A Separate Battle


Book Description

Discusses the roles women played, and how they influenced the course of the American Civil War.




A Different Battle


Book Description

"Their stories, however, also reflect experiences that are universal to all veterans: the lasting bonds created among fellow soldiers; the shock of entering combat for the first time; the sense of loss from seeing friends killed or wounded. The veterans have different opinions about the necessity of war, but they agree that war is not a glorious adventure. It's a hellhole.




Unholy Sabbath


Book Description

Readers of Civil War history have been led to believe the battle of South Mountain was but a trifling skirmish, a preliminary engagement of little strategic or tactical. In fact, the fight was a decisive Federal victory and important turning point in the campaign, as historian Brian Matthew Jordan argues convincingly in his fresh interpretation.




Antietam


Book Description

“The best battlefield first-person compilation I have read . . . Here it all is—the tactics, the movement, the truth about warfare.” —The Civil War Times In Antietam: The Soldiers’ Battle, historian John Michael Priest tells this brutal tale of slaughter from an entirely new point of view: that of the common enlisted man. Concentrating on the days of actual battle—September 16, 17, and 18, 1862—Priest vividly brings to life the fear, the horror, and the profound courage that soldiers displayed, from the first Federal cavalry probe of the Confederate lines to the last skirmish on the streets of Sharpsburg. Antietam is not a book about generals and their grand strategies, but rather concerns men such as the Pennsylvanian corporal who lied to receive the Medal of Honor; the Virginian who lay unattended on the battlefield through most of the second day of fighting, his arm shattered from a Union artillery shell; the Confederate surgeon who wrote to the sweetheart he left behind enemy lines in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania that he had seen so much death and suffering that his “head had whitened and my very soul turned to stone.” Besides being a gripping tale charged with the immediacy of firsthand accounts of the fighting, Antietam also dispels many misconceptions long held by historians and Civil War buffs alike. Seventy-two detailed maps—which describe the battle in the hourly and quarter-hourly formats established by the Cope Maps of 1904—together with rarely-seen photographs and his own intimate knowledge of the Antietam terrain, allow Priest to offer a substantially new interpretation of what actually happened.




The Will to Battle


Book Description

The Will to Battle—the third book of 2017 John W. Campbell Award winner Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota series—a political science fiction epic of extraordinary audacity “A cornucopia of dazzling, sharp ideas set in rich, wry prose that rewards rumination with layers of delight. Provocative, erudite, inventive, resplendent.” —Ken Liu, author of The Grace of Kings The long years of near-utopia have come to an abrupt end. Peace and order are now figments of the past. Corruption, deception, and insurgency hum within the once steadfast leadership of the Hives, nations without fixed location. The heartbreaking truth is that for decades, even centuries, the leaders of the great Hives bought the world’s stability with a trickle of secret murders, mathematically planned. So that no faction could ever dominate. So that the balance held. The Hives’ façade of solidity is the only hope they have for maintaining a semblance of order, for preventing the public from succumbing to the savagery and bloodlust of wars past. But as the great secret becomes more and more widely known, that façade is slipping away. Just days earlier, the world was a pinnacle of human civilization. Now everyone—Hives and hiveless, Utopians and sensayers, emperors and the downtrodden, warriors and saints—scrambles to prepare for the seemingly inevitable war. “Seven Surrenders veers expertly between love, murder, mayhem, parenthood, theology, and high politics. I haven't had this much fun with a book in a long time.” —Max Gladstone, author of Three Parts Dead Terra Ignota Series 1. Too Like the Lightning 2. Seven Surrenders 3. The Will to Battle At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.




The Last Battle


Book Description

The classic account of the final offensive against Hitler’s Third Reich. The Battle for Berlin was the culminating struggle of World War II in the European theater, the last offensive against Hitler’s Third Reich, which devastated one of Europe’s historic capitals and marked the final defeat of Nazi Germany. It was also one of the war’s bloodiest and most pivotal battles, whose outcome would shape international politics for decades to come. The Last Battle is Cornelius Ryan’s compelling account of this final battle, a story of brutal extremes, of stunning military triumph alongside the stark conditions that the civilians of Berlin experienced in the face of the Allied assault. As always, Ryan delves beneath the military and political forces that were dictating events to explore the more immediate imperatives of survival, where, as the author describes it, “to eat had become more important than to love, to burrow more dignified than to fight, to exist more militarily correct than to win.” The Last Battle is the story of ordinary people, both soldiers and civilians, caught up in the despair, frustration, and terror of defeat. It is history at its best, a masterful illumination of the effects of war on the lives of individuals, and one of the enduring works on World War II.




This Republic of Suffering


Book Description

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 be seven and a half million. In This Republic of Suffering, Drew Gilpin Faust describes how the survivors managed on a practical level and how a deeply religious culture struggled to reconcile the unprecedented carnage with its belief in a benevolent God. Throughout, the voices of soldiers and their families, of statesmen, generals, preachers, poets, surgeons, nurses, northerners and southerners come together to give us a vivid understanding of the Civil War's most fundamental and widely shared reality. With a new introduction by the author, and a new foreword by Mike Mullen, 17th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.




War without Mercy


Book Description

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD • AN AMERICAN BOOK AWARD FINALIST • A monumental history that has been hailed by The New York Times as “one of the most original and important books to be written about the war between Japan and the United States.” In this monumental history, Professor John Dower reveals a hidden, explosive dimension of the Pacific War—race—while writing what John Toland has called “a landmark book ... a powerful, moving, and evenhanded history that is sorely needed in both America and Japan.” Drawing on American and Japanese songs, slogans, cartoons, propaganda films, secret reports, and a wealth of other documents of the time, Dower opens up a whole new way of looking at that bitter struggle of four and a half decades ago and its ramifications in our lives today. As Edwin O. Reischauer, former ambassador to Japan, has pointed out, this book offers “a lesson that the postwar generations need most ... with eloquence, crushing detail, and power.”




Days of Battle


Book Description

This volume of WWII military studies examines significant yet neglected clashes of German-Hungarian and Soviet armor north of the river Danube. In Days of Battle, Dr. Norbert Számvéber, chief of Hungary's military archives, examines armor combat operations in the southern territory of the historical Upper Hungary (part of Hungary between 1938 and 1945, at the present time now part of Slovakia) in three separate studies. The first is an account of the battle between the Ipoly and Garam rivers during the second half of December 1944, in which the élite Hungarian Division "Szent László" saw action for the first time. The second study examines the fierce tank battle of Komárom, fought between January 6th–22nd of 1945. This was an integral part of the Battle for Budapest, parallel in time with Operation Konrad. The third study describes the combat during the German Operation Südwind in February 1945, as well as the Soviet attack launched in the direction of Bratislava in March 1945. Based on files and documentation from German, Hungarian and Soviet sources, Dr. Számvéber’s authoritative text is supported by photographs and color battle maps.




Separate Is Never Equal


Book Description

"Years before the landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling Brown v. Board of Education, Sylvia Mendez, an eight-year-old girl of Mexican and Puerto Rican heritage, played an instrumental role in Mendez v. Westminster, the landmark desegregation case of 1946 in California"--