seward, Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, John Brown, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and others. Tubman, embraced by Seward and Wright and by the radical network of reformers in western New York State, settled in Auburn and spent the second half of her life there. With extraordinarily compelling storytelling reminiscent of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s No Ordinary Time and David McCullough’s John Adams, The Agitators brings a vivid new perspective to the epic American stories of abolition, the Underground Railroad, women’s rights activism, and the Civil War.

      Four unique voices; two parallel love stories; one sweeping novel rich in the history of nineteenth-century America. This remarkable debut draws from the great themes of literature—famine, war, love, and family—as it introduces four unforgettable characters. Ethan McOwen is an Irish immigrant whose endurance is tested in Brooklyn and the Five Points at the height of its urban destitution; he is among the first to join the famed Irish Brigade and becomes a celebrated war photographer. Marcella, a society girl from Spain, defies her father to become a passionate abolitionist. Mary and Micah are slaves of varying circumstances, who form an instant connection and embark on a tumultuous path to freedom.      All four lives unfold in two beautiful love stories, which eventually collide. Written in gorgeous language that subtly captures the diverse backgrounds of the characters, and interspersed with letters, journals, and dreams, this unforgettable story, rendered in cinematic detail, is about having faith in life's great meaning amidst its various tangles.