Catalog Search Results

"A groundbreaking, revelatory history of Abraham Lincoln's plan to secure a just and lasting peace after the Civil War-a vision that inspired future presidents as well as the world's most famous peacemakers, including Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr. It is a story of war and peace, race and reconciliation"-- Provided by publisher. As the tide of the Civil War turned in the spring of 1865, Abraham Lincoln took a dangerous...

Crime did not take a holiday during the Civil War, far from it. As Tobin Buhk shows in this fast-paced narrative, the war created new opportunities to gain profits from illegal activities, to settle old scores against personal enemies under the cover of fighting the nation's enemies, to pillage, plunder, and murder amid the carnage and destruction that seemed to offer license to legitimize such crimes. Students of the Civil War will find new information...

"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 British consul in 1853, he was young and full of ambition, but even he couldn't have imagined the incredible role he would play in the history-making events to unfold. In an age when diplomats often were spies, Bunch's job...

In the summer of 1862, the U.S. Army court martialed Colonel John B. Turchin, a Russian-born Union officer, for "outrages" committed by his troops in Athens, Alabama. By modern standards, the outrages were minor: stores looted, safes cracked, and homes vandalized. There was one documented act of personal violence, the rape of a young black woman. The pillage of Athens violated a government policy of conciliation; it was hoped that if Southern civilians...

The destruction of Atlanta is an iconic moment in American history-it was the centerpiece of “Gone with the Wind”. 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...

The War after the War is a lively military history and overview of Reconstruction that illuminates the new war fought immediately after the American Civil War. This Southern Civil War was distinct from the American Civil War and fought between southerners for control of state governments. In the South, African American and white unionists formed a successful biracial coalition that elected state and local officials. White supremacist insurrectionaries...

"The Civil War did not end at Appomattox Court House. Nor did it end at the surrenders that followed in North Carolina, Texas, and Indian Country. The Civil War dragged on for at least five years after Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant in April 1865. In the first large-scale examination of the post-Civil War occupation, this book offers a rethinking of Reconstruction, the end of the Civil War, and the United States' history of occupation....

When Abraham Lincoln issued his final Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, he not only freed the slaves in the Confederate states but also invited freed slaves and free persons of color to join the U.S. Army as part of the U.S. Colored Troops (USCT), the first systematic, large-scale effort by the U.S. government to arm African Americans to aid in the nation's defense. By the end of the war in 1865, nearly 180,000 black soldiers had fought...