Emma Edmonds cut off her hair and assumed the identity of a man to enlist as a Union private, witnessing the bloodiest battles of the Civil War. The beautiful widow, Rose O’Neale Greenhow, engaged in affairs with powerful Northern politicians to gather intelligence for the Confederacy, and used her young daughter to send information to Southern generals. Elizabeth Van Lew, a wealthy Richmond abolitionist, hid behind her proper Southern manners as she orchestrated a far-reaching espionage ring, right under the noses of suspicious rebel detectives.Using a wealth of primary source material and interviews with the spies’ descendants, Abbott seamlessly weaves the adventures of these four heroines throughout the tumultuous years of the war. With a cast of real-life characters including Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, General Stonewall Jackson, detective Allan Pinkerton, Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln, and Emperor Napoleon III, Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy draws you into the war as these daring women lived it.Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy contains 39 black & white photos and 3 maps.

    Hodges   In the United States of America, the legislative branch is responsible for creating legislation, while the executive branch is responsible for signing that legislation and enforcing it. But how do senators, representatives, and presidents make sure that these laws don’t run afoul of the Constitution that guides the running of the country?   The nine justices of the Supreme Court of the United States serve as the final arbiters of which laws are and aren’t constitutional. Every year, thousands of contentious cases are submitted to the court for that reason; only about eighty of them are heard. Out of those cases, many are remembered only by the people directly involved. But over the years, many cases heard by the Supreme Court have gone on to affect the lives of many or even all American citizens.   In The Supreme Court: Landmark Decisions, veteran court reporter Tony Mauro picks out the twenty most momentous Supreme Court cases in United States history. In his reviews of Marbury v. Madison, the 1803 case that first affirmed the Supreme Court’s status as the country’s final legal arbiter, to Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 case that legalized same-sex marriage, Mauro summarizes each case and includes cogent summaries of the justices’ decisions, as well as notable dissents.    With Mauro’s crisp language and sharp insights, The Supreme Court: Landmark Decisions serves as your quick, concise, and informative guide to one of the most important, and sometimes least-understood, institutions in the nation.

    Here are four of the most notable narratives: The Life of Olaudah Equiano; The History of Mary Prince; Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass; and Incidents in the Life of Slave Girl.

    Ten years in the research and writing, Presidents of War is a fresh, magisterial, intimate look at a procession of American leaders as they took the nation into conflict and mobilized their country for victory. It brings us into the room as they make the most difficult decisions that face any President, at times sending hundreds of thousands of American men and women to their deaths. From James Madison and the War of 1812 to recent times, we see them struggling with Congress, the courts, the press, their own advisors and antiwar protesters; seeking comfort from their spouses, families and friends; and dropping to their knees in prayer. We come to understand how these Presidents were able to withstand the pressures of war—both physically and emotionally—or were broken by them. Beschloss’s interviews with surviving participants in the drama and his discoveries in original letters, diaries, once-classified national security documents, and other sources help him to tell this story in a way it has not been told before. Presidents of War combines the sense of being there with the overarching context of two centuries of American history. This important book shows how far we have traveled from the time of our Founders, who tried to constrain presidential power, to our modern day, when a single leader has the potential to launch nuclear weapons that can destroy much of the human race.

    No matter how gruesome the memories are, relatively few of the interviewees said they would have been better off without the experience. It was a central and formative experience in their lives. Although 400,000 Americans perished, the United States itself was not attacked again after Pearl Harbor, the economy grew, and there was a new sense of world power that invigorated the country. Some women and African Americans experienced new freedoms in the post war society, but good life after World War II was tarnished by the threat of nuclear war.

    Free of ideological bias, profound in its undertsanding, and compassionate in its human portrayals, it is filled with fresh revelations drawn from secret documents and from exclusive interviews with participants-French, American, Vietnamese, Chinese: diplomats, military commanders, high government officials, journalists, nurses, workers, and soldiers. Originally published a companion to the Emmy-winning PBS series, Karnow’s defining book is a precursor to Ken Burns’s ten-part forthcoming documentary series, The Vietnam War. Vietnam: A History puts events and decisions into such sharp focus that we come to understand – and make peace with – a convulsive epoch of our recent history.

    Andrew Turnbull tells the story behind F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise, revised and finally published when he was twenty-four, making him instantly famous, and his tender love affair with Zelda Sayre, from their glittering early life to the years Zelda spent in and out of sanatoriums. A literary generation, too, comes alive, including Ernest Hemingway, Edmund Wilson and Edith Wharton. Fitzgerald lived on Turnbull's family estate in Baltimore in the early 1930s and there befriended young Andrew, then aged eleven. Turnbull's personal relationship with Fitzgerald and the hundreds of interviews with those who knew him elegantly capture the dramatic, tragic story of F. Scott and the glow and pathos of his flamboyant life.

    The essays were written during a difficult time in Twain's life; he was deep in debt and had lost his wife and one of his daughters. The book consists of a series of short stories, many of which deal with God and Christianity. Twain penned a series of letters from the point-of-view of a dejected angel on Earth. This title story consists of letters written by the archangel Satan to archangels, Gabriel and Michael, about his observations on the curious proceedings of earthly life and the nature of man's religions. By analyzing the idea of heaven and God that is widely accepted by those who believe in both, Twain is able to take the silliness that is present and study it with the common sense that is absent. Not so much an attack as much as a cold dissection. Other short stories in the book include a bedtime story about a family of cats Twain wrote for his daughters, and an essay explaining why an anaconda is morally superior to Man. Twain's writings in Letters From the Earth find him at perhaps his most quizzical and questioning state ever.

    Official companion to the Ken Burns PBS film. For readers captivated by the story of Antonina Zabinski as told in The Zookeeper's Wife and other stories of rescue missions during WWII, Defying the Nazis is an essential read.In 1939, the Reverend Waitstill Sharp, a young Unitarian minister, and his wife, Martha, a social worker, accepted a mission from the American Unitarian Association: they were to leave their home and young children in Wellesley, Massachusetts, and travel to Prague, Czechoslovakia, to help address the mounting refugee crisis. Seventeen ministers had been asked to undertake this mission and had declined; Rev. Sharp was the first to accept the call for volunteers in Europe.Armed with only $40,000, Waitstill and Martha quickly learned the art of spy craft and undertook dangerous rescue and relief missions across war-torn Europe, saving refugees, political dissidents, and Jews on the eve of World War II. After narrowly avoiding the Gestapo themselves, the Sharps returned to Europe in 1940 as representatives of the newly formed Unitarian Service Committee and continued their relief efforts in Vichy France.A fascinating portrait of resistance as told through the story of one courageous couple, Defying the Nazis offers a rare glimpse at high-stakes international relief efforts during WWII and tells the remarkable true story of a couple whose faith and commitment to social justice inspired them to risk their lives to save countless others.

    In the spring of 1865, the bloody saga of America's Civil War finally comes to an end after a series of increasingly harrowing battles. President Abraham Lincoln's generous terms for Robert E. Lee's surrender are devised to fulfill Lincoln's dream of healing a divided nation, with the former Confederates allowed to reintegrate into American society. But one man and his band of murderous accomplices, perhaps reaching into the highest ranks of the U.S. government, are not appeased.In the midst of the patriotic celebrations in Washington D.C., John Wilkes Booth—charismatic ladies' man and impenitent racist—murders Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theatre. A furious manhunt ensues and Booth immediately becomes the country's most wanted fugitive. Lafayette C. Baker, a smart but shifty New York detective and former Union spy, unravels the string of clues leading to Booth, while federal forces track his accomplices. The thrilling chase ends in a fiery shootout and a series of court-ordered executions—including that of the first woman ever executed by the U.S. government, Mary Surratt. Featuring some of history's most remarkable figures, vivid detail, and page-turning action, Killing Lincoln is history that reads like a thriller. http://catalog.loc.gov/cgi-bin/Pwebre...~

    His actions helped determine the fate of a nation.As the United States threatened to break into civil war, the Southern states found themselves in an impossible position: Their economic survival would require reopening the slave trade, banned in America since 1807, but the future of the Confederacy could not be secured without official recognition from Great Britain, which would never countenance such a move. How, then, could the first be achieved without dooming the possibility of the second? Believing their cotton monopoly would provide sufficient leverage, the Southerners publically declared the slave trade dead, even as rapacious traders quickly landed more and more ships on the American coast.The unlikely man at the roiling center of this intrigue was Robert Bunch, the ambitious young British consul in Charleston, S.C. As he soured on the self-righteousness of his slave-loving neighbors, Bunch used his unique perch to thwart their plans, sending reams of damning dispatches to the Foreign Office in London and eventually becoming the Crown's best secret source on the Confederacy—even as he convinced those neighbors that he was one of them.In this masterfully told story, Christopher Dickey introduces Consul Bunch as a key figure in the pitched battle between those who wished to reopen the floodgates of bondage and misery, and those who wished to dam the tide forever. Featuring a remarkable cast of diplomats, journalists, senators, and spies, Our Man in Charleston captures the intricate, intense relationship between great powers as one stood on the brink of warFrom the Hardcover edition.