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.

In this classic study, Pulitzer Prize-winning author James M. McPherson deftly narrates the experience of blacks--former slaves and soldiers, preachers, visionaries, doctors, intellectuals, and common people--during the Civil War. Drawing on contemporary journalism, speeches, books, and letters, he presents an eclectic chronicle of their fears and hopes as well as their essential contributions to their own freedom. Through the words of these extraordinary participants, both Northern and Southern, McPherson captures African-American responses to emancipation, the shifting attitudes toward Lincoln and the life of black soldiers in the Union army. Above all, we are allowed to witness the dreams of a disenfranchised people eager to embrace the rights and the equality offered to them, finally, as citizens. From the Trade Paperback edition.

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.