From the Pulitzer Prize--winning author of Battle Cry of Freedom, a powerful new reckoning with Jefferson Davis as military commander of the Confederacy shows how Davis shaped and articulated the principal policy of the Confederacy with clarity and force and, like no other chief executive in American history, exercised a tenacious hands-on influence in the shaping of military strategy.

"From a preeminent presidential historian comes a groundbreaking and often surprising saga of America's wartime chief executives. Ten years in the research and writing, Presidents of Waris a fresh, magisterial, intimate look at a procession of American leaders as they took the nation into conflict and mobilized their country for victory. It brings us into the room as they make the most difficult decisions that face any President, at times sending...

Winning Independence is the dramatic story of how and why Great Britain-so close to regaining several southern colonies and rendering the postwar United States a fatally weak nation ultimately failed to win the war. The book explores the choices and decisions made by Clinton and Washington, and others, that ultimately led the French and American allies to clinch the pivotal victory at Yorktown that at long last secured American independence.

"From journalist and historian Steve Inskeep, a compelling and nuanced exploration of the political acumen of Abraham Lincoln via sixteen encounters before and during his presidency, bringing to light not only the strategy of a great politician who inherited a country divided, but lessons for our own disorderly present. In 1855, as the United States found itself at odds over the issue of slavery, then lawyer Abraham Lincoln composed a note on the...