The Battle of Antietam, fought on September 17, 1862, was the bloodiest single day in American history, with more than 6,000 soldiers killed--four times the number lost on D-Day, and twice the number killed in the September 11th terro...

On the morning of April 2, 1865, Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, received a telegram from General Robert E. Lee. There is no more time—the Yankees are coming, it warned. Shortly before midnight, Davis fled the capita...

Originally published as Embrace an Angry Wind Following the fall of Atlanta, rebel commander John Bell Hood rallied his demoralized troops and marched them off the Tennessee, desperately hoping to draw Sherman after him and forestall...

When Vicksburg fell to Union forces under General Grant in July 1863, the balance turned against the Confederacy in the trans-Appalachian theater. The Federal success along the river opened the way for advances into central and easter...

When prize-winning war correspondent Tony Horwitz leaves the battlefields of Bosnia and the Middle East for a peaceful corner of the Blue Ridge Mountains, he thinks he's put war zones behind him. But awakened one morning by the crackl...

Few historians have ever captured the drama, excitement, and tragedy of the Civil War with the headlong elan of Edwin Bearss, who has won a huge, devoted following with his extraordinary battlefield tours and eloquent soliloquies abou...

Infinitely readable and absorbing, Bruce Catton's The Civil War is one of the best-selling, most widely read general histories of the war available in a single volume. Newly introduced by the critically acclaimed Civil War historian J...

Life in Southern Alabama During The Civil War. A Blockaded Family recounts how a frightened and war-weary household dealt with privations during a blockade imposed on the South. This book is memorable for its glimpse of wartime domest...

Just 24 hours after former President James Buchanan died on June 1, 1868, the Chicago Tribune rejoiced: "This desolate old man has gone to his grave. No son or daughter is doomed to acknowledge an ancestry from him" Nearly a...

An author of the Valley of the Shadow Project presents a series of essays on the American Civil War, the New South, and the twentieth-century South to consider such issues as slavery, secession, and poverty as contributing factors to ...

Between the Confederacy and recognition by Great Britain stood one unlikely Englishman who hated the slave trade. His actions helped determine the fate of a nation. When Robert Bunch arrived in Charleston to take up the post of Briti...

A collection of fascinating anecdotes and colorful stories organized by topics and not by chronology, Civil War Curiosities offers a rare glimpse into unusual and often bizarre persons, attitudes, and events that enhance our understan...

Considered a classic of American literature and military autobiography, Grant's memoirs are an honest, clear retelling of the author's growing-up in Ohio, his graduation from West Point, his marriage to Julia Dent, and, most significa...

Essential reading for students of American history and Civil War buffs, this inexpensive volume includes key documents and memorable speeches such as Lincoln's Gettysburg Address; Lee's 'Farewell to the Army of Northern Virginia'; Fre...

On April 12, 1862 -- one year to the day after Confederate guns opened on Fort Sumter and started the Civil War -- a tall, mysterious smuggler and self-appointed Union spy named James J. Andrews and nineteen infantry volunteers infilt...

This compelling narrative offers a firsthand account of a couple's remarkable flight from slavery in the antebellum South. William and Ellen Craft devised a daring plan in which the light-skinned wife disguised herself as a man and th...

In the spring of 1862, the largest army ever assembled on the North American continent landed in Virginia, on the peninsula between the James and York Rivers, and proceeded to march toward Richmond. Between that army and the capital o...

Clear out the Shenandoah Valley "clean and clear," Union General-in-Chief Ulysses S. Grant ordered, in the late summer of 1864.His man for the job: Major General "Little Phil" Sheridan, the bandy-legged Irishman wh...

"Lee's army is really whipped," Federal commander Ulysses S. Grant believed.May 1864 had witnessed near-constant combat between his Army of the Potomac and the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia. Grant, unlike his predece...

More than 600,000 soldiers lost their lives in the American Civil War. An equivalent proportion of today's population would be six million. In This Republic of Suffering, Drew Gilpin Faust reveals the ways that death on such a scale c...

In a masterly narrative, historian and novelist Charles Bracelen Flood brings to life the drama of Abraham Lincoln's final year, in which he oversaw the final campaigns of the Civil War, was re-elected president, and laid out his visi...

In a masterful narrative, historian and biographer Charles Bracelen Flood brings to life the drama of Lincoln's final year, in which he oversaw the last campaigns of the Civil War, was reelected as president, and laid out his majestic...

“Gripping and essential.”—Jesse Wegman, New York Times\n\nAn authoritative history by the preeminent scholar of the Civil War era, The Second Founding traces the arc of the three foundational Reconstruction amendments...

In July 1862, Confederate Captain Raphael Semmes took command of a secret new warship. At the helm of the Alabama, he became the most hated and feared man along the Union coast, as well as a Confederate legend. Now, with unparalleled ...

Selected narratives from the two most important contemporary chroniclers of the Underground Railroad, Levi Coffin and William Still. Here are firsthand descriptions of the experiences of escaped slaves making their way to freedom in t...

The riveting true story of Robert E. Lee, the brilliant soldier bound by marriage to George Washington's family but turned by war against Washington's crowning achievement, the Union. On the eve of the Civil War, one soldier embodied ...

For the past half century, John Keegan, the greatest military historian of our time, has been returning to the scenes of America's most bloody and wrenching war to ponder its lingering conundrums: the continuation of fighting for four...

During the Civil War, Americans from homefront to battlefront played baseball as never before. While soldiers slaughtered each other over the country's fate, players and fans struggled over the form of the national pastime. George Kir...

George Gordon Meade could hardly believe it: only three days earlier, he had been thrust unexpectedly into command of the Army of the Potomac, which was cautiously stalking its long-time foe, the Army of Northern Virginia, as it launc...

[Read by Joe Barrett] Although previously undervalued for their strategic impact because they represented only a small percentage of total forces, the Union and Confederate navies were crucial to the outcome of the Civil War. In War o...