"May 1863. The Civil War was in its third spring, and Confederate Lt. Gen. Thomas Jonathan Jackson stood at the peak of his fame. He had arisen from obscurity to become Old Stonewall, adored across the South and feared and respected throughout the North. On the night of May 2, however, just hours after Jackson executed the most audacious maneuver of his career and delivered a crushing blow against an unsuspecting Union army at Chancellorsville, disaster struck.The Last Days of Stonewall Jackson recounts the events of that fateful night considered one of the most pivotal moments of the war and...

The former general in chief of the Union armies during the Civil War . . . the two-term president of the United States . . . the beloved ambassador of American goodwill around the globe . . . the respected New York financier Ulysses S. Grant was dying. The hardscrabble man who regularly smoked 20 cigars a day had developed terminal throat cancer. Thus began Grant s final battle a race against his own failing health to complete his Personal Memoirs in an attempt to secure his family s financial future. But the project evolved into something far more: an effort to secure the very meaning of the...

Sweep 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: Maj. Gen. Little Phil Sheridan, the bandy-legged Irishman who d proven himself just the kind of scrapper Grant loved. Grant turned Sheridan loose across Virginia s most vital landscape, the breadbasket of the Confederacy.In the spring of 1862, a string of Confederate victories in the Valley had foiled Union plans in the state and kept Confederate armies fed and supplied. In 1863, the Army of Northern Virginia used the Valley as its avenue of invasion,...

In early July 1864, a quickly patched together force of outnumbered Union soldiers under the command of Maj. Gen. Lew Wallace prepared for a last-ditch defense along the banks of the Monocacy River. Behind them, barely fifty miles away, lay the capital of the United States, open to attack. Facing Wallace's men were Lt. Gen. Jubal Early's Confederates. In just under a month, they had cleared the Shenandoah Valley of Union soldiers and crossed the Potomac River, invading the north for the third time in the war. The veterans in Early's force could almost imagine their flags flying above the...

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 of the Confederate States of America, an outnumbered Confederate force did all in its feeble power to resist--but all it could do was slow, not stop, the juggernaut. To Southerners, the war, not yet a year old, looked lost. The Confederate government prepared to evacuate the city. The citizenry prepared for the worst. And then the war turned. During battle at a...

September 17, 1862--one of the most consequential days in the history of the United States--was a moment in time when the future of the country could have veered in two starkly different directions. Confederates under General Robert E. Lee had embarked upon an invasion of Maryland, threatening to achieve a victory on Union soil that could potentially end the Civil War in Southern Independence. Lee's opponent, Major General George McClellan, led the Army of the Potomac to stop Lee's campaign. In Washington D.C., President Lincoln eagerly awaited news from the field, knowing that the future of...

In October 1863, the Union Army of the Cumberland was besieged in Chattanooga, all but surrounded by familiar opponents: The Confederate Army of Tennessee. The Federals were surviving by the narrowest of margins, thanks only to a trickle of supplies painstakingly hauled over the sketchiest of mountain roads. Soon even those quarter-rations would not suffice. Disaster was in the offing. Yet those Confederates, once jubilant at having routed the Federals at Chickamauga and driven them back into the apparent trap of Chattanooga's trenches, found their own circumstances increasingly difficult to...

Recounts "The Great Battle Never Fought," the Mine Run Campaign of 1863. It is the final chapter of the forgotten fall of 1863--when George Gordon Meade made one final attempt to save the Union.

Historians Robert Orrison and Kevin Pawlak trace the routes both armies traveled during the Maryland Campaign, ultimately coming to a climactic blow on the banks of Antietam Creek.

Chronicles the Civil War experiences of Custer, one of the most recognized individuals to emerge from this tragic chapter in American history.