McPherson recounts how the Union navy's blockade of the Confederate coast, leaky as a sieve in the war's early months, became increasingly effective as it choked off vital imports and exports. Meanwhile, the Confederate navy, dwarfed by its giant adversary, demonstrated daring and military innovation.

Relates the experiences of ordinary teenager Tillie Pierce during the Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863, as she helped save wounded Union and Confederate soldiers during the bloody, three-day battle.

In 1862 eleven-year-old Summer and her thirteen-year-old brother Rosco take turns describing how life on the quiet Virginia plantation where they are slaves is affected by the Civil War.

When a schoolgirl gets seperated from her tour of the White House and finds herself in the Lincoln bedroom, she also discovers the ghost of the great man himself.

The bloody and decisive two-day battle of Shiloh on April 6-7, 1862 changed the entire course of the American Civil War. The stunning Northern victory thrust Union commander Ulysses S. Grant into the national spotlight, claimed the life of Confederate commander Albert S. Johnston, and forever buried the notion that the Civil War would be a short conflict. The conflagration had its roots in the strong Union advance during the winter of 1861-1862 that...

In 1865, while helping her family keep their Virginia farm going through the end of the Civil War, twelve-year-old Cassie meets a Confederate deserter and a Yankee prisoner of war and tries to discover who has been stealing from the farm.

"The Civil War is most often understood as an internal conflict, one fought by American soldiers over issues uniquely American in origin and consequence. But in The Cause of All Nations, distinguished historian Don H. Doyle reframes our understanding of the Civil War, describing it as a conflict that was shaped by international forces--and which had major international repercussions. Doyle shows that, rather than being an internal struggle, the Civil...

A captivating and richly detailed novel about one young soldier who saw the Civil War from both sides and lived to tell the tale. Earnest, plainspoken sixteen-year-old Jeff Bussey has finally gotten his father's consent to join the Union volunteers. It's 1861 in Linn County, Kansas, and Jeff is eager to fight for the North before the war is over, which he's sure will be soon. But weeks turn to months, the marches through fields and woods prove endless,...

By May of 1863, the Stone Wall at the base of Marye's Heights above Fredericksburg loomed large over the Army of the Potomac, haunting its men with memories of slaughter from their crushing defeat there the previous December. They would assault it again with a very different result the following spring when General Joe Hooker, bogged down in bloody battle with the Army of Northern Virginia around the crossroads of Chancellorsville, ordered John Sedgwick's...

The Lincoln Reader weaves a biography of Abraham Lincoln written by sixty-five authors, meshing history, anecdotes and research to provide a fascinating view of the Emancipating President. Paul Angle, the noted Lincoln scholar, has selected passages from the works of Lincoln's contemporaries, later biographers, and even Lincoln himself, to form a composite portrait of one of the wisest and most beloved American presidents. These passages, interwoven...