Uncover their mesmerizing, realistic stories of combat, courage, and distress in readable and balanced stories told from the front lines.Witness the creation of new technologies of destruction: tanks, planes, and submarines; machine guns and field artillery; poison gas and chemical warfare. It introduced U-boat packs and strategic bombing, unrestricted war on civilians and mistreatment of prisoners.World War I reduced Europe’s mightiest empires to rubble, killed twenty million people, and cracked the foundations of our modern world. In its wake, empires toppled, monarchies fell, and whole populations lost their national identities.If you like gripping, authentic accounts of life and combat during WWI, then you won't want to miss WWI: Tales from the Trenches.

    How near the South came to victory is clearly set forth in these pages. The author vividly conveys the background of the crucial b attle of the Civil War so that the reader can fully appreciate its unfolding.

    Based on long-lost interviews, confessions, and court testimony, this book reveals Mary's deep complicity in the murder plot, and explores how Mary's actions defied nineteenth-century norms of femininity, piety, and motherhood, leaving her vulnerable to deadly punishment historically reserved for men.

    W. Brands, a masterful biography of the Civil War general and two-term president who saved the Union twice, on the battlefield and in the White House, holding the country together at two critical turning points in our history.Ulysses Grant rose from obscurity to discover he had a genius for battle, and he propelled the Union to victory in the Civil War. After Abraham Lincoln's assassination and the disastrous brief presidency of Andrew Johnson, America turned to Grant again to unite the country, this time as president. In Brands's sweeping, majestic full biography, Grant emerges as a heroic figure who was fearlessly on the side of right. He was a beloved commander in the field but willing to make the troop sacrifices necessary to win the war, even in the face of storms of criticism. He worked valiantly to protect the rights of freedmen in the South; Brands calls him the last presidential defender of black civil rights for nearly a century. He played it straight with the American Indians, allowing them to shape their own fate even as the realities of Manifest Destiny meant the end of their way of life.  He was an enormously popular president whose memoirs were a huge bestseller; yet within decades of his death his reputation was in tatters, the victim of Southerners who resented his policies on Reconstruction. In this page-turning biography, Brands now reconsiders Grant's legacy and provides a compelling and intimate portrait of a man who saved the Union on the battlefield and consolidated that victory as a resolute and principled political leader.

    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.

    Lee relinquished his sword, a band of Union and Confederate veterans dusted off their guns. But these former foes had no intention of reigniting the Civil War. Instead, they were bound by a common goal: to seize the British province of Canada and to hold it hostage until the independence of Ireland was secured.By the time that these invasions--known together as the Fenian Raids--began in 1866, Ireland had been Britain's unwilling colony for seven hundred years. Thousands of Civil War veterans considered themselves Irishmen before they were Americans. They were those who fled rather than perish in the wake of the Great Hunger, and now they took their cue from a previous generation of successful American revolutionaries. With the tacit support of the U.S. government, the Fenian Brotherhood established a state in exile, planned prison breaks, weathered infighting, stockpiled weapons, and assassinated enemies. Defiantly, this motley group, including a one-armed war hero, an English spy infiltrating rebel forces, and a radical who staged his own funeral, managed to seize a piece of Canada--if only for three days.When the Irish Invaded Canada is the untold tale of a band of fiercely patriotic Irish Americans and their chapter in Ireland's centuries-long fight for independence. Inspiring, lively, and often undeniably comic, this is a story of fighting for what's right in the face of impossible odds.

    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

     The Underground Railroad was the passage to freedom for many slaves, but it was rife with dangers. There were dedicated conductors and safe houses, but also arduous nights in the mountains and days in threatening towns. For those who made it to Midnight (the code name given to Detroit), the Detroit River became a River Jordan—and Canada became their land of Canaan, the Promised Land where they could live freely in black settlements under the protection of British law. One of these settlements was known as Dawn.In prose rich in detail and imagery, From Midnight to Dawn presents compelling portraits of the men and women who established the Railroad, and of the people who traveled it to find new lives in Canada. Some of the figures are well known, like Harriet Tubman and John Brown. But there are equally heroic, less familiar figures here as well, like Mary Ann Shadd, who became the first black female newspaper editor in North America, and Osborne Perry Anderson, the only black survivor of the fighting at Harpers Ferry. From Midnight to Dawn evokes the turmoil and controversies of the time, reveals the compelling stories behind events such as Harpers Ferry and the Christian Resistance, and introduces the reader to the real–life “Uncle Tom” who influenced Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.An extraordinary examination of a part of American history that transcends national borders, From Midnight to Dawn will captivate readers with its tales of hope, courage, and a people’s determination to live equal under the law.

    Hanging Maw, the raiders’ leader, recognizes one of the captives as Jemima Boone, daughter of Kentucky's most influential pioneers, and realizes she could be a valuable pawn in the battle to drive the colonists out of the contested Kentucky territory for good.With Daniel Boone and his posse in pursuit, Hanging Maw devises a plan that could ultimately bring greater peace both to the tribes and the colonists. But after the girls find clever ways to create a trail of clues, the raiding party is ambushed by Boone and the rescuers in a battle with reverberations that nobody could predict. As Matthew Pearl reveals, the exciting story of Jemima Boone’s kidnapping vividly illuminates the early days of America’s westward expansion, and the violent and tragic clashes across cultural lines that ensue.In this enthralling narrative in the tradition of Candice Millard and David Grann, Matthew Pearl unearths a forgotten and dramatic series of events from early in the Revolutionary War that opens a window into America’s transition from colony to nation, with the heavy moral costs incurred amid shocking new alliances and betrayals.

    At first, the South and most of the North responded with outrage—southerners promised to execute any black soldiers captured in battle, while many northerners claimed that blacks lacked the necessary courage. Meanwhile, Massachusetts, long the center of abolitionist fervor, launched one of the greatest experiments in American history.In Thunder at the Gates, Douglas Egerton chronicles the formation and battlefield triumphs of the 54th and 55th Massachusetts Infantry and the 5th Massachusetts Cavalry—regiments led by whites but composed of black men born free or into slavery. He argues that the most important battles of all were won on the field of public opinion, for in fighting with distinction the regiments realized the long-derided idea of full and equal citizenship for blacks.A stirring evocation of this transformative episode, Thunder at the Gates offers a riveting new perspective on the Civil War and its legacy.

    Lee is the most revered and perhaps the most misunderstood. Lee is widely portrayed as an ardent antisecessionist who left the United States Army only because he would not draw his sword against his native Virginia, a Southern aristocrat who opposed slavery, and a brilliant military leader whose exploits sustained the Confederate cause. Alan Nolan explodes these and other assumptions about Lee and the war through a rigorous reexamination of familiar and long-available historical sources, including Lee's personal and official correspondence and the large body of writings about Lee. Looking at this evidence in a critical way, Nolan concludes that there is little truth to the dogmas traditionally set forth about Lee and the war.

    Makes some startling revelations using photographic evidence.

    They lived in the South during 1865 -- a year that saw war, disunion, and slavery give way to peace, reconstruction, and emancipation.Between January and December 1865, these four people witnessed, from very different vantage points, the death of the Old South and the birth of the New South. Civil War historian Stephen V. Ash reconstructs their daily lives, their fears and hopes, and their frustrations and triumphs in vivid detail -- telling a dramatic story of real people in a time of great upheaval and offering a fresh perspective on a pivotal moment in history.

    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

    Over the next 102 minutes, each would become part of a drama for the ages, one witnessed only by the people who lived it-until now. Of the millions of words written about this wrenching day, most were told from the outside looking in. "New York Times" reporters Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn have taken the opposite-and far more revealing-approach. Reported from the perspectives of those inside the towers, "102 Minutes" captures the little-known stories of ordinary people who took extraordinary steps to save themselves and others. Beyond this stirring panorama stands investigative reporting of the first rank. An astounding number of people actually survived the plane impacts but were unable to escape, and the authors raise hard questions about building safety and tragic flaws in New York's emergency preparedness. Dwyer and Flynn rely on hundreds of interviews with rescuers, thousands of pages of oral histories, and countless phone, e-mail, and emergency radio transcripts. They cross a bridge of voices to go inside the infernos, seeing cataclysm and heroism, one person at a time, to tell the affecting, authoritative saga of the men and women-the nearly 12,000 who escaped and the 2,749 who perished-as they made 102 minutes count as never before. "102 Minutes" is a 2005 National Book Award Finalist for Nonfiction.