It shines a spotlight and shares new details about the admiral's leadership of the mission to recapture the port of New Orleans from the Confederacy - a campaign historians consider one of the most daring in military history.Farragut is perhaps best known for his order to “Damn the torpedoes.... Full speed ahead." during the Battle of Mobile Bay, which has become a touchstone and rallying cry for the United States Navy.A sweeping and riveting telling of Farragut's career and campaigns, Lincoln's Admiral offers fascinating insights into the strategy and decisions of one of the greatest military leaders on the Civil War - and of all time.

     Forty years later, in 1908, Page wrote this memoir to dispel the slanders told about Wirz. Page explains how the prison Wirz was in charge of was designed to hold, at most, 10,000 prisoners. The population quickly swelled to 30,000 prisoners, overwhelming the South's ability to feed, clothe and house the Andersonville prisoners. Over 13,000 POWs died out of 45,000 prisoners due to disease and diet, and Page claims that Wirz was made a scapegoat to appease the wrath of the families of those who had died. ‘a good read and very different than what is force fed us’ - Civil War Talk James Madison Page was born on July 22, 1839 in Crawfordville, Pennsylvania. He served in the Union army as 2d Lieutenant of Company A, Sixth Michigan Cavalry. After participating in many skirmishes and battles, including Gettysburg, Page was captured on September 21, 1863 along the Rapidan in Virginia and spent the next thirteen months in Southern military prisons, seven of which were at Camp Sumter near Andersonville, Georgia. After the war, Page was supoenaed for the war crimes trial of Major Henry Wirz, the former commandant of the prison, but after being interviewed, the prosecution decided not to call him as a witness because his testimony undermined the predetermined guilt of the accused. Having been present at the prison in the summer of 1864, when the atrocities were said to have occurred, Page denied that any of the four murders charged to Wirz had happened, which denial was supported by the fact that the alleged deceased were never named. After being dissuaded by his sister from joining the ill-fated Indian foray in the West under the command of General George Custer, Page instead moved to the Montana Territory in 1866, where he worked as a Government surveyor. The town of Pageville in Madison County was named in his honor. Page spent his final years in Long Beach, California, where he died in 1924. The True Story of Andersonville Prison was first published in 1908.

    cuts squarely across the accepted tradition... Fuller examines these two great soldiers from a fresh viewpoint and refuses to let himself be bound by tradition." --New York Times Book Review..". readable, instructive, stimulating, and... controversial as when first published." --Military ReviewFirst published fifty years ago, Fuller's study of Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee remains one of his most brilliant and durable works, Grant and Lee is a compelling study not only of the two men, but also of the nature of leadership and command in wartime.

    Dew finds in the commissioners' brutally candid rhetoric a stark white supremacist ideology that proves the contrary. The commissioners included in their speeches a constitutional justification for secession, to be sure, and they pointed to a number of political "outrages" committed by the North in the decades prior to Lincoln's election. But the core of their argument--the reason the right of secession had to be invoked and invoked immediately--did not turn on matters of constitutional interpretation or political principle. Over and over again, the commissioners returned to the same point: that Lincoln's election signaled an unequivocal commitment on the part of the North to destroy slavery and that emancipation would plunge the South into a racial nightmare.Dew's discovery and study of the highly illuminating public letters and speeches of these apostles of disunion--often relatively obscure men sent out to convert the unconverted to the secessionist cause--have led him to suggest that the arguments the commissioners presented provide us with the best evidence we have of the motives behind the secession of the lower South in 1860-61.Addressing topics still hotly debated among historians and the public at large more than a century after the Civil War, Dew challenges many current perceptions of the causes of the conflict. He offers a compelling and clearly substantiated argument that slavery and race were absolutely critical factors in the outbreak of war--indeed, that they were at the heart of our great national crisis.

    This is not only too simple an explanation; Blood on the Moon reveals that it is completely wrong. John Wilkes Booth was neither mad nor alone in his act of murder. He received the help of many, not the least of whom was Dr. Samuel Alexander Mudd, the Charles County

    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.

    The summer months of 1776 witnessed the most consequential events in the story of our country’s founding. While the thirteen colonies came together and agreed to secede from the British Empire, the British were dispatching the largest armada ever to cross the Atlantic to crush the rebellion in the cradle. The Continental Congress and the Continental Army were forced to make decisions on the run, improvising as history congealed around them. In a brilliant and seamless narrative, Ellis meticulously examines the most influential figures in this propitious moment, including George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and Britain’s Admiral Lord Richard and General William Howe. He weaves together the political and military experiences as two sides of a single story, and shows how events on one front influenced outcomes on the other.Revolutionary Summer tells an old story in a new way, with a freshness at once colorful and compelling.

    Motivated partially by his deep-rooted antagonism toward his enemies (both the Northern victors and his Southern detractors), partially by his continuing obsession with the “cause,” and partially by his desperate pecuniary and physical condition, Davis devoted three years and extensive research to the writing of what he termed ”an historical sketch of the events which preceded and attended the struggle of the Southern states to maintain their existence and their rights as sovereign communities.” The result was a perceptive two-volume chronicle, covering the birth, life, and death of the Confederacy, from the Missouri Compromise in 1820, through the tumultuous events of the Civil War, to the readmission of the Southern states to the U.S. Congress in the late 1860s. Supplemented with a new historical foreword by the Pulitzer Prize–winning James M. McPherson, The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, Volume I belongs in the library of anyone interested in the root causes, the personalities, and the events of America’s greatest war.

    Anyone who heard these diaries excerpted on the PBS-TV series The Civil War will recognize his accounts of those campaigns, which remain outstanding for their clarity and detail. Most of all, Rhodes's words reveal the motivation of a common Yankee foot soldier, an otherwise ordinary young man who endured the rigors of combat and exhausting marches, short rations, fear, and homesickness for a salary of $13 a month and the satisfaction of giving "all for the union."

    military history, was finishing a remarkable book that retoldAmerican history through the lens of a hand-selected list of firearms. Kyle masterfully argues that guns have played a fascinating, indispensable, and often under-appreciated role in our national story.Kyle carefully chose ten guns to help tell his story., including the American long rifle, Colt .45 revolver, Winchester rifle, .38 police handgun, and M-16 rifle platform Kyle himself used as a SEAL. This is also the story of how American innovation, creativity, and industrial genius has constantly pushed technology - and U.S. power - forward.RUNNING TIME ⇒ 6hrs. and 56mins.©2013 Chris Kyle (P)2013 HarperCollins Publishers

    Freehling offers a new answer, in the final volume of his monumental history The Road to Disunion. Here is history in the grand manner, a powerful narrative peopled with dozens of memorable portraits, telling this important story with skill and relish. Freehling highlights all the key moments on the road to war, including the violence in Bleeding Kansas, Preston Brooks's beating of Charles Sumner in the Senate chambers, the Dred Scott Decision, John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry, and much more. As Freehling shows, the election of Abraham Lincoln sparked a political crisis, but at first most Southerners took a cautious approach, willing to wait and see what Lincoln would do--especially, whether he would take any antagonistic measures against the South. But at this moment, the extreme fringe in the South took charge, first in South Carolina and Mississippi, but then throughout the lower South, sounding the drum roll for secession. Indeed, The Road to Disunion is the first book to fully document how this decided minority of Southern hotspurs took hold of the secessionist issue and, aided by a series of fortuitous events, drove the South out of the Union. Freehling provides compelling profiles of the leaders of this movement--many of them members of the South Carolina elite. Throughout the narrative, he evokes a world of fascinating characters and places as he captures the drama of one of America's most important--and least understood--stories. The long-awaited sequel to the award-winning Secessionists at Bay, which was hailed as "the most important history of the Old South ever published," this volume concludes a major contribution to our understanding of the Civil War. A compelling, vivid portrait of the final years of the antebellum South, The Road to Disunion will stand as an important history of its subject.

    From the secret meetings of the Sons of Liberty to the final victory at Yorktown and the new Congress, Patriots vividly re-creates one of history's great eras.

    Let us determine to die here and we will conquer. Rally behind them!” With these words Gen. B. E. Bee of the Confederates States Army inspired the famous nickname for Gen. T. J. Jackson, and his brigade, at the First Battle of Bull Run: Stonewall. Three months earlier the 2d, 4th, 5th and 27th Virginia Infantry Regiments had been brigaded together with the 33rd, in whose “A” Company John O. Casler was serving as a Private.However, their reputation came at a cost: if there was an extra hard duty, Jackson would send in his old brigade lest he be thought of as favouring them.Drawn from his diary at the time, Casler recounts his experiences in the ranks, from marches and looting to nail-biting escapades and the monotony of life as a prisoner of war. Instead of a history of the war, Four Years in the Stonewall Brigade is a remarkable account of men in war, graphically bringing to light the challenges they faced on a daily basis.Praise for Four Years in the Stonewall Brigade“…as illustrating the daily life of a soldier in the ranks it is one of the very best publications I have read. I found it a vivid reminder of the days gone by…” — E. M. Schutte, late Sergeant Company C, 13th Massachusetts.“Your style is clear and entertaining. It will do all the old boys of both sides good to read it.” — J. G. Winne, late 16th New York Horse Artillery.“This is to certify that John O. Casler belonged to Company A, 33d Virginian Infantry, Stonewall Brigade. John was a good soldier, always ready and willing to perform any duty assigned him.” — W. H. Powell, Captain Company A, 33d Virginian Infantry, Stonewall Brigade.John O. Casler (1838-1926) was an American soldier and author born in Frederick County, Virginia. While he had left the family home aged twenty one, when it seemed that war was imminent he returned and enlisted in the Confederate States Army in June 1861. Following the war he emigrated to Sherman, Texas. For details of other books published by Albion Press go to the website at www.albionpress.co.uk. Albion Press is an imprint of Endeavour Press, the UK's leading independent digital publisher. For more information on our titles please sign up to our newsletter at www.endeavourpress.com. Each week you will receive updates on free and discounted ebooks. Follow us on Twitter: @EndeavourPress and on Facebook via http://on.fb.me/1HweQV7. We are always interested in hearing from our readers. Endeavour Press believes that the future is now.

     Since its debut, The New York Times' acclaimed web journal entitled 'Disunion' has published hundreds of original articles and won multiple awards, including "Best History Website" from the New Media Institute and the History News Network. Following the chronology of the secession crisis and the Civil War, the contributors to Disunion, who include modern scholars, journalists, historians, and Civil War buffs, offer contemporary commentary and assessment of the Civil War as it unfolded chronologically. Now, this commentary has been gathered together and organized in one volume. In The New York Times: Disunion, historian Ted Widmer has curated more than 100 articles that span events beginning with Lincoln's presidential victory through the Emancipation Proclamation. Topics include everything from Walt Whitman's wartime diary to the bloody guerrilla campaigns in Missouri and Kansas. Esteemed contributors include William Freehling, Adam Goodheart, and Edward Ayers, among others. The book also compiles new essays that have not been published on the Disunion site by well-known historians such as David Blight, Gary Gallagher, and Drew Gilpin Faust. Topics include the perspective of African-American slaves and freed men on the war, the secession crisis in the Upper South, the war in the West (that is, past the Appalachians), the war in Texas, the international context, and Civil War-era cartography. Portraits, contemporary etchings, and detailed maps round out the book.

    Representing a lifetime of study by the great American poet, Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years and The War Years distills Sandburg's monumental six volume set into a single one-book edition. By gleaning every possible reference from history, literature, and popular lore, Sandburg successfully captures not only the legendary president, but also Lincoln the man. He reveals exactly who Lincoln was, and what forces in his life shaped his personality. More than 100 black-and-white historical photographs and linecuts show Lincoln himself, the places he went, and the people who knew him.