For this highly intelligent, acutely observant woman, loyalty did not come easily: she spent long years struggling to reconcile her societal duties to her personal beliefs. Raised in Mississippi but educated in Philadelphia, and a long-time resident of Washington, D.C., Mrs. Davis never felt at ease in Richmond. During the war she nursed Union prisoners and secretly corresponded with friends in the North. Though she publicly supported the South, her term as First Lady was plagued by rumours of her disaffection. After the war, Varina Davis endured financial woes and the loss of several children, but following her husband's death in 1889, she moved to New York and began a career in journalism. Here she advocated reconciliation between the North and South and became friends with Julia Grant, the widow of Ulysses S. Grant. She shocked many by declaring in a newspaper that it was God's will that the North won the war. A century after Varina Davis's death in 1906, Joan E.Cashin has written a masterly work, the first definitive biography of this truly modern, but deeply conflicted, woman. Pro-slavery but also pro-Union, Varina Davis was inhibited by her role as Confederate First Lady and unable to reveal her true convictions. In this path breaking book, Cashin offers a splendid portrait of a fascinating woman who struggled with the constraints of her time and place.

    Nelson, c1960.

    By exposing the painful past she has created a beautiful, timely, and uplifting book with unforgettable characters who kept me guessing.--Donna Hylton, author of A Little Piece of Light: A Memoir of Hope, Prison, and a Life UnboundDeirdre Sinnott is an extraordinary writer whose eye misses nothing. This compelling story is a must read--and it couldn't be more timely.--David Black, award-winning journalist, novelist, screenwriter, and producerA fast-paced excursion into Utica, New York, in the mid-1830s, The Third Mrs. Galway captures the true-life antiabolition riots against the New York Anti-Slavery Society. With lively and enjoyable prose, Deirdre Sinnott brings the story of emancipation alive.--Paul Stewart, cofounder of the Underground Railroad History ProjectThe Third Mrs. Galway offers readers romance, adventure, and poignant family drama while also providing insight into the complexity of antislavery attitudes before the Civil War. This is a historical page-turner that both enlightens and entertains.--Barbara Weisberg, author of Talking to the Dead: Kate and Maggie Fox and the Rise of SpiritualismWith historical accuracy, Deirdre Sinnott brings to life the surprising drama of freedom-seekers and slave-catchers in Oneida County. This book animates the history of the region and the larger Underground Railroad phenomenon in a way that street signs and public lectures cannot.--Jan DeAmicis, cochair of the Oneida County Freedom Trail CommissionThe Third Mrs. Galway reads like Balzac, with fear, desire, terror, and love intertwined in this gripping work of historical fiction. Deirdre Sinnott weaves the stories of a cross-section of 1835 Utica, New York, into an impressive and fascinating narrative that contemplates race, class, history, and the search for justice and humanity. ReadThe Third Mrs. Galway to be swept into the uncertain, violent time of 1830s New York and to see in new ways how that moment still affects our own.--Taylor M. Polites, author of The Rebel WifeIt's 1835 in Utica, New York, and newlywed Helen Galway discovers a frightening secret: two runaway slaves are hiding in the shack behind her husband's house. Suddenly, she is at the center of not only the era's greatest moral dilemma, but her own as well. Should she be a good wife and report the fugitives to her husband? Or will she defy convention and come to the aid of the least of her brethren?Within her home, Helen is haunted by the previous Mrs. Galway, recently deceased but still an oppressive presence. Her husband, injured by a drunken tumble off his horse, is assisted by a doctor of questionable ambitions who keeps a close eye on Helen. In charge of all things domestic is Maggie--formerly enslaved by the Galway family and freed when emancipation came to New York eight years earlier.At the same time, Utica is at the center of emancipation efforts as abolitionists arrive for the founding meeting of the New York State Anti-Slavery Society. Those who plead for an immediate end to enslavement are attacked by newspapers accusing them of being insurrectionists and traitors to the Constitution. Everyone faces dangerous choices as they navigate this intensely heated personal and political landscape.

    She was soon to experience a coming-of-age filled with the turmoil and upheaval that devastated the wartime South. She set down the Remarkable events of the war in a record that remains one of the most vivid, evocative portrayals in existence of a time and place that today make up a crucial chapter in our national history.Sarah Morgan herself emerges as one of the most memorable nineteenth-century women in fiction or nonfiction, a young woman of intelligence and fortitude, as well as of high spirits and passion, who questioned the society into which she was born and the meaning of the war for ordinary families like her own and for the divided nation as a whole.Now published in its entirety for the first time, Sarah Morgan's classic account brings the Civil War and the Old South to life with all the freshness and immediacy of great literature.

    In the 1870s, OTR was comparable to the cultural hearts of Paris and Vienna. By the turn of the last century, the neighborhood was home to roughly three hundred saloons and had over a dozen breweries within or adjacent to its borders. It was beloved by countless citizens and travelers for the exact reasons that others successfully sought to destroy it. This is the story of how the heart of the "Paris of America" became a time capsule.

    During the war, approximately 620,000 soldiers lost their lives. An equivalent proportion of today's population would be six million. This Republic of Suffering explores the impact of this enormous death toll from every angle: material, political, intellectual, and spiritual. The eminent historian Drew Gilpin Faust delineates the ways death changed not only individual lives but the life of the nation and its understanding of the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. She describes how survivors mourned and how a deeply religious culture struggled to reconcile the slaughter with its belief in a benevolent God, pondered who should die and under what circumstances, and reconceived its understanding of life after death. Faust details the logistical challenges involved when thousands were left dead, many with their identities unknown, on the fields of places like Bull Run, Shiloh, Antietam, and Gettysburg. She chronicles the efforts to identify, reclaim, preserve, and bury battlefield dead, the resulting rise of undertaking as a profession, the first widespread use of embalming, the gradual emergence of military graves registration procedures, the development of a federal system of national cemeteries for Union dead, and the creation of private cemeteries in the South that contributed to the cult of the Lost Cause. She shows, too, how the war victimized civilians through violence that extended beyond battlefields-from disease, displacement, hardships, shortages, emotional wounds, and conflicts connected to the disintegration of slavery.

    Guelzo shows us the face, the sights and sounds of nineteenth-century combat: the stone walls and gunpowder clouds of Pickett's Charge; the reason that the Army of Northern Virginia could be smelled before it could be seen; the march of thousands of men from the banks of the Rappahannock in Virginia to the Pennsylvania hills. What emerges is a previously untold story: from the personal politics roiling the Union and Confederate officer ranks, to the peculiar character of artillery units. Through such scrutiny the cornerstone battle of the Civil War is given extraordinarily vivid new life.

    But though the epic sieges of Leningrad, Stalingrad, and Berlin have all been explored in bestselling books, the one great American example has been treated only cursorily in more general histories. Marc Wortman remedies that conspicuous absence in grand fashion with The Bonfire, an absorbing narrative history told through the points of view of key participants both Confederate and Union.The Bonfire reveals an Atlanta of unexpected paradoxes: a new mercantile city dependent on the primitive institution of slavery; governed by a pro-Union mayor, James Calhoun, whose cousin was a famous defender of the South. When he surrendered the city to General Sherman after forty-four terrible days, Calhoun was accompanied by Bob Yancey, a black slave likely the son of Union advocate Daniel Webster. Atlanta was both the last of the medieval city sieges and the first modern urban devastation. From its ashes, a new South would arise.

    Though Lincoln has been criticized by many historians for failing to appreciate the severity of the secession crisis that greeted his victory, Harold Holzer shows that the presidentelect waged a shrewd and complex campaign to prevent the expansion of slavery while vainly trying to limit secession to a few Deep South states.During this most dangerous White House transition in American history, the country had two presidents: one powerless (the president-elect, possessing no constitutional authority), the other paralyzed (the incumbent who refused to act). Through limited, brilliantly timed and crafted public statements, determined private letters, tough political pressure, and personal persuasion, Lincoln guaranteed the integrity of the American political process of majority rule, sounded the death knell of slavery, and transformed not only his own image but that of the presidency, even while makinginevitable the war that would be necessary to make these achievements permanent.Lincoln President-Elect is the first book to concentrate on Lincoln's public stance and private agony during these months and on the momentous consequences when he first demonstrated his determination and leadership. Holzer recasts Lincoln from an isolated prairie politician yet to establish his greatness, to a skillful shaper of men and opinion and an immovable friend of freedom at a decisive moment when allegiance to the founding credo "all men are created equal" might well have been sacrificed.

    . .this book eerily reflects some of today's key issues." - The New York Times Book ReviewFrom an award-winning historian, an engrossing look at how Abraham Lincoln grappled with the challenges of leadership in an unruly democracyAn awkward first meeting with U.S. Army officers, on the eve of the Civil War. A conversation on the White House portico with a young cavalry sergeant who was a fiercely dedicated abolitionist. A tense exchange on a navy ship with a Confederate editor and businessman.In this eye-opening book, Elizabeth Brown Pryor examines six intriguing, mostly unknown encounters that Abraham Lincoln had with his constituents. Taken together, they reveal his character and opinions in unexpected ways, illustrating his difficulties in managing a republic and creating a presidency. Pryor probes both the political demons that Lincoln battled in his ambitious exercise of power and the demons that arose from the very nature of democracy itself: the clamorous diversity of the populace, with its outspoken demands. She explores the trouble Lincoln sometimes had in communicating and in juggling the multiple concerns that make up being a political leader; how conflicted he was over the problem of emancipation; and the misperceptions Lincoln and the South held about each other. Pryor also provides a fascinating discussion of Lincoln's fondness for storytelling and how he used his skills as a raconteur to enhance both his personal and political power.Based on scrupulous research that draws on hundreds of eyewitness letters, diaries, and newspaper excerpts, Six Encounters with Lincoln offers a fresh portrait of Lincoln as the beleaguered politician who was not especially popular with the people he needed to govern with, and who had to deal with the many critics, naysayers, and dilemmas he faced without always knowing the right answer. What it shows most clearly is that greatness was not simply laid on Lincoln's shoulders like a mantle, but was won in fits and starts.

    But what vow could forestall their separate destinies or shield them from an age when innocence was overcome by violence and the force of history itself?Continents apart, they fought and loved the world over before coming to America and plunging into the gigantic maelstrom of the Civil War.Fred Mustard Stewart, author of such bestsellers as Ellis Island, Century, and The Glitter and the Gold, has woven a vast epic about a stunning, spirited woman, a proud, passionate man, and a chapter of history written in blood and bravery, tragedy and triumph.

    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.

    In the heart of enemy territory and in the thick of battle, Bronwen Llyr and her sister must thwart a Rebel conspiracy that threatens both their lives -- and the entire outcome of the war.

    Okatibbee Creek is based on the true story of Mary Ann Rodgers, who not only survived the war, but with the help of an unexpected champion, emerged a heroic woman with an amazing story.

    Yet the two have never been seriously compared at book length. Acclaimed historian Lewis Lehrman finds that Lincoln and Churchill led their wars in remarkably similar fashion, guided by fixed principles of honor, duty, and freedom. Gifted literary stylists, both also relied on the written and spoken word to steel their nation's hearts and give meaning to war's sacrifice. And though both unexpectedly left office near the end of their wars--Lincoln by the bullet, Churchill by the ballot--they had gained victory.