Best Civil War Books

“Available recommendation signals cluster around Social Sciences, American, History, Civil, War lists, suggesting this book may fit readers looking for decision-making, behavior, or human motivation. Treat this as discovery context, not a quality guarantee.”

The #1 New York Times bestseller. New York Times Book Review 10 Best Books of 2017Pulitzer Prize winner Ron Chernow returns with a sweeping and dramatic portrait of one of our most compelling generals and presidents, Ulysses S. Grant.Ulysses S. Grant's life has typically been misunderstood. All too often he is caricatured as a chronic loser and an ...

Gore Vidal's Narratives of Empire series spans the history of the United States from the Revolution to the postWorld War II years. With their broad canvas and large cast of fictional and historical characters, the novels in this series present a panorama of the American political and imperial experience as interpreted by one of its most worldly, k...

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in History ?Extraordinary?a great American biography? (The New Yorker) of the most important AfricanAmerican of the nineteenth century: Frederick Douglass, the escaped slave who became the greatest orator of his day and one of the leading abolitionists and writers of the era.As a young man Frederick Douglass (1818?...

Scarlett O'Hara, the beautiful, spoiled daughter of a welltodo Georgia plantation owner, must use every means at her disposal to claw her way out of the poverty she finds herself in after Sherman's March to the Sea....

Former slave, impassioned abolitionist, brilliant writer, newspaper editor and eloquent orator whose speeches fired the abolitionist cause, Frederick Douglass (1818?1895) led an astounding life. Physical abuse, deprivation and tragedy plagued his early years, yet through sheer force of character he was able to overcome these obstacles to become a l...

On Jamie Dimon's list of favorite books.

2011 Reprint of 1928 Edition not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. Clare and Irene were two childhood friends. They lost touch when Clare's father died and she moved in with two white aunts. By hiding that Clare was partblack, they allowed her to 'pass' as a white woman and marry a white racist. Irene lives in Harlem, commits herself t...

Selected as a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times Book Review, this landmark work gives us a definitive account of Lincoln's lifelong engagement with the nation's critical issue: American slavery. A master historian, Eric Foner draws Lincoln and the broader history of the period into perfect balance. We see Lincoln, a pragmatic politicia...

When prizewinning war correspondent Tony Horwitz leaves the battlefields of Bosnia and the Middle East for a peaceful corner of the Blue Ridge Mountains, he thinks he's put war zones behind him. But awakened one morning by the crackle of musket fire, Horwitz starts filing frontline dispatches again this time from a war close to home, and to his o...

Cold Mountain is a novel about a soldier?s perilous journey back to his beloved near the Civil War's end. At once a love story & a harrowing account of one man?s long walk home, Cold Mountain introduces a new talent in American literature.Based on local history & family stories passed down by Frazier?s greatgreatgrandfather, Cold Mountain is the ...

In Volume I, we learn of Grant's early life and education, his entry into the West Point military academy, and what influenced his views on life and the situation of the United States as a nation. General Grant's gradual rise from his original posting as second lieutenant is charted through the various conflicts and skirmishes he was involved in.Va...

The pioneering work in the study of the role of Black Americans during Reconstruction by the most influential Black intellectual of his time....

Harriet Tubman's heroic and pivotal role in the fight against slavery is the subject of the fourteenth picture book in this New York Times bestselling biography seriesThis friendly, fun biography series focuses on the traits that made our heroes greatthe traits that kids can aspire to in order to live heroically themselves. Each book tells the st...

When he was a boy in Henning, Tennessee, Alex Haley's grandmother used to tell him stories about their family?stories that went back to her grandparents, and their grandparents, down through the generations all the way to a man she called "the African." She said he had lived across the ocean near what he called the "Kamby Bolongo" and had been out ...

“Available recommendation signals cluster around American, History, Civil, War, NonFiction lists, suggesting this book may fit readers looking for big-picture nonfiction and accessible learning. Treat this as discovery context, not a quality guarantee.”

Octavia E. Butler's 1979 masterpiece and groundbreaking exploration of power and responsibility, for fans of The Handmaid's Tale, The Power and Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing. With an original foreword by Ayòbámi Adébáyò.In 1976, Dana dreams of being a writer. In 1815, she is assumed a slave.When Dana first meets Rufus on a Maryland plantation, he's drowni...

“Available recommendation signals cluster around Civil, War, NonFiction, History, American lists, suggesting this book may fit readers looking for big-picture nonfiction and accessible learning. Treat this as discovery context, not a quality guarantee.”

In the shadow of Auschwitz, a flamboyant German industrialist grew into a living legend to the Jews of Cracow. He was a womaniser, a heavy drinker and a bon viveur, but to them he became a saviour. This is the extraordinary story of Oskar Schindler, who risked his life to protect Jews in Nazioccupied Poland and who was transformed by the war into ...

“Available recommendation signals cluster around Civil, War, Historical, Fiction, American lists, suggesting this book may fit readers looking for imaginative storytelling, atmosphere, or character-driven reflection. Treat this as discovery context, not a quality guarantee.”

Miss Jane Pittman. She is one of the most unforgettable heroines in American fiction, a woman whose life has come to symbolize the struggle for freedom, dignity, and justice. Ernest J. Gaines?s nowclassic novel?written as an autobiography?spans one hundred years of Miss Jane?s remarkable life, from her childhood as a slave on a Louisiana plantatio...

No historical event has left as deep an imprint on America's collective memory as the Civil War. In the war's aftermath, Americans had to embrace and cast off a traumatic past. David Blight explores the perilous path of remembering and forgetting, and reveals its tragic costs to race relations and America's national reunion. In 1865, confronted wit...

He is a brilliant math Professor with a peculiar problemever since a traumatic head injury, he has lived with only eighty minutes of shortterm memory. She is an astute young Housekeeper, with a tenyearold son, who is hired to care for him. And every morning, as the Professor and the Housekeeper are introduced to each other anew, a strange and ...

Mary Chesnut kept her diary from early in 1861, just before the Civil War began, to shortly after the end of the war, in 1865. Though not a daybyday account of the conflict, the diary gives an upcloseandpersonal view of this critical period in American history. Her commentary on the conversations and events of her day reveals a keen awareness ...

When Confederate men marched off to battle, southern women struggled with the new responsibilities of directing farms and plantations, providing for families, and supervising increasingly restive slaves. Drew Faust offers a compelling picture of the more than halfmillion women who belonged to the slaveholding families of the Confederacy during thi...

Jeff Bussey walked briskly up the rutted wagon road toward Fort Leavenworth on his way to join the Union volunteers. It was 1861 in Linn County, Kansas, and Jeff was elated at the prospect of fighting for the North at last.In the Indian country south of Kansas there was dread in the air; and the name, Stand Watie, was on every tongue. A hero to the...

Winner of the 2013 National Book Award for Fiction A Washington Post, Publishers Weekly, Oprah Magazine Top 10 Book of the Year ?A magnificent new novel by the bestselling author James McBride.? ?cover review of The New York Times Book Review?Outrageously entertaining.? ?USA Today?James McBride delivers another tour de force? ?Essence?So imaginati...

Traveling to Civil Warera Washington, D.C., to tend wounded soldiers and pursue her dream of becoming a surgeon, headstrong midwife Mary receives guidance from two smitten doctors and resists her mother's pleas for her to return home....

Tempest Over Texas: The Fall and Winter Campaigns, 1863?1864 is the fourth installment in Dr. Donald S. Frazier?s awardwinning Louisiana Quadrille series. Picking up the story of the Civil War in Louisiana and Texas after the fall of Port Hudson and Vicksburg, Tempest Over Texas describes Confederate confusion on how to carry on in the TransMissi...

Brian Matthew Jordan?s Marching Home, a ?powerful exploration? (Washington Post) of the fates of Union veterans, vaulted him into the first rank of Civil War historians. Now, in A Thousand May Fall, Jordan sends us trundling along dusty roads with the 107th Ohio, an ethnically German infantry regiment whose members battled nativism no less than Con...

A collection of letters written when Alcott was a Civil War army nurse, they garnered Alcott's first critical recognition for her observations and humour....

From the moment the Civil War began, partisans on both sides were calling not just for victory but for extermination. And both sides found leaders who would oblige. In this vivid and fearfully persuasive book, Charles Royster looks at William Tecumseh Sherman and Stonewall Jackson, the men who came to embody the apocalyptic passions of North and So...

In 1864, Union general William Tecumseh Sherman marched his sixty thousand troops through Georgia to the sea, and then up into the Carolinas. The army fought off Confederate forces, demolished cities, and accumulated a bornealong population of freed blacks and white refugees until all that remained was the dangerous transient life of the disposses...

?Albert Cashier? served three years in the Union Army and passed successfully as a man until 1911 when the aging veteran was revealed to be a woman named Jennie Hodgers. Frances Clayton kept fighting even after her husband was gunned down in front of her at the Battle of Murfreesboro. And more than one soldier astonished ?his? comradesinarms by g...

The diary of a fictional fourteenyearold girl living in Virginia, in which she describes the hardships endured by her family and friends during one year of the Civil War....

An evocative poem and stunning watercolors come together to honor an American heroine in a Coretta Scott King Honor and Christopher Awardwinning picture book. We know her today as Harriet Tubman, but in her lifetime she was called by many names. As General Tubman she was a Union spy. As Moses she led hundreds to freedom on the Underground Railroad...

A stirring, dramatic story of a slave who mails himself to freedom by a Jane Addams Peace Awardwinning author and a Coretta Scott King Awardwinning artist.Henry Brown doesn't know how old he is. Nobody keeps records of slaves' birthdays. All the time he dreams about freedom, but that dream seems farther away than ever when he is torn from his fam...

There are few picture books written about the Civil War, and none are as powerful as this one. This story, about how a young black soldier rescues a white soldier, opens young readers' eyes to the injustices of slavery and the senselessness of war. Highly charged emotionally, this masterful retelling of a true story is seen through the white soldie...

An estimated 200,000 men of German birth enlisted in the Union Army during the Civil War, far more than any other contemporary foreignborn population. One of these, Prussian Army officer Johann August Ernst von Willich, led a remarkable life of integrity, commitment to a cause, and interaction with leading lights of the nineteenth century. After r...

Michael Shaara reinvented the war novel with his Pulitzer Prize?winning masterpiece of Gettysburg, The Killer Angels. Jeff Shaara continued his father?s legacy with a series of centuriesspanning New York Times bestsellers. This volume assembles three Civil War novels from America?s first family of military fiction: Gods and Generals, The Killer An...

When first published in 1953, Bruce Catton, our foremost Civil War historian was awarded both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for excellence in nonfiction. This final volume of The Army of the Potomac trilogy relates the final year of the Civil War....

"Wonderfully written...populated by vivid characters and rendered in fascinating detail."?Nancy Kline, New York Times Book ReviewKidnapped as a child from Africa, Aminata Diallo is enslaved in South Carolina but escapes during the chaos of the Revolutionary War. In Manhattan she becomes a scribe for the British, recording the names of blacks who ha...

Araminta Ross was born a slave in Delaware in the early 19th century. Slavery meant that her family could be ripped apart at any time, and that she could be put to work in dangerous places and for abusive people. But north of the MasonDixon line, slavery was illegal. If she could run away and make it north without being caught or killed, she?d be ...

The astonishing story of the longest and most decisive military campaign of the Civil War in Vicksburg, Mississippi, which opened the Mississippi River, split the Confederacy, freed tens of thousands of slaves, and made Ulysses S. Grant the most important general of the war.Vicksburg, Mississippi, was the last stronghold of the Confederacy on the M...

From the same author and illustrator as our #1 nationally bestselling What Do You Do With an Idea comes a new book to encourage you to look closely at problems and discover the possibilities they can hold.What do you do with a problem Especially one that follows you around and doesn't seem to be going away Do you worry about it Ignore it Do y...

“Available recommendation signals cluster around Civil, War lists, suggesting this book may fit readers looking for reader-fit discovery across adjacent interests. Treat this as discovery context, not a quality guarantee.”

A masterful, singlevolume history of the Civil War's greatest campaign. Drawing on original source material, from soldiers' letters to official military records of the war, Stephen W. Sears's Gettysburg is a remarkable and dramatic account of the legendary campaign. He takes particular care in his study of the battle's leaders and offers detailed ...

Jubilee tells the true story of Vyry, the child of a white plantation owner and his black mistress. Vyry bears witness to the South?s antebellum opulence and to its brutality, its wartime ruin, and the promises of Reconstruction. Weaving her own family?s oral history with thirty years of research, Margaret Walker?s novel brings the everyday experie...

Volume I of The Army Of The Potomac trilogy, this is Bruce Catton's superb evocation of the early years of the Civil War when the army was under the command of the dashing General George B. McClellan....

Winner of the Seaborg Award A History Book Club SelectionOn October 8, 1862, Union and Confederate forces clashed near Perryville, Kentucky, in what would be the largest battle ever fought on Kentucky soil. The climax of a campaign that began two months before in northern Mississippi, Perryville came to be recognized as the high water mark of the w...

More than 150 years after the end of the Civil War, scores of websites, articles, and organizations repeat claims that anywhere between 500 and 100,000 free and enslaved African Americans fought willingly as soldiers in the Confederate army. But as Kevin M. Levin argues in this carefully researched book, such claims would have shocked anyone who se...

A fascinating and complete guide to the Civil War, this book includes compelling information on the War between the States, Abraham Lincoln, slavery in America, the Confederacy and the Union. Every effort has been made to make Civil War reliable and complete ? the book was created with The Smithsonian Institution, using artifacts and photographs fr...

Following the fall of Atlanta, rebel commander John Bell Hood rallied his demoralized troops and marched them off the Tennessee, desperately hoping to draw Sherman after him and forestall the Confederacy's defeat. But Sherman refused to be lured and began his infamous "March to the Sea," while Hood charged headlong into catastrophe.In this compelli...

First published in 1955, Pulitzer Prizewinning historian Bruce Catton?s classic account of the Civil War simultaneously captures the dramatic scope and intimate experience of that epic struggle in one brilliant volume. Covering events from the prelude of the conflict to the death of Lincoln, Catton blends a gripping narrative with deep, yet unass...

No one knows where the term Underground Railroad came fromthere were no trains or tracks, only "conductors" who helped escaping slaves to freedom. Including real stories about "passengers" on the "Railroad," this book chronicles slaves' close calls with bounty hunters, exhausting struggles on the road, and what they sacrificed for freedom. With 8...

The raid that inspired John Wayne's film, The Horse Soldiers....

Combining brilliant military analysis with rich narrative history, Landscape Turned Red is the definitive work on the Battle of Antietam.The Civil War battle waged on September 17, 1862, at Antietam Creek, Maryland, was one of the bloodiest in the nation's history: on this single day, the war claimed nearly 23,000 casualties. Here renowned historia...

Part history, part novel, this book chronicles two great American dynasties over three generations. Though brought together in a friendship that neither jealousy nor violence could shatter, the Hazards and the Mains are torn apart by the storm of events that has divided the nation....

With a New IntroductionFrom the "preeminent historian of Reconstruction" (New York Times Book Review), a newly updated edition of the prizewinning classic work on the postCivil War period that shaped modern AmericaEric Foner's "masterful treatment of one of the most complex periods of American history" (New Republic) redefined how the postCivil W...

It's the skullfucking you didn't know you needed.Liberty Hardy, Book Riot THE CULT CLASSIC RETURNS WITH A NEW DEFINITIVE EDITION Robert Kloss's The Alligators of Abraham is a fever dream built from the fly strewn corpses of armies, the megalomania of generals, the madness of widows, the fires of mourning, the fury of the poor, the indifference of...

"Four score and seven years ago..." begins Abraham Lincoln's beautiful speech commemorating the threeday battle that turned the tide of the Civil War. The South had been winning up to this point. So how did Union troops stop General Robert E. Lee's invasion of the North With blackandwhite illustrations throughout and sixteen pages of photos, th...

Born a slave in Maryland, Harriet Tubman knew firsthand what it meant to be someone's property; she was whipped by owners and almost killed by an overseer. It was from other field hands that she first heard about the Underground Railroad which she travelled by herself north to Philadelphia. Throughout her long life (she died at the age of ninetyt...

In celebration of the 150th anniversary of the Civil War: The definitive Civil War classic as Sam wanted it revised complete with his edits, new perspectives, authoritative text, and images of his changes.Company Aytch has reigned as one of the most memorable and honest depictions of the American Civil War since its original publication in 1882. Sa...

Addy Walker's family is planning a dangerous escapefrom slavery in the summer of 1864. But before they can make the escape, the worst happensMaster Stevens decides to sell some of his slaves, including Poppa and Addy's brother, Sam. Addy and Momma take the terrible risk of escaping by themselves, hoping that the family eventually will be together...

Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the epic New York Times bestselling account of how Civil War general Thomas ?Stonewall? Jackson became a great and tragic national hero.Stonewall Jackson has long been a figure of legend and romance. As much as any person in the Confederate pantheon?even Robert E. Lee?he embodies the romantic Sou...

?David M. Potter?s magisterial The Impending Crisis is the single best account to date of the coming of the Civil War.? ?Civil War History?The magnum opus of a great American historian.? ?NewsweekNow in a new edition for the 150th Anniversary of the Civil War, David Potter?s Pulitzer Prizewinning history of antebellum America offers an indispensib...

An indepth political study of Alabama?s government during the Civil War Alabama?s military forces were fierce and dedicated combatants for the Confederate cause.In his study of Alabama during the Civil War, Ben H. Severance argues that Alabama?s electoral and political attitudes were, in their own way, just as unified in their support for the ca...

Over the course of four decades until his death in 1866, Henry Schaumann was a laborer, craftsman, mechanic, and housewright, a person who built and repaired houses. He knew life as a husband, father, and citizen at different times in two countries. Of temperate disposition, he was of average height for the time, standing 5 feet 6½ inches tall, wit...

In this important new contribution to the historical literature, Amy Fluker offers a history of Civil War commemoration in Missouri, shifting focus away from the guerrilla war and devoting equal attention to Union, African American, and Confederate commemoration. She provides the most complete look yet at the construction of Civil War memory in Mis...

General John A. Wickham, commander of the famous 101st Airborne Division in the 1970s and subsequently Army Chief of Staff, once visited Antietam battlefield. Gazing at Bloody Lane where, in 1862, several Union assaults were brutally repulsed before they finally broke through, he marveled, "You couldn't get American soldiers today to make an attack...

Medical student turned professional soldier David S. Stanley offered forty years of service to his country on the western frontier and during the Civil War. He participated in some of most important Civil War battles, including the Battle of Iuka, the Battle of Corinth, the Battle of Stones Rivers, the Battle of Resaca, the Battle of Spring Hill, a...

A ?brilliant? look at America?s sixteenth president by the New York Times?bestselling, Pulitzer Prize?winning author of Lincoln (American Historical Review). First published in 1956 and revised and updated for the twenty-first century, Lincoln Reconsidered is a masterpiece of Civil War scholarship. In a dozen eloquent, witty, and incisive essays, t...

For well over a century, traditional Civil War histories have concluded in 1865, with a bitterly won peace and Union soldiers returning triumphantly home. In a landmark work that challenges sterilized portraits accepted for generations, Civil War historian Brian Matthew Jordan creates an entirely new narrative. These veterans? tending rotting wound...

The Civil War was a long and bloody affair that claimed the life of some 750,000 men. When it ended, former opponents worked to rebuild their common countryAmericaand move into the future together. Most modern Americans might find that hard to believe, especially in an era witnessing the tearing down or movement of Confederate monuments and des...

This compelling narrative offers a firsthand account of a couple's remarkable flight from slavery in the antebellum South. William and Ellen Craft devised a daring plan in which the lightskinned wife disguised herself as a man and the husband posed as her servant. This brief memoir recounts their journey northward in 1848, when they made their way...

The story of Captain John Valley Young personifies the body of rugged Union Army volunteers from West Virginia during the Civil War: highly resilient, stubbornly independent, and fiercely patriotic. Using Captain Young?s wartime letters to his wife, Paulina Franklin Young, and his daughters, Sarah and Emily Young, along with his diary and numerous ...

The Nashville Campaign, culminating with the last major battle of the Civil War, is one of the most compelling and controversial campaigns of the conflict. The campaign pitted the young and energetic James Harrison Wilson and his Union cavalry against the cunning and experienced Nathan Bedford Forrest with his Confederate cavalry. This book is an a...

In this companion to The Life of Johnny Reb, Bell Irvin Wiley explores the daily lives of the men in blue who fought to save the Union. With the help of many soldiers' letters and diaries, Wiley explains who these men were and why they fought, how they reacted to combat and the strain of prolonged conflict, and what they thought about the land and ...

More than 600,000 soldiers lost their lives in the American Civil War. An equivalent proportion of today's population would be six million. In This Republic of Suffering , Drew Gilpin Faust reveals the ways that death on such a scale changed not only individual lives but the life of the nation, describing how the survivors managed on a practical le...

Twenty years after Appomattox, the Civil War?s greatest general fought his last campaign against death and time. Stricken by cancer as his family faced financial ruin, Ulysses S. Grant wrote his Personal Memoirs to secure their future, and in doing so won for himself a unique place in American letters. Acclaimed by readers as diverse as Mark Twain,...

A detailed analysis of the end of the Vicksburg Campaign and the fortyday siege Vicksburg, Mississippi, held strong through a bitter, hardfought, monthslong Civil War campaign, but General Ulysses S. Grant?s fortyday siege ended the stalemate and, on July 4, 1863, destroyed Confederate control of the Mississippi River. In the first anthology ...