Author: Arthur B. Carter
Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press
ISBN: 9781572330474
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
"The tarnished Cavalier is more than a story of scandal. Carter sheds new light on Confederate conduct of the war in the western theater during 1861 and 1862, revisits the pivotal battles of Pea Ridge and Corinth - both of which are important to understanding the loss of the upper South - and introduces new perspectives on the defense of Vicksburg and the Middle Tennessee operations of early 1863."--BOOK JACKET.

Author: Clint Crowe
Publisher: Casemate Publishers
ISBN: 1940669685
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 411

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Book Description
The sad plight of the Five Civilized Tribes—the Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek (Muscogee), and Seminole—during America’s Civil War is both fascinating and often overlooked in the literature. From 1861-1865, the Indians fought their own bloody civil war on lands surrounded by the Kansas Territory, Arkansas, and Texas. Clint Crowe’s magisterial Caught in the Maelstrom: The Indian Nations in the Civil War reveals the complexity and the importance of this war within a war, and explains how it affected the surrounding states in the Trans-Mississippi West and the course of the broader war engulfing the country. The onset of the Civil War exacerbated the divergent politics of the five tribes and resulted in the Choctaw and Chickasaw contributing men for the Confederacy and the Seminoles contributing men for the Union. The Creeks were divided between the Union and the Confederacy, while the internal war split apart the Cherokee nation mostly between those who followed Stand Watie, a brigadier general in the Confederate Army, and John Ross, who threw his majority support behind the Union cause. Throughout, Union and Confederate authorities played on divisions within the tribes to further their own strategic goals by enlisting men, signing treaties, encouraging bloodshed, and even using the hard hand of war to turn a profit. Crowe’s well-written study is grounded upon a plethora of archival resources, newspapers, diaries, letter collections, and other accounts. Caught in the Maelstrom examines every facet of this complex and fascinating story in a manner sure to please the most demanding reader.

Author: Darren L. Ivey
Publisher: University of North Texas Press
ISBN: 1574417010
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 665

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Book Description
Established in Waco in 1968, the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum honors the iconic Texas Rangers, a service which has existed, in one form or another, since 1823. They have become legendary symbols of Texas and the American West. Thirty-one Rangers, with lives spanning more than two centuries, have been enshrined in the Hall of Fame. In The Ranger Ideal Volume 1: Texas Rangers in the Hall of Fame, 1823-1861, Darren L. Ivey presents capsule biographies of the seven inductees who served Texas before the Civil War. He begins with Stephen F. Austin, “the Father of Texas,” who laid the foundations of the Ranger service, and then covers John C. Hays, Ben McCulloch, Samuel H. Walker, William A. A. “Bigfoot” Wallace, John S. Ford, and Lawrence Sul Ross. Using primary records and reliable secondary sources, and rejecting apocryphal tales, The Ranger Ideal presents the true stories of these intrepid men who fought to tame a land with gallantry, grit, and guns. This Volume 1 is the first of a planned three-volume series covering all of the Texas Rangers inducted in the Hall of Fame and Museum in Waco, Texas.

Author: Winston Groom
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307276775
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 514

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Book Description
In this thrilling narrative history of the Civil War’s most strategically important campaign, Winston Groom describes the bloody two-year grind that started when Ulysses S. Grant began taking a series of Confederate strongholds in 1861, climaxing with the siege of Vicksburg two years later. For Grant and the Union it was a crucial success that captured the Mississippi River, divided the South in half, and set the stage for eventual victory. Vicksburg, 1863 brings the battles and the protagonists of this struggle to life: we see Grant in all his grim determination, Sherman with his feistiness and talent for war, and Confederate leaders from Jefferson Davis to Joe Johnston to John Pemberton. It is an epic account by a masterful writer and historian.

Author: Thomas W. Cutrer
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469666286
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 609

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Book Description
Though its most famous battles were waged in the East at Antietam, Gettysburg, and throughout Virginia, the Civil War was clearly a conflict that raged across a continent. From cotton-rich Texas and the fields of Kansas through Indian Territory and into the high desert of New Mexico, the Trans-Mississippi Theater was site of major clashes from the war's earliest days through the surrenders of Confederate generals Edmund Kirby Smith and Stand Waite in June 1865. In this comprehensive military history of the war west of the Mississippi River, Thomas W. Cutrer shows that the theater's distance from events in the East does not diminish its importance to the unfolding of the larger struggle.

Author: Michael B. Ballard
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807876216
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 509

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Book Description
Michael Ballard provides a concise yet thorough study of the 1863 battle that cut off a crucial river port and rail depot for the South and split the Confederate nation, providing a turning point in the Civil War. The Union victory at Vicksburg was hailed with as much celebration in the North as the Gettysburg victory and Ballard makes a convincing case that it was equally important to the ultimate resolution of the conflict.

Author: Stephen D. Engle
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803267534
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
Struggle for the Heartland tells the story surrounding the military campaign that began in early 1862 with the advance to Fort Henry and culminated in late May with the capture of Corinth, Mississippi. The first significant Northern penetration into the Confederate west, this campaign saw the military coming-of-age of Ulysses S. Grant and offered a hint as to where the Federals might win the war. For the South, it dashed any hopes of avoiding a protracted conflict. Stephen D. Engle colors in the details that bring great clarity and new life to the scene of these battles as well as to the social and political context in which they occurred.

Author: Stephen William Berry
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820334138
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
“It is well that war is so terrible,” Robert E. Lee reportedly said, “or we would grow too fond of it.” The essays collected here make the case that we have grown too fond of it, and therefore we must make the war ter­rible again. Taking a “freakonomics” approach to Civil War studies, each contributor uses a seemingly unusual story, incident, or phenomenon to cast new light on the nature of the war itself. Collectively the essays remind us that war is always about damage, even at its most heroic and even when certain people and things deserve to be damaged. Here then is not only the grandness of the Civil War but its more than occasional littleness. Here are those who profited by the war and those who lost by it—and not just those who lost all save their honor, but those who lost their honor too. Here are the cowards, the coxcombs, the belles, the deserters, and the scavengers who hung back and so survived, even thrived. Here are dark topics like torture, hunger, and amputation. Here, in short, is war.

Author: Spencer C. Tucker
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 3088

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Book Description
This user-friendly encyclopedia comprises a wide array of accessible yet detailed entries that address the military, social, political, cultural, and economic aspects of the Mexican-American War. The Encyclopedia of the Mexican-American War: A Political, Social, and Military History provides an in-depth examination of not only the military conflict itself, but also the impact of the war on both nations; and how this conflict was the first waged by Americans on foreign soil and served to establish critical U.S. military, political, and foreign policy precedents. The entries analyze the Mexican-American War from both the American and Mexican perspectives, in equal measure. In addition to discussing the various campaigns, battles, weapons systems, and other aspects of military history, the three-volume work also contextualizes the conflict within its social, cultural, political, and economic milieu, and places the Mexican-American War into its proper historical and historiographical contexts by covering the eras both before and after the war. This information is particularly critical for students of American history because the conflict fomented sectional conflict in the United States, which resulted in the U.S. Civil War.

Author: Bruce J. Dinges
Publisher: SIU Press
ISBN: 0809387093
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 478

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Book Description
General Benjamin H. Grierson is most widely known as the brilliant cavalryman whose actions in the Civil War's Mississippi Valley campaign facilitated Ulysses S. Grant's capture of Vicksburg. There is, however, much more to this key Union officer than a successful raid into Confederate-held Mississippi. In A Just and Righteous Cause: Benjamin H. Grierson's Civil War Memoir, edited by Bruce J. Dinges and Shirley A. Leckie, Grierson tells his story in forceful, direct, and highly engaging prose. A Just and Righteous Cause paints a vivid picture of Grierson's prewar and Civil War career, touching on his antislavery views, Republican Party principles, and military strategy and tactics. His story begins with his parents' immigration to the United States and follows his childhood, youth, and career as a musician; the early years of his marriage; his business failures prior to becoming a cavalry officer in an Illinois regiment; his experiences in battle; and his Reconstruction appointment. Grierson also provides intimate accounts of his relationships with such prominent politicians and Union leaders as Abraham Lincoln, Richard Yates, Andrew Johnson, William T. Sherman, Ulysses S. Grant, John C. Frémont, and Benjamin Prentiss. Because Grierson wrote the memoir mainly with his family as the intended audience, he manages to avoid the self-promotion that plagues many of his contemporaries' chronicles. His reliance on military records and correspondence, along with family letters, lends an immediacy rarely found in military memoirs. His reminiscences also add fuel to a reemerging debate on soldiers' motivations for enlisting—in Grierson's case, patriotism and ideology—and shed new light on the Western theater of the Civil War, which has seen a recent surge in interest among Civil War enthusiasts. A non–West Point officer, Grierson owed his developing career to his independent studies of the military and his connections to political figures in his home state of Illinois and later to important Union leaders. Dinges and Leckie provide a helpful introduction, which gives background on the memoir and places Grierson's career into historical context. Aided by fourteen photos and two maps, as well as the editors' superb annotations, A Just and Righteous Cause is a valuable addition to Civil War history.