Oliver Otis Howard devoted his life to the service of his country, both as a distinguished army officer in two wars and as the founder of two universities. Oliver Otis Howard was a graduate of Bowdoin College and of West Point. Being reared in a pious New England (Maine) atmosphere gave him a deep sense of obligation to lead a Christian life, for the good of others and for the development of his own best self. He was often disturbed by the conflict presented him in his dual career in peace and war.General Howard's strong sense of duty to his country brought about his distinguished career of...

Abner Small wrote one of the most honest, poignant, and moving memoirs to come out of the Civil War. He served as a non-commissioned officer in the Third Maine Infantry during the summer of 1861, experiencing battle for the first time at First Bull Run. As a recruiting officer, he helped to raise the Sixteenth Maine Infantry and served as its adjutant. The Sixteenth Maine gained fame for its heroic delaying action on July 1 at Gettysburg, where it lost 180 of its 200 men. It went on to serve in Grant's Overland Campaign in Virginia. Small was an articulate observer of all this. He wrote his...

Holmes's wartime letters and diary entries have attracted students of war as well as biographers of Holmes as rare glimpses into the mind and heart of a soldier who withstood the great slaughter.

This striking portrait of Abraham Lincoln found in this book is drawn entirely from the writing of his contemporaries and extends from his political beginnings in Springfield to his assassination. It reveals a more severely beleaguered, less godlike, and finally a richer Lincoln than has come through many of the biographies of Lincoln written at a distance after his death. To those who are familiar only with the various retouchedversions of Lincoln's life, Abraham Lincoln: A Press Portrait will be a welcome-if sometimes surprising-addition to the literature surrounding the man who is perhaps...

During the 1880s, a German-born, Boston-based picture publisher successfully commissioned the most ambitious series of battle prints ever published. Louis Prang, best known as the "father of the Christmas card," hired noted military and marine artists to create original scenes of combat, and then reproduced their works in a wildly popular portfolio of chromolithographs. He called the set Prang's War Pictures. They were offered to an eager public accompanied by "descriptive texts" that told the story of each engagement through eyewitness recollection by the heroes of each action. The set...

Three years ago, in celebration of the publication of The Union Preserved: A Guide to the Civil War Records in the New York State Archives, the New York State Archives Partnership Trust, a program of the New York State Education Department, held a two-day symposium featuring research by leading scholars on New York's role in the Civil War. The symposium brought together a broad spectrum of attendees from the Lincoln Forum, Civil War re-enactors, Civil War Roundtable members, students, local historians, educators, and history enthusiasts. As the most populous state at the time of the Civil...

Union Soldiers and the Northern Home Front: Wartime Experiences, Postwar Adjustments explores the North's Civil War in ways that brings fresh perspectives to our knowledge of the way soldiers and civilians interacted in the Civil War North. Northerners rarely confronted the hardships their southern counterparts faced, but they still found the war a challenging event that to varying degrees would re-shape and transform their old comfortable assumptions about their lives. Having given up their sons to save the Union, they craved information and followed the progress of the companies and...

From First to Last is complete life story of one of the most controversial yet least well known generals on either side during the Civil War. The number one graduate of the West Point class of 1843, William Buel Franklin served in the U.S. Army's Corps of Topographical Engineers and contributed greatly to the building of the nation's internal improvements, including a stint as chief engineer in charge of construction of the U.S. Capitol's dome and extension from 1859 to 1861. During the Civil War Franklin ascended rapidly in rank and command authority, from command of a Union brigade at Bull...

These original essays bring fresh perspectives to our understanding of the impact of the Civil War on daily life in the northern states. From family, race, religion, and popular culture to political organization and party ideology, the essays chronicle the many dimensions of the uncommon timeof the North's Civil War.

Historians have tended to dismiss pacifism and the peace movement of the Civil War era, arguing that most Americans believed in the war as an answer to the crisis of secession. This groundbreaking book offers a much needed new perspective on role played by pacifism during and after Civil War era. Thomas Curran focuses on the "perfectionist pacifists," a group of northerners whose views on Christian perfection and obligation forced them to take an extreme pacifist stance during the War. Curran tracks wartime opposition into the postwar years, when the perfectionists united to create the...