Uses primary documents to highlight the daily lives of ordinary Americans--Union and Confederate, black and white, soldier and civilian--during the Civil War and Reconstruction.

Karen Abbott illuminates one of the most fascinating yet little known aspects of the Civil War: the stories of four courageous women--a socialite, a farm girl, an abolitionist, and a widow--who were spies. After shooting a Union soldier in her front hall with a pocket pistol, Belle Boyd became a courier and spy for the Confederate army, using her charms to seduce men on both sides. Emma Edmonds cut off her hair and assumed the identity of a man to...

"After the War Between the States, a Confederate officer longs to heal the heart of Lizbeth Barclay--but first he'll have to right the wrongs that were done to her." --

"From a Pulitzer Prize finalist, a pathbreaking history of the Civil War centered on a regiment of immigrants and their brutal experience of the conflict. Brian Matthew Jordan's Marching Home, a "powerful exploration" (Washington Post) of the fates of Union veterans, vaulted him into the first rank of Civil War historians. Now, in A Thousand May Fall, Jordan sends us trundling along dusty roads with the 107th Ohio, an ethnically German infantry regiment...

"What was the Emancipation Proclamation and why was it important? How did it affect the Southern states' ability to fight in the Civil War? How did the proclamation change the lives of black slaves in the South? When President Abraham Lincoln created the Emancipation Proclamation in 1862, it had far-reaching effects on the course of the Civil War and U.S. history. Using an inquiry-based approach, primary sources, and quick-reference infographics,...

The previously untold story of the violence in Congress that helped spark the Civil War. In The Field of Blood, Joanne B. Freeman recovers the long-lost story of physical violence on the floor of the U.S. Congress. Drawing on an extraordinary range of sources, she shows that the Capitol was rife with conflict in the decades before the Civil War. Legislative sessions were often punctuated by mortal threats, canings, flipped desks, and all-out slugfests....

Between late 1863 and mid-1864, an armed band of Confederate deserters battled Confederate cavalry in the Piney Woods region of Jones County, Mississippi. Calling themselves the Knight Company after their captain, Newton Knight, and aided by women, slaves, and children who spied on the Confederacy and provided food and shelter, they set up headquarters in the swamps of the Leaf River. There, legend has it, they declared the Free State of Jones. The...