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The role that African Americans played in the Gettysburg Campaign has now been largely forgotten. This work seeks to rectify this oversight by bringing to light the many ways that Black Americans took part in the crucial battle at Gettysburg, how they were able to influence the military outcome, and the impact the Civil War had on their lives. Author, James M. Paradis, a former licensed battlefield guide at Gettysburg National Military Park, examines the active prewar role played by Gettysburg c...

It’s a poignant irony in American history that on Independence Day, 1863, not one but two pivotal Civil War battles ended in Union victory, marked the high tide of Confederate military fortune, and ultimately doomed the South’s effort at secession. But on July 4, 1863, after six months of siege, Ulysses Grant’s Union army finally took Vicksburg and the Confederate west. On the very same day, Robert E. Lee was in Pennsylvania, parrying the threat to Vicksburg with a daring push north to Gettysbu...

Like no other American, Abraham Lincoln's life is entwined with the history and culture of the nation. His rise from poverty to presidency has inspired others to believe in the promise of opportunity; his success in preserving the nation is one of our greatest triumphs; his death is our American tragedy. To commemmorate the 200th anniversary of Lincoln's birth, the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History is publishing, for the first time, its unparalleled Lincoln collection. It contai...

Published some thirty years ago, Robert Manson Myers's Children of Pride: The True Story of Georgia and the Civil War won the National Book Award in history and went on to become a classic reference on America's slaveholding South. That book presented the letters of the prominent Presbyterian minister and plantation patriarch Charles Colcock Jones (1804--1863), whose family owned more than one hundred slaves. While extensive, these letters can provide only one part of the story of the Jones fami...

The Civil War history of Galveston is one of the last untold stories from America's bloodiest war, despite the fact that Galveston was a focal point of hostilities throughout the conflict. As other Southern ports fell to the Union, Galveston emerged as one of the Confederacy's only lifelines to the outside world. When the war ended in 1865, Galveston was the only major port still in Confederate hands.In this beautifully written narrative history, Ed Cotham draws upon years of archival and on-sit...

This is a new edition of the radical social history of America from Columbus to the present. This powerful and controversial study turns orthodox American history upside down to portray the social turmoil behind the "march of progress". Known for its lively, clear prose as well as its scholarly research, A People's History is the only volume to tell America's story from the point of view of - and in the words of - America's women, factory workers, African-Americans, Native Americans, the wor...