Potter’s magisterial The Impending Crisis is the single best account to date of the coming of the Civil War.” —Civil War History“The magnum opus of a great American historian.” —NewsweekNow in a new edition for the 150th Anniversary of the Civil War, David Potter’s Pulitzer Prize-winning history of antebellum America offers an indispensible analysis of the causes of the war between the states. The Journal of Southern History calls Potter’s incisive account, “modern scholarship’s most comprehensive account of the coming of the Civil War,” and the New York Times Book Review hails it as “profound and original…. History in the grand tradition.”

    This work fills that order admirably ... [Thomas] sensibly and deftly integrates the course of Southern military fortunes with the concerns that shaped them and were shaped by them. In doing so he also manages to convey a sense of how the war itself deteriorated from something spirited and gallant to something base and mean and modern on both sides.

    Lincoln was asked to memorialize the gruesome battle. Instead he gave the whole nation “a new birth of freedom” in the space of a mere 272 words. His entire life and previous training and his deep political experience went into this, his revolutionary masterpiece.By examining both the address and Lincoln in their historical moment and cultural frame, Wills breathes new life into words we thought we knew, and reveals much about a president so mythologized but often misunderstood. Wills shows how Lincoln came to change the world and to effect an intellectual revolution, how his words had to and did complete the work of the guns, and how Lincoln wove a spell that has not yet been broken.

    It is our greatest national drama, at once heroic, tragic, and epic—our Iliad, but also our Bible, a story of sin and judgment, suffering and despair, death and resurrection in a “new birth of freedom.” Drawn from letters, diaries, speeches, articles, poems, songs, military reports, legal opinions, and memoirs, The Civil War: The First Year brings together over 120 pieces by more than sixty participants to create a unique firsthand narrative of this great historical crisis.Beginning on the eve of Lincoln’s election in 1860 and ending in January 1862 with the appointment of Edwin M. Stanton as secretary of war, signaling a new energy and determination to the Union war effort, this volume collects writing by figures well-known—Ulysses S. Grant, Robert E. Lee, Mary Chesnut, Frederick Douglass, and Lincoln himself among them—and less familiar, like pro-slavery advocate J.D.B. DeBow, Lieutenants Charles B. Haydon of the 2nd Michigan Infantry and Henry Livermore Abbott of the 20th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment, and plantation mistresses Catherine Edmondston of North Carolina and Kate Stone of Mississippi. Together, the selections provide a powerful sense of the immediacy, uncertainty, and urgency of events as the nation was torn asunder. Secessionist appeals by Georgia Governor Joseph E. Brown and Alabama legislator Stephen F. Hale give voice to the intense racial fears that helped drive the South toward disunion; Union corporal Samuel J. English and Confederate surgeon Lunsford P. Yandell evoke the shock, confusion, and horror of battle in Virginia and Missouri; memoirist Sallie Brock candidly records the impact of war on Richmond society; and Sam Mitchell recounts his liberation from slavery when the South Carolina Sea Islands fell to Union soldiers.The Civil War: The First Year includes headnotes, a chronology of events, biographical and explanatory endnotes, endpaper maps, and an index.

    . . one of the most thorougly dignified, one of the most distinguished biographies of the year." -- Henry Steele Commager, New York Herald Tribune "It is not often that one comes upon a biography that is so well done as this book. Nearly every page bears evidence of the fact that it is the product of painstaking and exhaustive research, mature thought, and an expert understanding of the subject in hand . . ." -- Saturday Review of Literature

    Allen’s expertise in military history and strategy is combined with Roger MacBride Allen’s knowledge of technology to reveal a lesser-known yet fascinating side of the 16th president of the United States. Their authoritative narrative reveals Lincoln as our nation’s first hands-on Commander-in-Chief, whose appreciation for the power of technology plays a critical role in the North’s Civil War victory over the less developed South.Readers meet Lincoln as he exchanges vital telegraph messages with his generals in the field; we witness his inspection of new ship models at the Navy Yard; we view the president target-shooting with the designer of a new kind of rifle; and we follow Lincoln, the man of action, as he leads a daring raid to recapture Norfolk, VA.The book’s historic sweep also sets Abraham Lincoln in the context of his military era: we learn about the North’s Anaconda Plan, the South’s counter strategies, and how the concept of total war replaced the old Napoleonic way of fighting. Readers will come away with a rich sense of a leader who lived through one of the most exciting ages of technological and social change in America. With archival photographs, artwork, and maps, Mr. Lincoln’s High-Tech War brings alive a time when the railroad brought soldiers and to and from the battlefields, when hot-air balloons were used for surveillance, and when ironclad warships revolutionized naval warfare.The Allens’ detailed study demonstrates why Lincoln’s appreciation of the importance of technology, his understanding of the art of war, and his mastery of military strategy were key elements in the winning of the American Civil War.National Geographic supports K-12 educators with ELA Common Core Resources.Visit www.natgeoed.org/commoncore for more information.

    Grant traces the life of the Civil War general and eighteenth president of the United States and assesses his major accomplishments.

    Grant and Robert E. Lee. Gordon C. Rhea, in his exhaustive study The Battle of the Wilderness, provides the consummate recounting of that conflict of May 5 and 6, 1864, which ended with high casualties on both sides but no clear victor.Whereas previous studies have stood solely on published documents—mainly the Official Records and regimental histories—The Battle of the Wilderness not only takes a fresh look at those sources but also examines an extensive body of unpublished material, much of which has never before been brought to bear on the subject. These diaries, memoirs, letters, and reports shed new light on several aspects of the campaign, compelling Rhea to offer a critical new perspective on the overall development of the battle.For example, it has long been thought that Lee through his superior skill as general lured Grant into the Wilderness. But as Rhea makes clear, although Lee indeed hoped that Grant would become ensnared in the Wilderness, he failed to take the steps necessary to delay Grant's progress and even left his own army in a position of peril. It was only because of miscalculations by the Federal high command that Grant stopped in the Wilderness rather than continuing on to a location more favorable to Union forces.Through The Battle of the Wilderness Rhea gives close attention to the hierarchy of each army. On the Confederate side, he scrutinizes the evolving relationship between Lee and his corps commanders. On the Federal side, he reviews the several tiers of command, including the tense alliance between Grant and George G. Meade, head of the Union Army of the Potomac.Rhea presents a balanced analysis of events and people, command structures and strategies, while gracefully infusing excitement and immediacy into a subject for which he obviously feels great enthusiasm. Both the general reader and the specialist will find this important contribution to Civil War scholarship rewarding.

    Lee’s triumph over Union leader John Pope in the summer of 1862. . . . Lee’s strategic skills, and the capabilities of his principal subordinates James Longstreet and Stonewall Jackson, brought the Confederates onto the field of Second Manassas at the right places and times against a Union army that knew how to fight, but not yet how to win."–Publishers Weekly

    A fast-paced, compulsively readable one-volume narrative of the American Civil War, by the author of the acclaimed saga of World War II, "Delivered from Evil."

    Their hair-raising investigations, fueled by their unique abilities and a healthy dose of scientific method, have made them the subject of a hit TV show: the SCI FI Channel's Ghost Hunters. Now their experiences are in print for the first time, as Jason and Grant recount for us, with the help of veteran author Michael Jan Friedman, the stories of some of their most memorable investigations. The men and women of T.A.P.S. pursue ghosts and other supernatural phenomena with the most sophisticated scientific equipment available -- from thermal-imaging cameras to electromagnetic-field recorders to digital thermometers -- and the results may surprise you. Featuring both cases depicted on Ghost Hunters and earlier T.A.P.S. adventures never told before now, this funny, fascinating, frightening collection will challenge everything you thought you knew about the spirit world.

    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.

    After serving briefly in the pro-Confederate Missouri State Guard, he became a prominent member of William Clarke Quantrill’s infamous guerrillas, who took advantage of the turmoil in the Missouri-Kansas borderland to prey on pro-Union people.McCorkle displayed an unflinchingly violent nature while he participated in raids and engagements including the massacres at Lawrence and Baxter Springs, Kansas, and Centralia, Missouri. In 1865 he followed Quantrill into Kentucky, where the notorious leader was killed and his followers, McCorkle among them, surrendered and were paroled by Union authorities. Early in this century, having returned to farming, McCorkle told his remarkable Civil War experiences to O.S. Barton, a lawyer, who wrote this book, first published in 1914.

    Accompanied by evocative illustrations, these compelling retellings of 30 popular folktales feature supernatural occurrences and ghosts of all sorts, from fiddling ghosts to the story of the Jack o'Lantern. Whether read around the fire on a dark and stormy night or in the backseat of the family van on the way to Grandma's, each expertly told tale is guaranteed to make readers look at the South--and over their shoulders--again and again.

    John Bell Hood and his Army of Tennessee had dreams of capturing Nashville and marching on to the Ohio River, but a small Union force under Hood's old West Point roommate stood between him and the state capital. In a desperate attempt to smash John Schofield's line at Franklin, Hood threw most of his men against the Union works, centered on the house of a family named Carter, and lost 30 percent of his attacking force in one afternoon, crippling his army and setting it up for a knockout blow at Nashville two weeks later. With firsthand accounts, letters and diary entries from the Carter House Archives, local historian James R. Knight paints a vivid picture of this gruesome conflict.