In the 19th Century a saloon was any establishment that provided food or drink. The Volunteer Refreshment Saloons served no alcohol. What they did dispense was coffee and heaping plates of food as good as the best hotels to the passing Union soldiers. These spontaneous gatherings of Southwark neighbors built two organizations, the Cooper Shop and the Union Refreshment Saloon, which operated throughout the Civil War and several months past its end as the soldiers returned home. Besides food, they provided fresh water for washing, reading and writing materials, and hospital care. This is the story of the people of the Philadelphia Saloons and their "grand and noble works" to support the Union cause.

To commemorate the 150th Anniversary of the end of the Civil War, Diversion Books is publishing seminal works of the era: stories told by the men and women who led, who fought, and who lived in an America that had come apart at the seams. While men fought the battles, it was the women who fought the war. Thrust onto sides of a fence, still decades away from even the right to vote, women kept the country from crumbling upon itself during the brutal conflict. These profiles of women both historically notable, like Clara Barton and Dorothea Dix, as well as women history has forgotten until now, will enthrall readers with stories of the war as seen by those who healed soldiers, kept the homefront safe, and ensured that the country would be strong after the final shot was fired.

Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes claimed that historian Benson J. Lossing did more than any other man to make history interesting and popular. Lossing wrote his comprehensive three-volume history of the Civil War at a time when the facts were still fresh. Originally published in 1866, Volume One covers the period from the political conventions held in the spring of 1860 to midsummer 1861 and the Battle of Bull Run. Lossing accompanies his narratives of marches, battles, and sieges with maps and plans, includes biographical sketches of the prominent people from both sides of the conflict, and illustrates his history with hundreds of drawings and engravings by the author and others.