Best American Civil War Biographies Books
Here you will get Best American Civil War Biographies Books For you.This is an up-to-date list of recommended books for you.
1. On Juneteenth
Author: by Annette Gordon-Reed
Liveright (May 4, 2021)
English
152 pages
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERThe essential, sweeping story of Juneteenth’s integral importance to American history, as told by a Pulitzer Prizewinning historian and Texas native. Weaving together American history, dramatic family chronicle, and searing episodes of memoir, Annette Gordon-Reed’s On Juneteenth provides a historian’s view of the country’s long road to Juneteenth, recounting both its origins in Texas and the enormous hardships that African-Americans have endured in the century since, from Reconstruction through Jim Crow and beyond.
All too aware of the stories of cowboys, ranchers, and oilmen that have long dominated the lore of the Lone Star State, Gordon-Reedherself a Texas native and the descendant of enslaved people brought to Texas as early as the 1820sforges a new and profoundly truthful narrative of her home state, with implications for us all.
Combining personal anecdotes with poignant facts gleaned from the annals of American history, Gordon-Reed shows how, from the earliest presence of Black people in Texas to the day in Galveston on June 19, 1865, when Major General Gordon Granger announced the end of legalized slavery in the state, African-Americans played an integral role in the Texas story.
2. A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier
Author: by Ishmael Beah
0374531269
Sarah Crichton Books
English
This is how wars are fought now: by children, hopped-up on drugs and wielding AK-47s. Children have become soldiers of choice. In the more than fifty conflicts going on worldwide, it is estimated that there are some 300,000 child soldiers.
Ishmael Beah used to be one of them. What is war like through the eyes of a child soldier? How does one become a killer?How does one stop? Child soldiers have been profiled by journalists, and novelists have struggled to imagine their lives.
But until now, there has not been a first-person account from someone who came through this hell and survived. In A Long Way Gone, Beah, now twenty-five years old, tells a riveting story: how at the age of twelve, he fled attacking rebels and wandered a land rendered unrecognizable by violence.
By thirteen, he’d been picked up by the government army, and Beah, at heart a gentle boy, found that he was capable of truly terrible acts. This is a rare and mesmerizing account, told with real literary force and heartbreaking honesty.”My new friends have begun to suspect I haven’t told them the full story of my life.
3. Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner's Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause
Author: by Ty Seidule
English
304 pages
1250239265
“Ty Seidule scorches us with the truth and rivets us with his fierce sense of moral urgency.” -Ron ChernowIn a forceful but humane narrative, former soldier and head of the West Point history department Ty Seidule’s Robert E. Lee and Me challenges the myths and lies of the Confederate legacyand explores why some of this country’s oldest wounds have never healed.
Ty Seidule grew up revering Robert E.Lee. From his southern childhood to his service in the U.S. Army, every part of his life reinforced the Lost Cause myth: that Lee was the greatest man who ever lived, and that the Confederates were underdogs who lost the Civil War with honor.
Now, as a retired brigadier general and Professor Emeritus of History at West Point, his view has radically changed. From a soldier, a scholar, and a southerner, Ty Seidule believes that American history demands a reckoning. In a unique blend of history and reflection, Seidule deconstructs the truth about the Confederacythat its undisputed primary goal was the subjugation and enslavement of Black Americansand directly challenges the idea of honoring those who labored to preserve that system and committed treason in their failed attempt to achieve it.
4. Grant
Author: by Ron Chernow
Penguin Books
English
1104 pages
The #1 New York Times bestseller and New York Times Book Review 10 Best Books of 2017Eminently readable but thick with import … Grant hits like a Mack truck of knowledge. Ta-Nehisi Coates, The AtlanticPulitzer Prize winner Ron Chernow returns with a sweeping and dramatic portrait of one of our most compelling generals and presidents, Ulysses S.Grant.Ulysses S.
Grant’s life has typically been misunderstood. All too often he is caricatured as a chronic loser and an inept businessman, or as the triumphant but brutal Union general of the Civil War. But these stereotypes don’t come close to capturing him, as Chernow shows in his masterful biography, the first to provide a complete understanding of the general and president whose fortunes rose and fell with dizzying speed and frequency.
Before the Civil War, Grant was flailing. His business ventures had ended dismally, and despite distinguished service in the Mexican War he ended up resigning from the army in disgrace amid recurring accusations of drunkenness. But in war, Grant began to realize his remarkable potential, soaring through the ranks of the Union army, prevailing at the battle of Shiloh and in the Vicksburg campaign, and ultimately defeating the legendary Confederate general Robert E.Lee.
5. Code Talker: The First and Only Memoir By One of the Original Navajo Code Talkers of WWII
Author: by Chester Nez
Dutton Caliber
English
320 pages
The first and only memoir by one of the original Navajo code talkers of WWII. His name wasn’t Chester Nez. That was the English name he was assigned in kindergarten. And in boarding school at Fort Defiance, he was punished for speaking his native language, as the teachers sought to rid him of his culture and traditions.
But discrimination didn’t stop Chester from answering the call to defend his country after Pearl Harbor, for the Navajo have always been warriors, and his upbringing on a New Mexico reservation gave him the strengthboth physical and mentalto excel as a marine.
During World War II, the Japanese had managed to crack every code the United States used. But when the Marines turned to its Navajo recruits to develop and implement a secret military language, they created the only unbroken code in modern warfareand helped assure victory for the United States over Japan in the South Pacific.
INCLUDES THE ACTUAL NAVAJO CODE AND RARE PICTURES
6. Grant's Tomb: The Epic Death of Ulysses S. Grant and the Making of an American Pantheon
Author: by Louis L. Picone
B08C1G3KX5
Arcade (February 16, 2021)
February 16, 2021
The moving story of Ulysses S. Grant’s final battle, and the definitive account of the national memorial honoring him as one of America’s most enduring heroes The final resting place of Ulysses S. Grant, the victorious general in the Civil War and the eighteenth president of the United States, is a colossal neoclassical tomb located in the most dynamic city in the country.
It is larger than the final resting place of any other president or any other person in America. Since its creation, the popularity and condition of this monument, built to honor the man and what he represented to a grateful nation at the time of his death, a mere twenty years after the end of the Civil War, have reflected not only Grant’s legacy in the public mind but also the state of New York City and of the Union.
In this fascinating, deeply researched book, presidential historian Louis L. Picone recounts the full story. He begins with Grant’s heroic final battle during the last year of his life, to complete his memoirs in order to secure his family’s financial future while contending with painful, incurable cancer.
7. The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family
Author: by Annette Gordon-Reed
English
816 pages
0393337766
Winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize: “[A] commanding and important book.” Jill Lepore, The New YorkerThis epic worknamed a best book of the year by the Washington Post, Time, the Los Angeles Times, Amazon, the San Francisco Chronicle, and a notable book by the New York Timestells the story of the Hemingses, whose close blood ties to our third president had been systematically expunged from American history until very recently.
Now, historian and legal scholar Annette Gordon-Reed traces the Hemings family from its origins in Virginia in the 1700s to the family’s dispersal after Jefferson’s death in 1826.37 illustrations
8. Meade at Gettysburg: A Study in Command (Civil War America)
Author: by Kent Masterson Brown
English
488 pages
1469661993
Although he took command of the Army of the Potomac only three days before the first shots were fired at Gettysburg, Union general George G. Meade guided his forces to victory in the Civil War’s most pivotal battle. Commentators often dismiss Meade when discussing the great leaders of the Civil War.
But in this long-anticipated book, Kent Masterson Brown draws on an expansive archive to reappraise Meade’s leadership during the Battle of Gettysburg. Using Meade’s published and unpublished papers alongside diaries, letters, and memoirs of fellow officers and enlisted men, Brown highlights how Meade’s rapid advance of the army to Gettysburg on July 1, his tactical control and coordination of the army in the desperate fighting on July 2, and his determination to hold his positions on July 3 insured victory.
Brown argues that supply deficiencies, brought about by the army’s unexpected need to advance to Gettysburg, were crippling. In spite of that, Meade pursued Lee’s retreating army rapidly, and his decision not to blindly attack Lee’s formidable defenses near Williamsport on July 13 was entirely correct in spite of subsequent harsh criticism.
9. Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln
Author: by Doris Kearns Goodwin
English
944 pages
0743270754
Winner of the Lincoln Prize Acclaimed historian Doris Kearns Goodwin illuminates Lincoln’s political genius in this highly original work, as the one-term congressman and prairie lawyer rises from obscurity to prevail over three gifted rivals of national reputation to become president.
On May 18, 1860, William H.Seward, Salmon P. Chase, Edward Bates, and Abraham Lincoln waited in their hometowns for the results from the Republican National Convention in Chicago. When Lincoln emerged as the victor, his rivals were dismayed and angry. Throughout the turbulent 1850s, each had energetically sought the presidency as the conflict over slavery was leading inexorably to secession and civil war.
That Lincoln succeeded, Goodwin demonstrates, was the result of a character that had been forged by experiences that raised him above his more privileged and accomplished rivals. He won because he possessed an extraordinary ability to put himself in the place of other men, to experience what they were feeling, to understand their motives and desires.
10. Killing Lincoln: The Shocking Assassination that Changed America Forever (Bill O'Reilly's Killing Series)
Author: by Bill O'Reilly
1250012163
St. Martin's Griffin
English
A riveting historical narrative of the heart-stopping events surrounding the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, and the first work of history from mega-bestselling author Bill O’ReillyThe iconic anchor of The O’Reilly Factor recounts one of the most dramatic stories in American historyhow one gunshot changed the country forever.
In the spring of 1865, the bloody saga of America’s Civil War finally comes to an end after a series of increasingly harrowing battles. President Abraham Lincoln’s generous terms for Robert E. Lee’s surrender are devised to fulfill Lincoln’s dream of healing a divided nation, with the former Confederates allowed to reintegrate into American society.
But one man and his band of murderous accomplices, perhaps reaching into the highest ranks of the U.S. Government, are not appeased. In the midst of the patriotic celebrations in Washington D.C., John Wilkes Boothcharismatic ladies’ man and impenitent racistmurders Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre.
11. Jim Bridger: Trailblazer of the American West
Author: by Jerry Enzler
English
384 pages
0806168633
Even among iconic frontiersmen like John C. Frmont, Kit Carson, and Jedediah Smith, Jim Bridger stands out. A mountain man of the American West, straddling the fur trade era and the age of exploration, he lived the life legends are made of.
His adventures are fit for remaking into the tall tales Bridger himself liked to tell. Here, in a biography that finally gives this outsize character his due, Jerry Enzler takes this frontiersman’s full measure for the first timeand tells a story that would do Jim Bridger proud.
Born in 1804 and orphaned at thirteen, Bridger made his first western foray in 1822, traveling up the Missouri River with Mike Fink and a hundred enterprising young men to trap beaver. At twenty he discovered the Great Salt Lake. At twenty-one he was the first to paddle the Bighorn River’s Bad Pass.
At twenty-two he explored the wonders of Yellowstone. In the following years, he led trapping brigades into Blackfeet territory; guided expeditions of Smithsonian scientists, topographical engineers, and army leaders; and, though he could neither read nor write, mapped the tribal boundaries for the Great Indian Treaty of 1851.
12. Rebel Yell: The Violence, Passion, and Redemption of Stonewall Jackson
Author: by S. C. Gwynne
Scribner
English
688 pages
Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the epic New York Times bestselling account of how Civil War general Thomas Stonewall Jackson became a great and tragic national hero. Stonewall Jackson has long been a figure of legend and romance.
As much as any person in the Confederate pantheoneven Robert E. Leehe embodies the romantic Southern notion of the virtuous lost cause. Jackson is also considered, without argument, one of our country’s greatest military figures. In April 1862, however, he was merely another Confederate general in an army fighting what seemed to be a losing cause.
But by June he had engineered perhaps the greatest military campaign in American history and was one of the most famous men in the Western world. Jackson’s strategic innovations shattered the conventional wisdom of how war was waged; he was so far ahead of his time that his techniques would be studied generations into the future.
In his magnificent Rebel YellS.C. Gwynne brings Jackson ferociously to life (New York Newsday) in a swiftly vivid narrative that is rich with battle lore, biographical detail, and intense conflict among historical figures. Gwynne delves deep into Jackson’s private life and traces Jackson’s brilliant twenty-four-month career in the Civil War, the period that encompasses his rise from obscurity to fame and legend; his stunning effect on the course of the war itself; and his tragic death, which caused both North and South to grieve the loss of a remarkable American hero.
13. Lincoln in Private: What His Most Personal Reflections Tell Us About Our Greatest President
Author: by Ronald C. White
Random House (May 4, 2021)
English
352 pages
An intimate character portrait and fascinating inquiry into the basis of Lincoln’s energetic, curious mind. The Wall Street Journal From the New York Times bestselling author of A. Lincoln and American Ulysses, a revelatory glimpse into the intellectual journey of our sixteenth president through his private notes to himself, explored together here for the first timeA deeply private man, shut off even to those who worked closely with him, Abraham Lincoln often captured his best thoughts, as he called them, in short notes to himself.
He would work out his personal stances on the biggest issues of the day, never expecting anyone to see these frank, unpolished pieces of writing, which he’d then keep close at hand, in desk drawers and even in his top hat.
The profound importance of these notes has been overlooked, because the originals are scattered across several different archives and have never before been brought together and examined as a coherent whole. Now, renowned Lincoln historian Ronald C. White walks readers through twelve of Lincoln’s most important private notes, showcasing our greatest president’s brilliance and empathy, but also his very human anxieties and ambitions.
14. A Glorious Liberty: Frederick Douglass and the Fight for an Antislavery Constitution
Author: by Damon Root
English
200 pages
1640122354
In this timely and provocative book, Damon Root reveals how Frederick Douglass’s fight for an antislavery Constitution helped to shape the course of American history in the nineteenth century and beyond. At a time when the principles of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence were under assault, Frederick Douglass picked up their banner, championing inalienable rights for all, regardless of race.
When Americans were killing each other on the battlefield, Douglass fought for a cause greater than the mere preservation of the Union. No war but an Abolition war, he maintained. No peace but an Abolition peace. In the aftermath of the Civil War, when state and local governments were violating the rights of the recently emancipated, Douglass preached the importance of the ballot-box, the jury-box, and the cartridge-box in the struggle against Jim Crow.
Frederick Douglass, the former slave who had secretly taught himself how to read, would teach the American people a thing or two about the true meaning of the Constitution. This is the story of a fundamental debate that goes to the very heart of America’s founding idealsa debate that is still very much with us today.
15. The Civil War Trilogy Box Set: With American Homer: Reflections on Shelby Foote and His Classic The Civil War: A Narrative (Modern Library)
Author: by Shelby Foote
Modern Library
English
2984 pages
Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best nonfiction books of all timeOn the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, the Modern Library publishes Shelby Foote’s three-volume masterpiece in a new boxed set including three hardcovers and a new trade paperback, American Homer: Reflections on Shelby Foote and His Classic Civil War: A Narrative, edited by and with an introduction from Pulitzer Prize winner Jon Meacham and including essays by Michael Beschloss, Ken Burns, Annette Gordon-Reed, and others.
Random House publisher Bennett Cerf commissioned southern novelist Shelby Foote to write a short, one-volume history of the American Civil War. Thirty years and a million and a half words laterevery word having been written out longhand with nib pens dipped into inkFoote published the third and final volume of what has become the classic narrative of that epic war.
As he approached the end of the final volume, Foote recounted this scene in a letter to his friend, the novelist Walker Percy: I killed Lincoln last weekSaturday, at noon. While I was doing it (he had his chest arched up, holding his last breath to let it out) some halfassed doctor came to the door with vols I and II under his arm, wanting me to autograph them for his son for Xmas.
16. The Complete Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant
Author: by Ulysses S. Grant
English
552 pages
148121604X
General Grant’s personal memoirs are a must read for all Civil War buffs and those even remotely interested in history. This book, which includes both Volume I and II, articulately spells out the military career of one of the United States’ greatest generals.
Grant’s memoirs are well-written, thoughtful, insightful, and offer more than a glimpse into the mind of U.S.Grant. Volume I opens with a heartfelt preface where Grant explains how his diminishing health pushed him to complete this work and “asking no favor but hoping (his remarks) will meet the approval of the reader.” They most definitely do.
Following the preface, the reader is given a (very) short review of his early childhood, life at West Point, and early Army life. The next one hundred pages are dedicated to the Mexican War followed by his resignation from the military and civilian life in Illinois.
The remainder of Volume I and all of Volume II extensively deal with the war between the states. Volume I (written before Grant realized he was critically ill) is rich in detail of the various military campaigns and his ascension through the military ranks.
