Balanced and in-depth military coverage (all theaters, North and South) in a non-partisan format with detailed notes, offering meaty, in-depth articles, original maps, photos, columns, book reviews, and indexes. Fredericksburg Artillery from Eacho’s Farm to Appomattox – First Gun at Gettysburg – 37th Illinois Infantry at Pea Ridge – Preservation Report – Capsule Unit Histories

Balanced and in-depth military coverage (all theaters, North and South) in a non-partisan format with detailed notes, offering meaty, in-depth articles, original maps, photos, columns, book reviews, and indexes. 126th NY Infantry at Harpers Ferry – First Confederate Regiment from Santa Rosa to Chickamauga – Long road to Bentonville – Book reviews – complete list of contents and index for Volume One

Balanced and in-depth military coverage (all theaters, North and South) in a non-partisan format with detailed notes, offering meaty, in-depth articles, original maps, photos, columns, book reviews, and indexes. Confederate Surgeon at Fort Donelson – Pennsylvania Bucktail’s life on the skirmish line – 22nd VA Infantry – Preservation of Chattahoochee River Line

Balanced and in-depth military coverage (all theaters, North and South) in a non-partisan format with detailed notes, offering meaty, in-depth articles, original maps, photos, columns, book reviews, and indexes. Chattanooga Revisited – Missionary Ridge – US Regulars at Chickamauga – Cleburne and Tunnel Hill – 2nd Georgia Sharpshooters – Camp Thomas, 1898

Balanced and in-depth military coverage (all theaters, North and South) in a non-partisan format with detailed notes, offering meaty, in-depth articles, original maps, photos, columns, book reviews, and indexes. Duryee’s Zouaves – “a Fine Looking Corpse?” – Rackensacker Raiders – “Noblest and Best Spirits”

Winner of the PEN Oakland–Josephine Miles Award “A stunning portrayal of a tragedy endured and survived by women.” —David W. Blight, author of Frederick Douglass “Readers expecting hoop-skirted ladies soothing fevered soldiers’ brows will not find them here...Explodes the fiction that men fight wars while women idle on the sidelines.” —Washington Post The idea that women are outside of war is a powerful myth, one that shaped the Civil War and still determines how we write about it today. Through three dramatic stories that span the war, Stephanie McCurry invites us to see America’s bloodiest conflict for what it was: not just a brothers’ war but a women’s war. When Union soldiers faced the unexpected threat of female partisans, saboteurs, and spies, long held assumptions about the innocence of enemy women were suddenly thrown into question. McCurry shows how the case of Clara Judd, imprisoned for treason, transformed the writing of Lieber’s Code, leading to lasting changes in the laws of war. Black women’s fight for freedom had no place in the Union military’s emancipation plans. Facing a massive problem of governance as former slaves fled to their ranks, officers reclassified black women as “soldiers’ wives”—placing new obstacles on their path to freedom. Finally, McCurry offers a new perspective on the epic human drama of Reconstruction through the story of one slaveholding woman, whose losses went well beyond the material to intimate matters of family, love, and belonging, mixing grief with rage and recasting white supremacy in new, still relevant terms. “As McCurry points out in this gem of a book, many historians who view the American Civil War as a ‘people’s war’ nevertheless neglect the actions of half the people.” —James M. McPherson, author of Battle Cry of Freedom “In this brilliant exposition of the politics of the seemingly personal, McCurry illuminates previously unrecognized dimensions of the war’s elemental impact.” —Drew Gilpin Faust, author of This Republic of Suffering

“An extremely good writer, [Ayers] is well worth reading . . . on the South and Southern history.”—Stephen Sears, Boston Globe The Southern past has proven to be fertile ground for great works of history. Peculiarities of tragic proportions—a system of slavery flourishing in a land of freedom, secession and Civil War tearing at a federal Union, deep poverty persisting in a nation of fast-paced development—have fed the imaginations of some of our most accomplished historians. Foremost in their ranks today is Edward L. Ayers, author of the award-winning and ongoing study of the Civil War in the heart of America, the Valley of the Shadow Project. In wide-ranging essays on the Civil War, the New South, and the twentieth-century South, Ayers turns over the rich soil of Southern life to explore the sources of the nation's and his own history. The title essay, original here, distills his vast research and offers a fresh perspective on the nation's central historical event.

Balanced and in-depth military coverage (all theaters, North and South) in a non-partisan format with detailed notes, offering meaty, in-depth articles, original maps, photos, columns, book reviews, and indexes. Who lost Lee’s order – Battle of South Mountain – 7th WV Infantry on the Bloody Lane – 1st TX Infantry in the cornfield – first fight letters of Colonel Phelps

Despite the abundance of books on the Civil War, not one has focused exclusively on what was in fact the determining factor in the outcome of the conflict: differences in Union and Southern strategy. In The Grand Design, Donald Stoker provides for the first time a comprehensive and often surprising account of strategy as it evolved between Fort Sumter and Appomattox. Reminding us that strategy is different from tactics (battlefield deployments) and operations (campaigns conducted in pursuit of a strategy), Stoker examines how Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis identified their political goals and worked with their generals to craft the military means to achieve them--or how they often failed to do so. Stoker shows that Davis, despite a West Point education and experience as Secretary of War, ultimately failed as a strategist by losing control of the political side of the war. Lincoln, in contrast, evolved a clear strategic vision, but he failed for years to make his generals implement it. And while Robert E. Lee was unerring in his ability to determine the Union's strategic heart--its center of gravity--he proved mistaken in his assessment of how to destroy it. Historians have often argued that the North's advantages in population and industry ensured certain victory. In The Grand Design, Stoker reasserts the centrality of the overarching plan on each side, arguing convincingly that it was strategy that determined the result of America's great national conflict.