Pendel's attention. It is very interesting and throws many sidelights on the life of the White House. Pendel writes: "In 1861, or 1862, the Metropolitan Police was established by Congress at the Capital, and I made application for and received an appointment on the force. I made the first arrest, with the assistance of "Buck" Essex. The case was that of a fellow named Grady, one of the English Hill toughs. A roundsman said to us, "Boys, you take a walk down Seventh Street, and if you see anything going on, take a hand in it." Just as we got opposite the Patent Office, this Grady had assaulted, or rather was assaulting, a young fellow with a whip. I went up and grabbed him and put him under arrest, then took him to Squire Dunn's court and preferred charges against him. The Squire was busy writing for some time. When he got through he handed me the paper he was writing, and I was so green at the business I did not know what it was, so said: "What is this, Squire?" He replied, "Why, that is the paper of commitment for this fellow. Take him to jail." "On November 3, 1864, Sergeant John Cronin, Alfonso Dunn, Andrew Smith, and myself were ordered to report at the First Precinct, in the old City Hall, at one o'clock in the afternoon. We supposed we were to be detailed for detective work in New York City on account of the great riot then on there, especially as we were ordered to report in citizens' clothes, to conceal our revolvers, and to be sure to have them all clean and in good order. We arrived at the City Hall, and then were told where we were to go, which was to the President's Mansion, there to report to Marshal Lanham, at that time United States Marshal of the District of Columbia, and a bosom friend of Abraham Lincoln. "These were days that tried men's hearts, and women's, too. Men were falling at the front by hundreds, both in the Union and in the Confederate armies. There was weeping and mourning all over the land. Our nation was trembling with anxiety; we were all hoping that the great strife was over or soon to be. "Marshal Lanham took us upstairs and into the President's office, where we were introduced to him and to his two secretaries, Mr. Nicolay and Mr. Hay, the latter now being Secretary of State. We were then instructed to keep a sharp lookout in the different parts of the house, more particularly in the East Room and at the door of the President's office. " CONTENTS I — Under President Lincoln II — Under President Johnson III — Under President Grant IV — Under President Hayes V — Under President Garfield VI — Under President Arthur VII — Under President Cleveland VIII — Under President Harrison IX — Cleveland's Second Administration X— Under President McKinley XI — Furniture in Executive Mansion Originally published in 1902; reformatted for the Kindle; may contain an occasional imperfections; original spellings have been kept in place.

    Britain was dependent on the South for cotton, and in turn the Confederacy relied almost exclusively on Britain for guns, bullets, and ships. The Union sought to block any diplomacy between the two and consistently teetered on the brink of war with Britain. For four years the complex web of relationships between the countries led to defeats and victories both minute and history-making. In A World on Fire, Amanda Foreman examines the fraught relations from multiple angles while she introduces characters both humble and grand, bringing them to vivid life over the course of her sweeping and brilliant narrative.Between 1861 and 1865, thousands of British citizens volunteered for service on both sides of the Civil War. From the first cannon blasts on Fort Sumter to Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, they served as officers and infantrymen, sailors and nurses, blockade runners and spies. Through personal letters, diaries, and journals, Foreman has woven together their experiences to form a panoramic yet intimate view of the war on the front lines, in the prison camps, and in the great cities of both the Union and the Confederacy. Through the eyes of these brave volunteers we see the details of the struggle for life and the great and powerful forces that threatened to demolish a nation.In the drawing rooms of London and the offices of Washington, on muddy fields and aboard packed ships, Foreman reveals the decisions made, the beliefs held and contested, and the personal triumphs and sacrifices that ultimately led to the reunification of America. A World on Fire is a complex and groundbreaking work that will surely cement Amanda Foreman’s position as one of the most influential historians of our time.

    government, is also the history of America's most tumultuous years. As the majestic new building rose above Washington's skyline, battles over slavery and secession were ripping the country apart. Ground was broken just months after Congress adopted the compromise of 1850. Workers began to bolt the Capitol's 9-million-pound cast-iron dome into place in 1856. The statue Freedom was placed atop it in 1863, five months after the Battle of Gettysburg. Little known is the greater irony: the United States owes the building's scale and magnificence to Jefferson Davis, who remained the Capitol's staunchest advocate up until the week he left Washington to become president of the Confederacy. Davis's protégé and the engineer in charge was army captain Montgomery C. Meigs, who as Lincoln's quartermaster general of the Union Army would never forgive Davis's betrayal of the nation. The Capitol's brilliant architect, and Meigs's longtime rival, was Thomas U. Walter, a Southern sympathizer who would turn fiercely against the South and all who had betrayed the Union.In Freedom's Cap, Guy Gugliotta, an award-winning journalist, science writer, and author, has captured with impeccable historical detail the clash of personalities behind the building of the Capitol and its extraordinary design and engineering.

    Lincoln realized that the Civil War had taken on a wider significance—that all of Europe and Latin America was watching to see whether the United States, a beleaguered model of democracy, would indeed “perish from the earth.”In The Cause of All Nations, distinguished historian Don H. Doyle explains that the Civil War was viewed abroad as part of a much larger struggle for democracy that spanned the Atlantic Ocean, and had begun with the American and French Revolutions. While battles raged at Bull Run, Antietam, and Gettysburg, a parallel contest took place abroad, both in the marbled courts of power and in the public square. Foreign observers held widely divergent views on the war—from radicals such as Karl Marx and Giuseppe Garibaldi who called on the North to fight for liberty and equality, to aristocratic monarchists, who hoped that the collapse of the Union would strike a death blow against democratic movements on both sides of the Atlantic. Nowhere were these monarchist dreams more ominous than in Mexico, where Napoleon III sought to implement his Grand Design for a Latin Catholic empire that would thwart the spread of Anglo-Saxon democracy and use the Confederacy as a buffer state.Hoping to capitalize on public sympathies abroad, both the Union and the Confederacy sent diplomats and special agents overseas: the South to seek recognition and support, and the North to keep European powers from interfering. Confederate agents appealed to those conservative elements who wanted the South to serve as a bulwark against radical egalitarianism. Lincoln and his Union agents overseas learned to appeal to many foreigners by embracing emancipation and casting the Union as the embattled defender of universal republican ideals, the “last best hope of earth.”A bold account of the international dimensions of America's defining conflict, The Cause of All Nations frames the Civil War as a pivotal moment in a global struggle that would decide the survival of democracy.

    Lee and the other by dour George Meade. They’ll meet in a Pennsylvania crossroads town where no one planned to fight. In this sweeping, savagely realistic novel, the greatest battle ever fought on American soil explodes into life at Gettysburg. As generals squabble, staffs err. Tragedy unfolds for immigrants in blue and barefoot Rebels alike. The fate of our nation will be decided in a few square miles of fields. Following a tough Confederate sergeant from the Blue Ridge, a bitter Irish survivor of the Great Famine, a German political refugee, and gun crews in blue and gray, Cain at Gettysburg is as grand in scale as its depictions of combat are unflinching. For three days, battle rages. Through it all, James Longstreet is haunted by a vision of war that leads to a fateful feud with Robert E. Lee. Scheming Dan Sickles nearly destroys his own army. Gallant John Reynolds and obstreperous Win Hancock, fiery William Barksdale and dashing James Johnston Pettigrew, gallop toward their fates…. There are no marble statues on this battlefield, only men of flesh and blood, imperfect and courageous. From New York Times bestselling author and former U.S. Army officer Ralph Peters, Cain at Gettysburg is bound to become a classic of men at war.

    Those ex-slaves were in their declining years by the time of the Great Depression, but Elizabeth Sparks, Elige Davison, and others like them nonetheless provided a priceless record of life under the yoke: where slaves lived, how they were treated, what they ate, how they worked, how they adjusted to freedom. Here, Belinda Hurmence presents the interviews of 21 former Virginia slaves. This is a companion volume to Hurmence's popular collections of North Carolina and South Carolina slave narratives, My Folks Don't Want Me to Talk About Slaveryand Before Freedom, When I Just Can Remember.

    As an outspoken opponent of the expansion of slavery in the United States, Lincoln won the Republican Party nomination in 1860 and was elected president later that year. During his term, he helped preserve the United States by leading the defeat of the secessionist Confederate States of America in the American Civil War. He introduced measures that resulted in the abolition of slavery, issuing his Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and promoting the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1865."

    ConnellyThomas Jonathan Jackson was the most renowned and skillful commander of Confederate troops in the Civil War. Not even Lee or Stuart matched his purely military intelligence-his intransigence at Bull Run (which earned him the name "Stonewall"), his knack for knowing when to attack and retreat, which he showed throughout the Shenandoah campaign, his tactical brilliance at Chancellorsville. He was stern, a strict Calvinist, a single-minded officer for whom religion and the army were everything. Yet he had the undivided loyalty of the men he commanded. This classic biography by the British historian G. F. R. Henderson, first published in 1898, is a meticulous study of Jackson's military campaigns from the Mexican War where he served under Winfield Scott to his death in 1863 at Chancellorsville. A romantic view of a great hero, inflected by the political views of the day, this work has remained a standard account of one of the Civil War's great warriors, here introduced by one of the Civil War's best historians.

    Senator Charles Sumner and the Beginning of the War Over SlaveryEarly in the afternoon of May 22, 1856, ardent pro-slavery Congressman Preston S. Brooks of South Carolina strode into the United States Senate Chamber in Washington, D.C., and began beating renowned anti-slavery Senator Charles Sumner with a gold-topped walking cane. Brooks struck again and again—more than thirty times across Sumner’s head, face, and shoulders—until his cane splintered into pieces and the helpless Massachusetts senator, having nearly wrenched his desk from its fixed base, lay unconscious and covered in blood. It was a retaliatory attack. Forty-eight hours earlier, Sumner had concluded a speech on the Senate floor that had spanned two days, during which he vilified Southern slaveowners for violence occurring in Kansas, called Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois a “noise-some, squat, and nameless animal,” and famously charged Brooks’s second cousin, South Carolina Senator Andrew Butler, as having “a mistress. . . who ugly to others, is always lovely to him. . . . I mean, the harlot, Slavery.” Brooks not only shattered his cane during the beating, but also destroyed any pretense of civility between North and South.One of the most shocking and provocative events in American history, the caning convinced each side that the gulf between them was unbridgeable and that they could no longer discuss their vast differences of opinion regarding slavery on any reasonable level.The Caning: The Assault That Drove America to Civil War tells the incredible story of this transformative event. While Sumner eventually recovered after a lengthy convalescence, compromise had suffered a mortal blow. Moderate voices were drowned out completely; extremist views accelerated, became intractable, and locked both sides on a tragic collision course.The caning had an enormous impact on the events that followed over the next four years: the meteoric rise of the Republican Party and Abraham Lincoln; the Dred Scott decision; the increasing militancy of abolitionists, notably John Brown’s actions; and the secession of the Southern states and the founding of the Confederacy. As a result of the caning, the country was pushed, inexorably and unstoppably, to war. Many factors conspired to cause the Civil War, but it was the caning that made conflict and disunion unavoidable five years later.

    He was a kid, eighteen years old. Married, broke, flunking out of college-and about to become a father. The Marines seemed like a good way out. He figured the Nam couldn't be any worse than home. He was wrong.Publishers Weekly says "Chilling...It tells how a youngster from Portland, Oregon matured in the crucible of combat...The reader is given a sense of what it's like to fight an unseen enemy who might appear anytime, anywhere and start shooting from ambush." Karl Marlantes, New York Times best selling author of "Matterhorn" calls "A Field of Innocence", "Powerful ...and riveting."Tim O'Brien, New York Times best selling author of "The Things They Carried" says, "With its raw realism and heartbreaking honesty...one of the finest Vietnam memoirs."Kirkus Review says A Field of Innocence is "Exciting and Impressive."

    We were halfway in when the Japanese machine guns got their range. Bullets slapped the water and whined as they ricocheted off the barge. Some of us ducked; some of us fell to the floor; and all of us prayed.” Here, in heart-stopping human detail, are twenty-one personal accounts told by the men themselves. They are the stories of men who lived in hell and lived to tell of it. There is the story of Sgt. Albert Schmid who was awarded the Navy Cross for his single-handed destruction of a flanking attack while on Guadalcanal. The account of Private Nicolli who was literally blown into the air like a matchstick and then, with a piece of shrapnel in his chest, managed to help a wounded comrade to the rear. “The luckiest man in the Solomons,” Sgt. Koziar, tells of how he had his tonsils removed with the assistance of a Japanese sniper’s bullet. These are just three of the twenty-one fascinating stories that were told to Gerold Frank and James Horan just months after these marines had returned from active duty to recover from the conflict in the Pacific. The valor of these marines is astounding, as twenty-one-year-old Corporal Conroy states in the book, “I don’t suppose I shall ever be able to sum up all the bravery, the guts, the genuine, honest courage displayed by the boys out in Guadalcanal. They were afraid, and yet they took it. They had what it takes . . .” The battles of Gavutu-Tanambogo, Tulagi, Tenaru, Matanikau and Guadalcanal are all covered through these accounts which take the reader right to the epicenter of the Pacific conflict. “telling of living conditions on the beaches and in the jungles where they fought, offering an insider’s view of foxholes, food, snipers, mosquitos, boondocks, shrapnel, their injuries, and their pain.” Great Stories of World War II Gerold Frank and James Horan were professional authors who wrote down the stories of these marines shortly after they had returned from active duty. The War in the South Pacific was first published in 1943 as Out in the Boondocks. Frank went on to become a prominent ghostwriter and passed away in 1998. Horan, author of more than forty books, died in 1981.

    Wynalda has constructed a painstakingly detailed day-by-day breakdown of president Abraham Lincoln’s decisions in office—including his signing of the Homestead Act on May 20, 1862; his signing of the legislation enacting the first federal income tax on August 5, 1861; and more personal incidents like the day his eleven-year-old son, Willie, died. Revealed are Lincoln’s private frustrations on September 28, 1862, as he wrote to vice president Hannibal Hamlin, “The North responds to the [Emancipation] proclamation sufficiently with breath; but breath alone kills no rebels.”366 Days in Abraham Lincoln’s Presidency includes fascinating facts like how Lincoln hated to hunt but loved to fire guns near the unfinished Washington monument, how he was the only president to own a patent, and how he recited Scottish poetry to relieve stress. As Scottish historian Hugh Blair said, “It is from private life, from familiar, domestic, and seemingly trivial occurrences, that we most often receive light into the real character.”Covering 366 nonconsecutive days (including a leap day) of Lincoln’s presidency, this is a rich, exciting new perspective of our most famous president. This is a must-have edition for any historian, military history or civil war buff, or reader of biographies.

    History—As You’ve Never Seen Them Before!  Secret Lives of the Civil War features irreverent and uncensored profiles of men and women from the Union and the Confederacy—complete with hundreds of little-known and downright bizarre facts. You’ll discover that:        •  Mary Todd Lincoln claimed to receive valuable military strategies from ghosts in the spirit         world.      •  Jefferson Davis once imported camels for soldiers stationed in the American southwest.      •  Ulysses S. Grant spent much of the Vicksburg campaign on a horse named “Kangaroo.”      •  James Longstreet fought the Battle of Antietam wearing carpet slippers.      •  William T. Sherman was the victim of two shipwrecks on the same day.      •  Harriet Tubman experienced frequent and bizarre hallucinations.      •  Stonewall Jackson was a notorious hypochondriac (he always sat up straight, fearing that         slouching would compress his vital organs).   With chapters on everyone from William Quantrill (a guerilla leader whose skull later ended up in the basement of a fraternity house) to Rose O’Neal Greenhow (perhaps the South’s most glamorous spy), Secret Lives of the Civil War features a mix of famous faces and unsung heroes. American history was never this much fun in school!

    He provides a rare glimpse of the personal battle that raged within soldiers then and now.