Widely considered the best black player of the 19th century, Hall-of-Famer Frank Grant challenged baseball's color barrier in the 1880s to play for all-white professional teams--two of which fought a legal battle for his services. This first full-length biography documents Grant's career highlights, including successful games against Major League teams and at-bats against Hall-of-Fame pitchers. Stories overlooked for more than a century are examined, including a falsified anecdote that obscured one of Grant's best games from history. New light is shed on the early years of the Cuban Giants, the first black pro ball club.

President Grant Reconsidered shatters myths about America's 18th president.

General Ulysses S. Grant is best remembered today as a war-winning general, and he certainly deserves credit for his efforts on behalf of the Union. But has he received too much credit at the expense of other men? Have others who fought the war with him suffered unfairly at his hands? General Grant and the Verdict of History: Memoir, Memory, and the Civil War explores these issues. Professor Frank P. Varney examines Grant’s relationship with three noted Civil War generals: the brash and uncompromising “Fighting Joe” Hooker; George H. Thomas, the stellar commander who earned the sobriquet “Rock of Chickamauga”; and Gouverneur Kemble Warren, who served honorably and well in every major action of the Army of the Potomac before being relieved less than two weeks before Appomattox, and only after he had played a prominent part in the major Union victory at Five Forks. In his earlier book General Grant and the Rewriting of History, Dr. Varney studied the tempestuous relationship between Grant and Union General William S. Rosecrans. During the war, Rosecrans was considered by many of his contemporaries to be on par with Grant himself; today, he is largely forgotten. Rosecrans’s star dimmed, argues Varney, because Grant orchestrated the effort. Unbeknownst to most students of the war, Grant used his official reports, interviews with the press, and his memoirs to influence how future generations would remember the war and his part in it. Aided greatly by his two terms as president, by the clarity and eloquence of his memoirs, and in particular by the dramatic backdrop against which those memoirs were written, our historical memory has been influenced to a degree greater than many realize. It is beyond time to return to the original sources—the letters, journals, reports, and memoirs of other witnesses and the transcripts of courts-martial— to examine Grant’s story from a fresh perspective. The results are enlightening and more than a little disturbing.

The weekly source of African American political and entertainment news.

In June 1950, Frank Lloyd Wright paid a surprise visit to the Grant house, under construction near Cedar Rapids, Iowa. This was Wright's first visit to the site, and he was worried about the house because, unlike most of Wright's clients, Doug Grant was building it himself, serving as his own general contractor and doing his own electrical work and carpentry. He and his wife, Jackie, quarried all of the stone for the house from their own quarry on the property, and both took an active part in the construction. Upon his return to Taliesin, Wright told the assembled group of architects and apprentices that he was extremely pleased by what he had seen. He delivered a long tribute to Grant, calling the act of building one's own house "an American proceeding." The book's foreword, contributed by the Wright Foundation's Director of Archives, Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, calls the Grant house, "among some of the finest and most inspired that Frank Lloyd Wright ever designed."

Volumes 1 to 20 are confined to decisions relating to pensions and bounty-land claims. Volumes 21 to 22 contain decisions relating to pensions and civil service retirement claims.