James M McPherson

Filled with fresh interpretations and information, puncturing old myths and challenging new ones, this fast-paced narrative fully integrates the political, social, and military events that crowded the two decades from the outbreak of one war in Mexico to the ending of another at Appomattox. Packed with drama and analytical insight, the book vividly recounts the momentous episodes that preceded the Civil War: the Dred Scott decision: the Lincoln-Douglas...

The Battle of Antietam, fought on September 17, 1862, was the bloodiest single day in American history, with more than 6,000 soldiers killed--four times the number lost on D-Day, and twice the number killed in the September 11th terrorist attacks. In Crossroads of Freedom, America's most eminent Civil War historian, James M. McPherson, paints a masterful account of this pivotal battle, the events that led up to it, and its aftermath. As McPherson...

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Battle Cry of Freedom, a powerful new reckoning with Jefferson Davis as military commander of the Confederacy shows how Davis shaped and articulated the principal policy of the Confederacy with clarity and force and, like no other chief executive in American history, exercised a tenacious hands-on influence in the shaping of military strategy.

"Winner of the Warren F. Kuehl Prize, Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations" James M. McPherson is the George Henry Davis '86 Professor of History Emeritus at Princeton University. His many books include the Pulitzer Prize-winning Battle Cry of Freedom and the New York Times bestseller Crossroads of Freedom. Originally published in 1964, The Struggle for Equality presents an incisive and vivid look at the abolitionist movement and...

Examines the events and effects of the American Civil War.

"More than 140 years ago, Mark Twain observed that the Civil War had 'uprooted institutions that were centuries old, changed the politics of a people, transformed the social life of half the country, and wrought so profoundly upon the entire national character that the influence cannot be measured short of two or three generations.' In fact, five generations have passed, and Americans are still trying to measure the influence of the immense fratricidal...