Author : Tom Lalicki
Publisher : Macmillan
Page : 214 pages
File Size : 31,24 MB
Release : 2004-04-08
Category : History
ISBN : 0374327874
Describes Colonel Benjamin H. Grierson's sixteen-day raid through central Mississippi in the spring of 1863, which distracted Confederate attention while Union troops moved on Vicksburg.
Author : Dee Brown
Publisher : Open Road Media
Page : 411 pages
File Size : 15,41 MB
Release : 2012-10-23
Category : History
ISBN : 1453274189
The improbable Civil War raid that led to the Siege of Vicksburg, recounted by the #1 New York Times–bestselling author of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. For two weeks in the spring of 1862, Colonel Benjamin Grierson and 1,700 Union cavalry troopers conducted a raid from Tennessee to Louisiana. It was intended to divert Confederate attention from Ulysses S. Grant’s army crossing the Mississippi River, a maneuver that would set the stage for the Siege of Vicksburg. Led by a former music teacher whose role in the Union cavalry was belied by his hatred of horses, Grierson’s Raid was not only brilliant, but improbably successful. The cavalrymen ripped up railway track, destroyed storehouses, took prisoners, and freed slaves. Colonel Grierson lost only three men through the whole expedition. Rich and detailed, Grierson’s Raid is the definitive work on one of the most astonishing missions of the Civil War’s early days. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Dee Brown including rare photos from the author’s personal collection.
Author : David J Eicher
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 992 pages
File Size : 35,75 MB
Release : 2002-03-30
Category : History
ISBN : 0743218469
Like no other conflict in our history, the Civil War casts a long shadow onto modern America," writes David Eicher. In his compelling new account of that war, Eicher gives us an authoritative modern single-volume battle history that spans the war from the opening engagement at Fort Sumter to Lee's surrender at Appomattox (and even beyond, to the less well-known but conclusive surrender of Confederate General Edmund Kirby Smith in Galveston, Texas, on June 2, 1865). Although there are other one-volume histories of the Civil War -- most notably James M. McPherson's Pulitzer Prize-winning Battle Cry of Freedom, which puts the war in its political, economic, and social context -- The Longest Night is strictly a military history. It covers hundreds of engagements on land and sea, and along rivers. The Western theater, often neglected in accounts of the Civil War, and the naval actions along the coasts and major rivers are at last given their due. Such major battles as Gettysburg, Antietam, and Chancellorsville are, of course, described in detail, but Eicher also examines lesser-known actions such as Sabine Pass, Texas, and Fort Clinch, Florida. The result is a gripping popular history that will fascinate anyone just learning about the Civil War while at the same time offering more than a few surprises for longtime students of the War Between the States. The Longest Night draws on hundreds of sources and includes numerous excerpts from letters, diaries, and reports by the soldiers who fought the war, giving readers a real sense of life -- and death -- on the battlefield. In addition to the main battle narrative, Eicher analyzes each side's evolving strategy and examines the tactics of Lee, Grant, Johnston, Sherman, and other leading figures of the war. He also discusses such militarily significant topics as prisons, railroads, shipbuilding, clandestine operations, and the expanding role of African Americans in the war. The Longest Night is a riveting, indispensable history of the war that James McPherson in the Foreword to this book calls "the most dramatic, violent, and fateful experience in American history."
Author : Neil Longley York
Publisher : Kent State University Press
Page : 204 pages
File Size : 35,96 MB
Release : 2001
Category : History
ISBN : 9780873386883
This volume documents Robert Taft's first term in the United States Senate and marks his entrance onto the national political and policymaking stage.
Author : Timothy B. Smith
Publisher : Casemate Publishers
Page : 443 pages
File Size : 47,23 MB
Release : 2020-02-08
Category : History
ISBN : 1611214297
“This epic account is as thrilling and fast-paced as the raid itself and will quickly rival, if not surpass, Dee Brown’s Grierson’s Raid as the standard.” —Terrence J. Winschel, historian (ret.), Vicksburg National Military Park Winner, Operational/Battle History, Army Historical Foundation Distinguished Book Award Winner, Fletcher Pratt Literary Award, Civil War Round Table of New York There were other simultaneous operations to distract Confederate attention from the real threat posed by U. S. Grant’s Army of the Tennessee. Benjamin Grierson’s operation, however, mainly conducted with two Illinois cavalry regiments, has become the most famous, and for good reason: For 16 days (April 17 to May 2) Grierson led Confederate pursuers on a high-stakes chase through the entire state of Mississippi, entering the northern border with Tennessee and exiting its southern border with Louisiana. Throughout, he displayed outstanding leadership and cunning, destroyed railroad tracks, burned trestles and bridges, freed slaves, and created as much damage and chaos as possible. Grierson’s Raid broke a vital Confederate rail line at Newton Station that supplied Vicksburg and, perhaps most importantly, consumed the attention of the Confederate high command. While Confederate Lt. Gen. John Pemberton at Vicksburg and other Southern leaders looked in the wrong directions, Grant moved his entire Army of the Tennessee across the Mississippi River below Vicksburg, spelling the doom of that city, the Confederate chances of holding the river, and perhaps the Confederacy itself. Based upon years of research and presented in gripping, fast-paced prose, Timothy B. Smith’s The Real Horse Soldiers captures the high drama and tension of the 1863 horse soldiers in a modern, comprehensive, academic study. Readers will find it fills a wide void in Civil War literature.
Author : William H. Leckie
Publisher : University of Oklahoma Press
Page : 388 pages
File Size : 29,75 MB
Release : 1998-03-01
Category : History
ISBN : 9780806130279
Unlikely Warriors is the story of Benjamin Henry Grierson, Civil War hero and postwar commander of the Tenth Cavalry "Buffalo Soldiers," and his family on the western frontier. In 1863, Colonel Grierson led a cavalry brigade of 1,700 men on a daring raid through Mississippi, which helped Ulysses S. Grant launch his successful campaign against Vicksburg. In the army reorganization of 1866, Grierson accepted an appointment as colonel of the Tenth Cavalry, a command of white officers and black enlisted men. In this biography, William and Shirley Leckie explore three generations of Grierson's family, and for this edition they include a new preface on recent interest in the Buffalo Soldiers.
Author : John Eicher
Publisher : Stanford University Press
Page : 1062 pages
File Size : 48,20 MB
Release : 2002-06-01
Category : History
ISBN : 9780804780353
Based on nearly five decades of research, this magisterial work is a biographical register and analysis of the people who most directly influenced the course of the Civil War, its high commanders. Numbering 3,396, they include the presidents and their cabinet members, state governors, general officers of the Union and Confederate armies (regular, provisional, volunteers, and militia), and admirals and commodores of the two navies. Civil War High Commands will become a cornerstone reference work on these personalities and the meaning of their commands, and on the Civil War itself. Errors of fact and interpretation concerning the high commanders are legion in the Civil War literature, in reference works as well as in narrative accounts. The present work brings together for the first time in one volume the most reliable facts available, drawn from more than 1,000 sources and including the most recent research. The biographical entries include complete names, birthplaces, important relatives, education, vocations, publications, military grades, wartime assignments, wounds, captures, exchanges, paroles, honors, and place of death and interment. In addition to its main component, the biographies, the volume also includes a number of essays, tables, and synopses designed to clarify previously obscure matters such as the definition of grades and ranks; the difference between commissions in regular, provisional, volunteer, and militia services; the chronology of military laws and executive decisions before, during, and after the war; and the geographical breakdown of command structures. The book is illustrated with 84 new diagrams of all the insignias used throughout the war and with 129 portraits of the most important high commanders.
Author : David J. Eicher
Publisher : University of Illinois Press
Page : 444 pages
File Size : 26,30 MB
Release : 1997
Category : History
ISBN : 9780252022739
With the assistance of several scholars, including James M. McPherson and Gary Gallagher, and a long-time specialist in Civil War books, Ralph Newman, David Eicher has selected for inclusion in The Civil War in Books the 1,100 most important books on the war. These are organized into categories as wide-ranging as "Battles and Campaigns," "Biographies, Memoirs, and Letters," "Unit Histories," and "General Works." The last of these includes volumes on black Americans and the war, battlefields, fiction, pictorial works, politics, prisons, railroads, and a host of other topics. Annotations are included for all entries in the work, which is presented in an oversized 8 1/2 x 11 inch volume in two-column format. Appendixes list "prolific" Civil War publishers and other Civil War bibliographies, and the works included in Eicher's mammoth undertaking are indexed by author or editor and by title. Gary Gallagher's foreword traces the development of Civil War bibliographies and declares that Eicher's annotation exceeds that of any previous comprehensive volume. The Civil War in Books, Gallagher believes, is "precisely the type of guide" that has been needed. The first full-scale, fully-annotated bibliography on the Civil War to appear in more than thirty years, Eicher's The Civil War in Books is a remarkable compendium of the best reading available about the worst conflict ever to strike the United States. The bibliography, the most valuable reference book on the subject since The Civil War Day by Day, will be essential for college and university libraries, dealers in rare and secondhand books, and Civil War buffs.
Author : Bruce J. Dinges
Publisher : SIU Press
Page : 478 pages
File Size : 27,41 MB
Release : 2016-06-29
Category : History
ISBN : 0809387093
General Benjamin H. Grierson is most widely known as the brilliant cavalryman whose actions in the Civil War's Mississippi Valley campaign facilitated Ulysses S. Grant's capture of Vicksburg. There is, however, much more to this key Union officer than a successful raid into Confederate-held Mississippi. In A Just and Righteous Cause: Benjamin H. Grierson's Civil War Memoir, edited by Bruce J. Dinges and Shirley A. Leckie, Grierson tells his story in forceful, direct, and highly engaging prose. A Just and Righteous Cause paints a vivid picture of Grierson's prewar and Civil War career, touching on his antislavery views, Republican Party principles, and military strategy and tactics. His story begins with his parents' immigration to the United States and follows his childhood, youth, and career as a musician; the early years of his marriage; his business failures prior to becoming a cavalry officer in an Illinois regiment; his experiences in battle; and his Reconstruction appointment. Grierson also provides intimate accounts of his relationships with such prominent politicians and Union leaders as Abraham Lincoln, Richard Yates, Andrew Johnson, William T. Sherman, Ulysses S. Grant, John C. Frémont, and Benjamin Prentiss. Because Grierson wrote the memoir mainly with his family as the intended audience, he manages to avoid the self-promotion that plagues many of his contemporaries' chronicles. His reliance on military records and correspondence, along with family letters, lends an immediacy rarely found in military memoirs. His reminiscences also add fuel to a reemerging debate on soldiers' motivations for enlisting—in Grierson's case, patriotism and ideology—and shed new light on the Western theater of the Civil War, which has seen a recent surge in interest among Civil War enthusiasts. A non–West Point officer, Grierson owed his developing career to his independent studies of the military and his connections to political figures in his home state of Illinois and later to important Union leaders. Dinges and Leckie provide a helpful introduction, which gives background on the memoir and places Grierson's career into historical context. Aided by fourteen photos and two maps, as well as the editors' superb annotations, A Just and Righteous Cause is a valuable addition to Civil War history.
Author : Terry L. Jones
Publisher : Scarecrow Press
Page : 1818 pages
File Size : 40,32 MB
Release : 2011
Category : History
ISBN : 0810878119
The Civil War was the most traumatic event in American history, pitting Americans against one another, rending the national fabric, leaving death and devastation in its wake, and instilling an anger that has not entirely dissipated even to this day, 150 years later. This updated and expanded two-volume second edition of the Historical Dictionary of the Civil War relates the history of this war through a chronology, an introductory essay, an extensive bibliography, and hundreds of cross-referenced dictionary entries on persons, places, events, institutions, battles, and campaigns. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about the Civil War.
