NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • An "extraordinary ... profoundly moving" history (The New York Times Book Review) of the American Civil War that reveals the ways that death on such a scale changed not only individual lives but the life of the nation.

An estiated 750,000 soldiers lost their lives in the American Civil War. An equivalent proportion of today's population would...

"The never-before-told story of four real-life women who risked everything to take on a life of espionage during the Civil War"--Provided by publisher.

"James M. McPherson’s Tried by War is a perfect primer . . . for anyone who wishes to under­stand the evolution of the president’s role as commander in chief. Few histo­rians write as well as McPherson, and none evoke the sound of battle with greater clarity." —The New York Times Book Review
The Pulitzer Prize–winning author reveals how Lincoln won the Civil War and invented...

Among the autobiographies of great military figures, Ulysses S. Grant's is certainly one of the finest, and it is arguably the most notable literary achievement of any American president: a lucid, compelling, and brutally honest chronicle of triumph and failure. From his frontier boyhood to his heroics in battle to the grinding poverty from which the Civil War ironically "rescued" him, these memoirs are a mesmerizing, deeply moving account of a brilliant...

A stunning collection of stoic portraits and intimate ephemera from the lives of Black Civil War soldiers
Though both the Union and Confederate armies excluded African American men from their initial calls to arms, many of the men who eventually served were black. Simultaneously, photography culture blossomed—marking the Civil War as the first conflict to be extensively documented through photographs. In The Black Civil War Soldier,

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“[An] exciting read . . . [Jeff] Shaara returns to the U.S. Civil War in this first book of a new trilogy. . . . This novel is meticulously researched and brings a vivid reality to the historical events depicted.”—Library Journal
 
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
Spring 1862. The Confederate Army in the West teeters on the brink of collapse. General Albert Sidney Johnston is forced to abandon...

Looks at the making of the Oxford English dictionary.

Sooner or later, history asks, which side were you on? In his powerful new novel, Charles Frazier returns to the time and place of Cold Mountain, vividly bringing to life the chaos and devastation of the Civil War. Her marriage prospects limited, teenage Varina Howell agrees to wed the much-older widower Jefferson Davis, with whom she expects the secure life of a Mississippi landowner. Davis instead pursues a career in politics and is eventually...

"In The Long Shadow of War, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian James M. McPherson considers why the Civil War retains such a hold on our national psyche and identity. Though the drama and tragedy of the subject, from the war's scope and size--an estimated death toll of 750,000, far more than all the rest of the country's wars combined--to the nearly mythical individuals involved--Abraham Lincoln, Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson--help explain why the...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • William Tecumseh Sherman was more than just one of our greatest generals. Fierce Patriot is a bold, revisionist portrait of how this iconic and enigmatic figure exerted an outsize impact on the American landscape—and the American character.
 
America’s first “celebrity” general, William Tecumseh Sherman was a man of many faces. Some were exalted in...