Civil War Period 1850 1877 category: 3786 books

Gripping re-examination of the rendition of Anthony Burns On June 2, 1854, crowds lined the streets of Boston, hissing and shouting at federal authorities as they escorted the fugitive slave Anthony Burns to the ship that would return him to his slaveholders in Virginia. Days earlier, handbills...

This collection of primary source material chronicles the Civil War experiences of North Carolinians from the secession crisis to the Confederate surrender at Bennett Place. In contrast to other works on the Civil War, this book focuses not on military events but on the larger issue of the societal...

The Civil War changed America forever. It shaped its future and determined its place in history. For the first time in military history, the camera was there to record these seismic events from innovations in military and naval warfare, to the battles themselves; the commanders at critical moments...

During the Civil War, cities, houses, forests, and soldiers’ bodies were transformed into “dead heaps of ruins,” novel sights in the southern landscape. How did this happen, and why? And what did Americans—northern and southern, black and white, male and female—make of this proliferation...

The American Civil War caused upheaval and massive private bereavement, but the years 1861-1865 also defined a great nation. This book provides a concise introduction to events from the secession to the end of the war. It focuses on the military progress of the war Union and Confederate...

During the four years of the Civil War, the border between eastern Kentucky and southwestern Virginia was highly contested territory, alternately occupied by both the Confederacy and the Union. Though this territory was sparsely populated, the geography of the region made it a desirable stronghold...

In the narrative of the Civil War, Edward Porter Alexander has loomed larger in death than in life. Just 25 years old when the war broke out, Porter Alexander had already served as an engineer and officer in the U.S. Army, but the native Georgian resigned his commission in May 1861 and joined the...

Henry Jackson Hunt (September 14, 1819 February 11, 1889) was Chief of Artillery in the Army of the Potomac during the Civil War. Considered by his contemporaries the greatest artillery tactician and strategist of the war, he was a master of the science of gunnery and rewrote the manual on the organization...

In 1854, after recently arriving from England, twenty-two-year-old Reuben Smith traveled west, eventually making his way to Kansas Territory. There he found himself in the midst of a bloody prelude to the Civil War, as Free Staters and defenders of slavery battled to stake their claim. The young Englishman...

Most of the Union soldiers who experienced the wrath of Southern women during the American Civil War came away feeling that fighting the Southern men was a more appealing proposition. General William Tecumseh Sherman said, “You women are the toughest set I ever knew. The men would have given up...

The Civil War and the World War II stand as the two great cataclysms of American history. They were our two costliest wars, with well over a million casualties suffered in each. And they were transforming moments in our history as well, times when the life of the nation and the great experiment in...

Author James Robertson, one of America's most respected Civil War scholars and storytellers whose weekly talks about little-known people and events of the Civil War aired for 15 years on National Public Radio, brings history to life here in a collection of unexpected and true stories revealing the...

In the narrative of the Civil War, Edward Porter Alexander has loomed larger in death than in life. Just 25 years old when the war broke out, Porter Alexander had already served as an engineer and officer in the U.S. Army, but the native Georgian resigned his commission in May 1861 and joined the...

Henry Jackson Hunt (September 14, 1819 February 11, 1889) was Chief of Artillery in the Army of the Potomac during the Civil War. Considered by his contemporaries the greatest artillery tactician and strategist of the war, he was a master of the science of gunnery and rewrote the manual on the organization...