Kategoria BISAC: History >> United States - Civil War Period (1850-1877)

As Jefferson Davis paraded through the streets of Montgomery, Alabama, to take the oath of office as the first president of the Confederate States of America, two men accompanied him in his open coach: Alexander Stephens -- the vice-president-elect -- and Basil Manly. A noted southern Baptist preacher, educator, and the most ardent secessionist of them all, Manly had been selected to serve as chaplain to the provisional Confederate Congress and opened the inaugural ceremonies with a prayer. For nearly thirty years, Manly had worked devotedly for the establishment of a southern nation, and...

Tall and handsome, vigorous and hot-tempered, fearless to a fault, Frederick W. Lander (1821-1862) became one of the most name-recognized Americans in the years 1854 to 1862. A top-notch railroad and wagon-road engineer in the western territories, a popular lyceum speaker, a published fiction writer and poet, an adept negotiator with Native Americans, and an agent for the Lincoln administration and the Union army, the Massachusetts native attracted newspaper coverage from coast to coast for his renown and versatility. His name evoked emotion and passion among his friends and associates,...

Born the eighth child in a wealthy Mississippi plantation family in 1843, David Eldred Holt joined Company K of the 16th Mississippi Regiment in 1861 and served in the Eastern theater throughout the Civil War. Late in his life, at a time when many former soldiers, both Union and Confederate, were reliving their memories of that event, Holt penned this memoir, recounting the idyllic life of an affluent southern boy before the war and the exhilarating, sometimes humorous, often terrifying experiences of a common soldier in camp and in battle. This new edition has been expanded to include...

Trained as a physician and ordained an Episcopal priest, Charles Todd Quintard (1824--1898) was a remarkable man by the standard of any generation. Born, raised, and educated in the North, he migrated to the South to pursue a medical career but was inspired by the bishop of Tennessee to serve the church. When Tennessee seceded from the Union in May 1861, Quintard joined the Confederate 1st Tennessee Infantry Regiment as its chaplain and during the maelstrom of the Civil War kept a diary of his experiences. He later penned a memoir, which was published posthumously in 1905.

Sam Davis...

This volume carries Ulysses S. Grant through a brief period of welcome calm to the storms of the White House. Seemingly resigned to becoming president, Grant detached himself from military routine in Washington, D.C., during the summer of 1868 to tour the Great Plains. He then settled in Galena to escape the clamor of the presidential campaign. Grant reveled in his respite from official duties, writing to his father, "I have enjoyed my summers vacation very much and look forward with dread to my return to Washington." Grant's residence in Galena shielded him from public scrutiny. "Whilst I...

"To tell my own story is to tell that of my famous husband, General John A. Logan," explains Mary S. Logan in the preface to her autobiography.

Married to John A. Logan for thirty-one years, Mary Logan shared in her distinguished husband s career as a prosecutor in southern Illinois, as a Civil War general, and as a senator from Illinois. She observed firsthand the extraordinary events before, during, and after the Civil War, and she knew personally those world leaders who held the power to shape history. After the death of her husband, she maintained her influence in Washington, D.C....

On May 10, 1876, Ulysses S. Grant pulled a lever to start the mighty 1,400-horsepower Corliss Steam Engine, powering acres of machinery for the nation's Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. Grant summed up a century of American progress by saying, "Whilst proud of what we have done, we regret that we have not done more. Our achievements have been great enough however to make it easy for our people to acknowledge superior merit wheresoever found."

That summer, Fourth of July celebrations coincided with early reports that Lieutenant Colonel George A. Custer and his Seventh Cavalry...

Within the American antislavery movement, abolitionists were distinct from others in the movement in advocating, on the basis of moral principle, the immediate emancipation of slaves and equal rights for black people. Instead of focusing on the "immediatists" as products of northern culture, as many previous historians have done, Stanley Harrold examines their involvement with antislavery action in the South--particularly in the region that bordered the free states. How, he asks, did antislavery action in the South help shape abolitionist beliefs and policies in the period leading up to...

When Slavery Was Called Freedom uncovers the cultural and ideological bonds linking the combatants in the Civil War era and boldly reinterprets the intellectual foundations of secession. John Patrick Daly dissects the evangelical defense of slavery at the heart of the nineteenth century's sectional crisis. He brings a new understanding to the role of religion in the Old South and the ways in which religion was used in the Confederacy.

Southern evangelicals argued that their unique region was destined for greatness, and their rhetoric gave expression and a degree of coherence...

Few American battles have been the object of as much discussion and popular fascination as the Battle of the Little Big Horn. Yet after more than a century, a great number of questions remain unanswered. Many are destined to remain so. No white man survived to tell the tale, Indian accounts are inconsistent, and contemporary reports are distorted by political considerations.

Charles K. Hofling, however, provides fresh insight to the events of June 1876 by exploring them from a unique perspective. Concluding that discussions of military tactics and strategy are not sufficient in...