Brandy Station: A Battle Like None Other

Great bloodbath of chivalry Comprehensive analysis reveals details of clash In his 1732 military writings Marshall of France Maurice Comte de Saxe wrote of cavalry: Altogether, cavalry operations are exceeding difficult, knowledge of the country is absolutely necessary, and abil...

High Seas and Yankee Gunboats:A Blockade-Running Adventure From the Diary of James Dickson

Savannah sailors aboard the Standard Coastal Georgians relied on blockade runners\u27 success When Southerners James Dickson and Thomas Hernandez went to sea aboard a blockade runner in early 1862, they dreamed of patriotism and profits. They did not expect the hazards to be ...

Old Soldiers Never Die: Grant\u27s Most Unrelenting Foe Was The Press

Ulysses S. Grant, the soldier who won the Civil War and saved the Union, remains an enigma, a wildly popular national figure who was both a monumental success as a soldier and a dismal failure as a civilian. Much has been written about Grant the soldier, but now author Max Byrd cleverly explores the...

One Continuous Fight: the Retreat From Gettysburg and the Pursuit of Lee\u27s Army of Northern Virginia, July 4-14, 1863

Retreat from Gettysburg When the Battle of Gettysburg finally ended on July 3, 1863, more than 50,000 men had been killed and wounded, and General Robert E. Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia had been soundly defeated. And while Gettysburg was the high water mark of the Confederacy, i...

The Most Fearful Ordeal: Original Coverage of the Civil War

The Big Apple\u27s perspective News from the frontlines Twentieth century author George Orwell once wrote, Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper. And, of course, he was right. During the Civil War newspapers were the only form of mas...

Wolf of the Deep: Raphael Semmes and the Notorious Confederate Raider C.S.S. Alabama

Raphl Semmes and the Naval War Winston Churchill once wrote: The advantage of sea-power used offensively is that when a fleet sails no one can be sure where it is going to strike. When Churchill wrote those profound words in 1949, he may have been thinking about a single Confederate wa...

Stalwart War Hero: Rediscovering The Career And Prose Of Orlando B. Willcox

While Robert Garth Scott\u27s claim that this is the largest collection of Civil War papers to surface in half a century may be true, what is certain is that Forgotten Valor is one of the most complete, candid, and compelling memoirs to cover the professional military career of an unsung but s...

Lincoln\u27s Darkest Year: the War in 1862

The Brutal Year of 1862 Certainly more books have been written about Napoleon than Abraham Lincoln, but Civil War historians are doing their best to catch up. This year, the two hundredth anniversary of Lincoln\u27s birth (1809-1865), has seen a marked increase in the number of books abou...

General Ulysses S. Grant: The Soldier and the Man

General Grant His Public and Professional Life For the general who don\u27t scare worth a damn, Ulysses S. Grant\u27s path from reluctant West Point cadet to commander of the Union Army in the Civil War was a rocky one, full of failure, disappointment, and personal struggle. In g...