It saw Lincoln's assassination just five days later and a near-successful plot to decapitate the Union government, followed by chaos and coup fears in the North, collapsed negotiations and continued bloodshed in the South, and finally, the start of national reconciliation.In the end, April 1865 emerged as not just the tale of the war's denouement, but the story of the making of our nation.Jay Winik offers a brilliant new look at the Civil War's final days that will forever change the way we see the war's end and the nation's new beginning. Uniquely set within the larger sweep of history and filled with rich profiles of outsize figures, fresh iconoclastic scholarship, and a gripping narrative, this is a masterful account of the thirty most pivotal days in the life of the United States.

    Lee’s birth, a new portrait drawing on previously unpublished correspondence Robert E. Lee’s war correspondence is well known, and here and there personal letters have found their way into print, but the great majority of his most intimate messages have never been made public. These letters reveal a far more complex and contradictory man than the one who comes most readily to the imagination, for it is with his family and his friends that Lee is at his most candid, most engaging, and most vulnerable. Over the past several years historian Elizabeth Brown Pryor has uncovered a rich trove of unpublished Lee materials that had been held in both private and public collections. Her new book, a unique blend of analysis, narrative, and historiography, presents dozens of these letters in their entirety, most by Lee but a few by family members. Each letter becomes a departure point for an essay that shows what the letter uniquely reveals about Lee’s time or character. The material covers all aspects of Lee’s life—his early years, West Point, his work as an engineer, his relationships with his children and his slaves, his decision to join the South, his thoughts on military strategy, and his disappointments after defeat in the Civil War. The result is perhaps the most intimate picture to date of Lee, one that deftly analyzes the meaning of his actions within the context of his personality, his relationships, and the social tenor of his times.

    Moving seamlessly between tactical details and analysis of strategic significance, Peter Cozzens presents a balanced, comprehensive account of a campaign that has long been romanticized but little understood. He offers new interpretations of the campaign and the reasons for Stonewall Jackson's success, demonstrates instances in which the mythology that has come to shroud the campaign has masked errors on Jackson's part, and provides the first detailed appraisal of Union leadership in the Valley Campaign, with some surprising conclusions.

    So valuable were the mission's findings about the North Korean-Soviet-Chinese alliance that it is no stretch to say they prevented World War III. Only one man — sworn to secrecy for a half-century—survived Operation Broken Reed. Arthur Boyd recalls his role as cryptographer on a team of Army Rangers, Navy Frogmen, Air Force officers, and CIA operatives that posed as the captured crew of a B-29 bomber in January 1952. Given cover names and cyanide capsules in case of discovery, the men were transported by Chinese Nationalists wearing Communist uniforms across North Korea, where undercover allies delivered information about troop strengths, weaponry, and intention. Fraught with danger, the mission came apart on its last day when the Americans came under fire from Chinese forces wise to the operation. The members of Broken Reed supplied Truman with proof of massive Chinese and Soviet buildups and a heavy Soviet bomber group in Manchuria, fully loaded with atomic weapons. With the potential destruction of the world outlined in front of him, Truman chose not to escalate the Korean War, saving millions of lives.

    In their own words, these men and women describe feeling the Lord's blessings as they have served in some of the most harsh and difficult circumstances imaginable. Their experiences range from leading armed combat and air rescue missions to saving lives in a makeshift hospital tent. Also included are stories of much-needed help and support received by families of those who are serving away from home. These life-changing stories, recorded in on-site personal interviews by bestselling author and artist Chad Hawkins, are reminders that the Lord does watch over and protect His children during troubling times. Featured black-and-white photographs throughout.

    

    She passes him a coded message before killing herself. But before the message can be deciphered, the world spins toward war: Within hours, the president of Pakistan is assassinated, and the country's nuclear warheads go missing. Al Qaeda streams into northern Pakistan. Israel puts her combat forces on hair-trigger alert. CIA paramilitary agent Peter Zembeic is given the impossible task of finding and destroying the missing warheads. Working with his best friend, a B-2 pilot, they develop a desperate plan to save the world from the threat of nuclear terror.

    Published to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Normandy landings, highlights of this unique collection include the break-out from Omaha beach as told by the GI who led it, a French housewife’s story of what it was like to wake up to the invasion, German soldiers’ accounts of finding themselves facing the biggest seaborne invasion in history, a view from the command post by a member of Eisenhower’s staff, combat reports, diaries and letters of British veterans of all forces and services, and accounts of the follow-up battle for Normandy, one of the bloodiest struggles of the war.Skyhorse Publishing, along with our Arcade, Good Books, Sports Publishing, and Yucca imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs. Our list includes biographies on well-known historical figures like Benjamin Franklin, Nelson Mandela, and Alexander Graham Bell, as well as villains from history, such as Heinrich Himmler, John Wayne Gacy, and O. J. Simpson. We have also published survivor stories of World War II, memoirs about overcoming adversity, first-hand tales of adventure, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

    Shuffled from one Rebel prison to another, they escaped and trekked across the snow-covered Appalachians with the help of slaves and pro-Union bushwhackers. Their amazing, long-forgotten odyssey is one of the great escape stories in American history, packed with drama, courage, horrors and heroics, plus moments of antic comedy.On their long, strange adventure, Junius and Albert encountered an astonishing variety of American characters—Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant, Rebel con men and Union spies, a Confederate pirate-turned-playwright, a sadistic hangman nicknamed “the Anti-Christ,” a secret society called the Heroes of America, a Union guerrilla convinced that God protected him from Confederate bullets, and a mysterious teenage girl who rode to their rescue at just the right moment.Peter Carlson, author of the critically acclaimed K Blows Top, has, in Junius and Albert’s Adventures in the Confederacy, written a gripping story about the lifesaving power of friendship and a surreal voyage through the bloody battlefields, dark prisons, and cold mountains of the Civil War.

    Remarkably few who study it contemplate what came after the armies marched away. Who would care for the tens of thousands of wounded? What happened to the thousands of dead men, horses, and tons of detritus scattered in every direction? How did the civilians cope with their radically changed lives? Gregory Coco's A Strange and Blighted Land. Gettysburg: The Aftermath of a Battle offers a comprehensive account of these and other issues.The late Coco was a park ranger at Gettysburg deeply interested in the battle and what was left in its wake. The Vietnam veteran who wrote well and often about the battle waxes eloquently about the carnage of war, its terrors and pain, its irreplaceable cost in human life and treasure, and the toll it took on the families who lost sons and husbands there.Arranged in a series of topical chapters, A Strange and Blighted Land begins with a tour of the battlefield, mostly through eyewitness accounts, of the death and destruction littering the sprawling landscape. Once the size and scope is exposed to readers, Coco moves on to discuss the dead of Gettysburg, North and South, how their remains were handled, and how and why the Gettysburg National Cemetery was established. The treatment of the wounded, Union and Confederate, was organized chaos. Every house and barn became of hospital or medical station, and the medical and surgical practices of the day were little short of compassionate torture. The author also discusses at length how prisoners were handled and the fate of the thousands of stragglers and deserters left behind once the armies left before concluding with the preservation efforts that culminated in the establishment of the Gettysburg National Military Park in 1895.Coco's prose is gripping, personal, and brutally honest. There is no mistaking where he comes down on the issue: There was nothing pretty or glorious or romantic about a battle--especially once the fighting ended.

    There wasn't damage from cannon balls, but souvenir-hunting Union officers left McLean's parlor bare of furniture.After the Confederacy was defeated, Jefferson Davis was stripped of his citizenship. He died as a man without a country. His citizenship was restored by Congress during the administration of Georgian Jimmy Carter.Three members of the Guillet family were killed while riding the same horse, which was then given to the Ohio Ninety-eighth regiment. Three officers were killed while riding the same horse. Lieutenant Milliner, the senior officer left on the field, then jumped on the jinxed horse. He escaped death, but suffered all his life from an arm shatterred by a minie ball while he was in the saddle.Civil War Curiosities uncovers those unusual persons, attitudes, and events that take you beyond a textbook understanding of the Civil War. A collection of  fascinating anecdotes and colorful stories, this book covers a wide variety of subjects, including "newfangled" weapons that changed the nature of war, the press' outrageous inaccuracy in covering the conflict, the phenomenon of "silent battles, " and various disguises, atrocities, and mix-ups.

    In Battle Tactics of the Civil War, Paddy Griffith argues that, far from being the first 'modern' war, it was the last 'Napoleonic' war, and that none of the innovations of industrialized warfare had any significant effect on the outcome.

    It is an unprecedented family record that reveals how the painful legacy of slavery continues to endure in America's collective memory and experience. Ball, a descendant of one of the largest slave-owning families in the South, discovered that his ancestors owned 25 plantations, worked by nearly 4,000 slaves. Through meticulous research and by interviewing scattered relatives, Ball contacted some 100,000 African-Americans who are all descendants of Ball slaves. In intimate conversations with them, he garnered information, hard words, and devastating family stories of precisely what it means to be enslaved. He found that the family plantation owners were far from benevolent patriarchs; instead there is a dark history of exploitation, interbreeding, and extreme violence.

    Throughout his life he exhibited the kind of exuberant charm and lack of scruple that wins friends, seduces women, and gets people killed. In American Scoundrel Thomas Keneally, the acclaimed author of Schindler’s List, creates a biography that is as lively and engrossing as its subject.Dan Sickles was a member of Congress, led a controversial charge at Gettysburg, and had an affair with the deposed Queen of Spain—among many other women. But the most startling of his many exploits was his murder of Philip Barton Key (son of Francis Scott Key), the lover of his long-suffering and neglected wife, Teresa. The affair, the crime, and the trial contained all the ingredients of melodrama needed to ensure that it was the scandal of the age. At the trial’s end, Sickles was acquitted and hardly chastened. His life, in which outrage and accomplishment had equal force, is a compelling American tale, told with the skill of a master narrative.

    Fascinating sidebars and contemporary documents tells the story of the war in the voices of those who experienced it. The interactive CD-ROM features a multimedia Civil War strategy game. 800+ photos, many in color. 3-D maps. Printed endpapers. Full-cloth case.