How the unprepossessing Ulysses S. Grant, whose military genius ultimately preserved the Union, came to the forefront in the Civil War is a story as surprising as it is compelling. Forced to resign his commission in the peacetime army for drinking, and thereafter reduced to eking out a living for himself and his family with hardscrabble jobs, at the outbreak of hostilities he suddenly found himself a colonel, and then a general, of volunteers. Grant made the most of unexpected commands. what he knew best, it turned out, was how to wage war, relentlessly and with irresistible...

"Damage them all you can," the patrician Lee exhorts, and his Southern army, ragtag in uniform and elite in spirit, responds ferociously in one battle after another against their Northern enemies--from the Seven Days and the Valley Campaign through Chancellorsville and Gettysburg, from the Wilderness to Spotsylvania to the final siege of Richmond and Petersburg. Lee knows that the South's five-and-a-half million white population will be worn down in any protracted struggle by the North's twenty-two million. He is ever offensive-minded, ever seeking the victory that will destroy his...

The smiling gregarious O'Dwyer, Irish to his toes, walked a policeman's beat while studying law and became the crusading district attorney who broke up Murder Inc.

Cotsello, the son of Calabrian peasants, turned early to crime in the streets of East Harlem, and never turned back. He and other young hoods--Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel, Joe Adonis--built a national crime network that extended from numbers to narcotics, from New York to California.

A part of the syndicate's fiefdom was Tammany Hall. Only Tammany could crown a mayor. William O'Dwyer profoundly wished...

This comprehensive survey of religion and its profound effects on history provides a historical context for in-depth analysis of theological, social, and political themes in which religion plays a major role.

George Walsh first traces the rise and impact of primitive religions. He looks at Indian traditions, including Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism and analyzes the Semitic tradition of Judaism and Christianity and the evolving conception of a personal God. He discusses the history and chief doctrines of Islam as well, with its fundamental respect for desert tribal values and its...