"From the Man Booker finalist and bestselling author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves comes an epic and intimate novel about the family behind one of the most infamous figures in American history: John Wilkes Booth. In 1822, a secret family moves into a secret cabin some thirty miles northeast of Baltimore, to farm, to hide, and to bear ten children over the course of the next sixteen years. Junius Booth--breadwinner, celebrated Shakespearean...

"From the New York Times bestselling author of The Last Castle and The Girls of Atomic City comes the fascinating story of America's national day of thanks and of the tenacious and inspiring Sarah Josepha Hale, a nineteenth-century woman who made establishing this holiday her life's mission-one brought to fruition by the wise support of Abraham Lincoln"-- From Ancient Rome through 21st-century America, bestselling author Denise Kiernan brings us...

An illuminating study of the American struggle to comprehend the meaning and practicalities of death in the face of the unprecedented carnage of the Civil War. During the war, approximately 620,000 soldiers lost their lives. An equivalent proportion of today's population would be six million. This book explores the impact of this enormous death toll from every angle: material, political, intellectual, and spiritual. Historian Faust delineates the...

Even before shots were fired at Fort Sumter, slaves recognized that their bondage was at the root of the war, and they began running to the Union army. By the war's end, nearly half a million had taken refuge behind Union lines in improvised "contraband camps". These were crowded and dangerous places, with conditions approaching those of a humanitarian crisis, yet families and individuals took unimaginable risks to reach them, and they became the...

This book explores the Southern home front during the Civil War.

Hidden amongst the photographs, uniforms, revolvers, and war medals of the Civil War are the remarkable stories of some of the most unlikely heroes--women. North, South, black, white, Native American, immigrant--the women in these micro-drama biographies are wives, mothers, sisters, and friends whose purposes ranged from supporting husbands and sons during wartime to counseling President Lincoln on strategy, from tending to the wounded on the battlefield...

"Describes the disgusting details of daily life during the U.S. Civil War"--

First book to cover all aspects of sexuality during the Civil War. Based on area original sources, including the soldiers' jokes, songs, letters, and diaries.

The American Civil War affected more than just the soldiers on the battlefield-families, businesses, and schools all felt the influence of the terrible conflict. Using a variety of perspectives to introduce readers to a country at war, this volume will engage readers while providing essential, factual information. Readers will discover this often-overlooked side of war, including cities and farms, and the lives of those on the Union and those on the...

"Antebellum America was a deeply troubled country, divided by partisan gridlock and ideological warfare. There were angry voices in the streets and the statehouses, and furious clashes over race and immigration, coupled with a growing chasm between immense wealth and desperate poverty. The Civil War that followed brought America to the brink of self-destruction. But it also created a new country from the ruins of the old one, bolder and stronger than...