The United States saw long-simmering sectional tensions erupt into fighting at Fort Sumter, South Carolina, in April 1861.This began what would become the most cataclysmic military struggle in the western world between Waterloo and the First World War. This volume focuses on events in the Virginia theater during the conflict's first two years, highlighting Union and Confederate strengths and weaknesses, leadership and strategy on each side, and the ways in which ev...

This edition from Osprey Publishing presents the full story of the American Civil War.The four long years of Civil War saw fighting across America on an unprecedented scale, incurring losses to both sides to an extent never previously imagined. As the battles raged from east to west, from the First Battle of Bull run to Sherman's march to the Sea, no part of America remained untouched by the war, with families finding themselves torn and fighting on opposing sides....

Shirley Rose Gray’s memoir and diary chronicle her World War II experiences with a USO show in the Pacific Theater during the summer of 1945. Part of comedic film actor Eddie Bracken’s troupe of entertainers, the twenty-two-year-old native of Los Angeles performed on bitterly contested islands such as Guam, Peleliu, Tinian, and Saipan, as well as aboard the aircraft carrier USS Ticonderoga and other naval vessels. Her narrative recounts traveling on crowded planes, performing in w...

Even one hundred and fifty years later, we are haunted by the Civil War—by its division, its bloodshed, and perhaps, above all, by its origins. Today, many believe that the war was fought over slavery. This answer satisfies our contemporary sense of justice, but as Gary Gallagher shows in this brilliant revisionist history, it is an anachronistic judgment.In a searing analysis of the Civil War North as revealed in contemporary letters, diaries, and documents, Gallagher demonstrates...

A "well-reasoned and timely" ( Booklist) essay collection interrogates the Lost Cause myth in Civil War historiography.Was the Confederacy doomed from the start in its struggle against the superior might of the Union? Did its forces fight heroically against all odds for the cause of states' rights? In reality, these suggestions are an elaborate and intentional effort on the part of Southerners to rationalize the secession and the war itself. Unfortunately,...

“My husband and I can’t seem to agree on anything.” “You spent how much?” “My wife’s parents are driving me crazy!” “You never listen to me!” Let’s face it—even the best of marriages hit an occasional bump in the road now and then. The secret to marital bliss lies in how you and your spouse handle those bumps. In Happily Ever After, Dr. Gary Chapman, the man who wrote on how husbands and wives can effectively love one another, shows couples how to successfully navigate the six mos...

Edited by Gary Gallagher and Elizabeth Varon, two of the most prominent nineteenth-century American historians in the nation, New Perspectives on the Union War provides a more nuanced understanding of what “Union” meant in the Civil War North by exploring how various groups of northerners conceived of the term. The essays in this volume demonstrate that while there was a broad consensus that the war was fought, or should be fought, for the cause of Union, there was bitter disagree...

Full DescriptionIn The American War: A History of the Civil War Era, renowned historians Gary W. Gallagher and Joan Waugh provide a fresh examination of the Civil War, the great defining moment in U.S. history, as well as its aftermath and enduring memory, in a masterful work that prize-winning historian William C. Davis calls "easily the best one-volume assessment of the Civil War to date." By investigating this crucial period of U.S. history through the ...

If one is to believe contemporary historians, the South never had a chance. Many allege that the Confederacy lost the Civil War because of internal division or civilian disaffection; others point to flawed military strategy or ambivalence over slavery. But, argues distinguished historian Gary Gallagher, we should not ask why the Confederacy collapsed so soon but rather how it lasted so long. In The Confederate War he reexamines the Confederate experience through t...

A biography of the man whom Jefferson Davis could have considered one of his greatest generals during the American Civil War.A revised edition of the only full-scale biography of the Confederacy's top-ranking field general during the opening campaigns of the Civil War. Albert Sidney Johnston was selected as one of the best one hundred books ever written on the Civil War by Civil War Times Illustrated in 1981 and by Civil War: The Magazine of th...

Between the end of May and the beginning of August 1864, Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant and General Robert E. Lee oversaw the transition between the Overland Campaign—a remarkable saga of maneuvering and brutal combat—and what became a grueling siege of Petersburg that many months later compelled Confederates to abandon Richmond. Although many historians have marked Grant’s crossing of the James River on June 12 to June 15 as the close of the Overland Campaign, this volume interprets ...

Was Robert E. Lee a gifted soldier whose only weaknesses lay in the depth of his loyalty to his troops, affection for his lieutenants, and dedication to the cause of the Confederacy? Or was he an ineffective leader and poor tactician whose reputation was drastically inflated by early biographers and Lost Cause apologists? These divergent characterizations represent the poles between which scholarly and popular opinion on Lee has swung over time. Now, in eight essays, Gary Gallagher offers ...