Vintage Civil War library

The marriage of Selina and Ashley Dent had ended three years ago in divorce and frustration - on her side as well as his. Now he had come dramatically back into her life - at the exact moment that her young brother had got himself into serious trouble - and it appeared that the only way she could save her brother was to give in to Ashley's insistence that they should remarry. So what choice had she? It soon became clear that he attracted her as much as he had ever done - yet had anything changed, really? For how could Selina ever manage to overcome the terrible fear that had ruined the marriage the first time?

Collection of provactive essays that probe the multiple depths of Abraham Lincoln--life and mythology.

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 South, and re-creates their characters, their strategies, and the feelings they inspired in their countrymen. At once an incisive dual biography, hypnotically engrossing military history, and a cautionary examination of the American penchant for patriotic bloodshed, The Destructive War is a work of enormous power.

As most Americans of the 1860s fixed their attention on the battlefields of Shiloh and Manassas, another war raged on the largely unsettled Western frontier. This splendid work by the author of The Patriot Chiefs restores this "other" Civil War to its true, epic proportions. With formidable scholarship and irresistible narrative ease, Alvin M. Josephy, Jr., tells of the Yankee armada that foundered in the Louisiana bayous; of the bloody fighting on the ridges and prairies of the border states. where a Cherokee guerrilla leader was the last Confederate general to surrender -- two months after Appomattox: and of the U.S. Army's brutal campaigns against the Plains Indians in theaters as far apart as Minnesota and Colorado. - Publisher. This definitive history, the first comprehensive examination of the Civil War as it was fought west of the Mississippi, is also a fine account of the 1861-1865 Indian wars that drew thousands of Union troops away from the main Eastern theaters. Josephy ( The Patriot Chiefs ) describes the Confederate defeat at Pea Ridge, Ark., in 1862, the Union victory in '63 over Texas troops at Glorieta, N.M. (the ``Gettysburg of the West''), the '63 raid on Lawrence, Kans., led by Confederate William Quantrill, and the unsuccessful Union expedition up the Red River in '64. As Federal forces gained the upper hand, the conflict turned into an aggressive war against the Indians. Josephy describes how President Lincoln sent Gen. John Pope to suppress the Sioux Uprising in Minnesota and the Dakotas, and such various ensuing massacres as the slaughter of Cheyenne and Arapaho men, women and children at Sand Creek, Colo., in 1865. - Publishers Weekly.

This history deals with the entire scope of the Civil War--from the months of unrest and hysteria that led to Fort Sumter through the Union victory.

General William Tecumseh Sherman famously said, "War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it." This statement has contributed to his mythic status as a grim-visaged character who embodied implacable war. Now acclaimed Civil War historian Steven E. Woodworth delivers a nuanced, insightful portrait of Sherman as an original, decisive, and efficient leader who wanted the war to end as quickly as possible, and whose level-headed singleness of purpose gave him his greatness.

Union soldier Elisha Hunt Rhodes chronicles his career in the war. "All for the Union is the astonishing and eloquent diary of Elisha Hunt Rhodes, the Union soldier featured in Ken Burns's highly acclaimed PBS-TV documentary The Civil War. Enlisting as a private in the 2nd Rhode Island Infantry at age nineteen, Elisha Hunt Rhodes fought in the regiment's twenty battles, beginning at First Bull Run and ending at Appomattox, rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel and command of the regiment at age 22. In these pages, history comes alive as a brave yet thoughtful soldier tells us, in his own words, what he saw, what he did, and why he was willing to endure such hardship and peril to preserve his beloved Union. Very few soldiers survived the entire war, and none wrote about it so clearly and honestly. It is difficult not to be charmed by the author of this diary, for he was a most decent man: dutiful, forthright, modest, and courageous. When Ken Burns stumbled onto this diary during the course of his research for The Civil War, he was so moved by it that he chose to reorganize the documentary so as to follow two "common" soldiers throughout the War: Elisha Hunt Rhodes for the North and Sam Watkins for the South. For the millions of television viewers who had the chance to meet Elisha Hunt Rhodes through excerpts from All for the Union, now at last comes the opportunity to read the entire diary of a man who embodied the American ideal of the citizen soldier and who expressed so powerfully his love for the young nation-a cause worth fighting for and, if need be, worth dying for."--Dust jacket.