CONTENTS:Introduction, Jean H. Baker and Charles W. Mitchell“Border State, Border War: Fighting for Freedom and Slavery in Antebellum Maryland,” Richard Bell“Charity Folks and the Ghosts of Slavery in Pre–Civil War Maryland,” Jessica Millward“Confronting Dred Scott: Seeing Citizenship from Baltimore,” Martha S. Jones“‘Maryland Is This Day . . . True to the American Union’: The Election of 1860 and a Winter of Discontent,” Charles W. Mitchell...

Filled with fresh interpretations and information, puncturing old myths and challenging new ones, Battle Cry of Freedom will unquestionably become the standard one-volume history of the Civil War. James McPherson's fast-paced narrative fully integrates the political, social, and military events that crowded the two decades from the outbreak of one war in Mexico to the ending of another at Appomattox. Packed with drama and analytical insight, the book vividly recounts the momentous...

In this major new history of the Civil War, Bruce Levine tells the riveting story of how that conflict upended the economic, political, and social life of the old South, utterly destroying the Confederacy and the society it represented and defended. Told through the words of the people who lived it, The Fall of the House of Dixie illuminates the way a war undertaken to preserve the status quo became a second American Revolution whose impact on the country was as strong and lasting...

In a startlingly innovative format, journalist Stephen A. Wynalda has constructed a painstakingly detailed day-by-day breakdown of president Abraham Lincoln’s decisions in office-including his signing of the Homestead Act on May 20, 1862; his signing of the legislation enacting the first federal income tax on August 5, 1861; and more personal incidents like the day his eleven-year-old son, Willie, died. Revealed are Lincoln’s private frustrations on September 28, 1862, as he wrote to vice ...

“Highly informative and entertaining…propels the reader light years beyond dull textbooks and Gone with the Wind.”—San Francisco ChronicleIt has been 150 years since the opening salvo of America’s War Between the States. New York Times bestselling author Ken Davis tells us everything we never knew about our nation’s bloodiest conflict in Don’t Know Much About ® the Civil War—another fascinating and fun installment in his acclaimed series.In his signature engaging st...

**NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERThe New York Times bestselling author of George Washington's Secret Six and Thomas Jefferson and the Tripoli Pirates turns to two other heroes of the nation: Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass.**In The President and the Freedom Fighter, Brian Kilmeade tells the little-known story of how two American heroes moved from strong disagreement to friendship, and in the process changed the entire course of ...

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award!A thrilling, page-turning piece of writing that describes the forces conspiring to tear apart the United States—with the disintegrating political processes and rising tempers finally erupting at Bull Run." . . . a major work by a major writer, a superb recreation of the twelve crucial months that opened the Civil War." —The New York Times

**Using letters, diaries, and regimental newspapers to take us inside the minds of Civil War soldiers—black and white, Northern and Southern—as they fought and marched across a divided country, this unprecedented account is “an essential contribution to our understanding of slavery and the Civil War" (**The Philadelphia Inquirer).In this unprecedented account, Chandra Manning With stunning poise and narrative verve, Manning explores how the Union and Confe...

One hundred and fifty years after the first shots were fired on Fort Sumter, the Civil War still captures the American imagination, and its reverberations can still be felt throughout America's social and political landscape. Louis P. Masur's The Civil War: A Concise History offers a masterful and eminently readable overview of the war's multiple causes and catastrophic effects. Masur begins by examining the complex origins of the war, focusing on the pulsating tensions over state...

The Civil War is the greatest trauma ever experienced by the American nation, a four-year paroxysm of violence that left in its wake more than 600,000 dead, more than 2 million refugees, and the destruction (in modern dollars) of more than $700 billion in property. The war also sparked some of the most heroic moments in American history and enshrined a galaxy of American heroes. Above all, it permanently ended the practice of slavery and proved, in an age of resurgent monarchies, that a li...

William C. Davis, one of America's best Civil War historians, here offers a definitive portrait of the Confederacy unlike any that has come before. Drawing on decades of writing and research among an unprecedented number of archives, Look Away! tells the story of the Confederate States of America not simply as a military saga (although it is that), but rather as a full portrait of a society and incipient nation. The first history of the Confederacy in decades, the culmination of a...

More than 140 years ago, Mark Twain observed that the Civil War had "uprooted institutions that were centuries old, changed the politics of a people, transformed the social life of half the country, and wrought so profoundly upon the entire national character that the influence cannot be measured short of two or three generations." In fact, five generations have passed, and Americans are still trying to measure the influence of the immense fratricidal conflict that nearly tore the nation a...