"Ordeal by Fire" blends the most up-to-date scholarship with interpretations based on decades of teaching, research, and writing, to tell an important story--that of the American Civil War and Reconstruction. Written by a leading Civil War historian and Pulitzer Prize winner, this text describes the[...]

McPherson recounts the momentous episodes that preceded the Civil War including the Dred Scott decision, the Lincoln-Douglas debates, John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry. From there it moves into a masterful chronicle of the war itself - the battles, the strategic maneuvering by each side, the polit[...]

This book covers one of the most turbulent periods of the USA's history, from the Mexican War in 1848 to the end of the Civil War in 1865. With a broad historical sweep, it traces the heightening sectional conflict of the 1850s: the growing estrangement of the South and its impassioned defence of sl[...]

No American needs to be told that the Civil War brought the United States to a critical juncture in its history. The war changed forever the face of the nation, the nature of American politics, the status of African-Americans, and the daily lives of millions of people. Yet few of us understand how[...]

James M. McPherson is acclaimed as one of the finest historians writing today and a preeminent commentator on the Civil War. Battle Cry of Freedom, his Pulitzer Prize-winning account of that conflict, was a national bestseller that Hugh Brogan, in The New York Times, called "history writing of the h[...]

Now featuring a new Afterword by the author, this handy paperback edition of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Battle Cry of Freedom is without question the definitive one-volume history of the Civil War. James McPherson's fast-paced narrative fully integrates the political, social, and military events tha[...]

Here is the definitive reference to the battles of the Civil War, written by Americas leading military historians and edited by the Pulitzer Prize-winning Civil War expert James M. McPherson. This authoritative volume includes gripping eyewitness accounts plus 200 specially commissioned, full-colo[...]

"From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "Battle Cry of Freedom," a powerful new reckoning with Jefferson Davis as military commander of the Confederacy"
History has not been kind to Jefferson Davis. His cause went down in disastrous defeat and left the South impoverished for generations. If [...]

""The most powerful and enduring work of art ever written about American slavery.""
-Alfred Kazin When Abraham Lincoln met Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1862, he greeted her as "the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war." He was exaggerating only slightly. First published in 1852, [...]