Homer Lea
Homer Lea

Author: Lawrence M. Kaplan

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Published: 2010-10-01

Total Pages: 346

ISBN-13: 0813126177

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As a five-feet-three-inch hunchback who weighed about 100 pounds, Homer Lea (1876–1912), was an unlikely candidate for life on the battlefield, yet he became a world-renowned military hero. Homer Lea: American Soldier of Fortune paints a revealing portrait of a diminutive yet determined man who never earned his valor on the field of battle, but left an indelible mark on his times. Lawrence M. Kaplan draws from extensive research to illuminate the life of a "man of mystery," while also yielding a clearer understanding of the early twentieth-century Chinese underground reform and revolutionary movements. Lea's career began in the inner circles of a powerful Chinese movement in San Francisco that led him to a generalship during the Boxer Rebellion. Fixated with commanding his own Chinese army, Lea's inflated aspirations were almost always dashed by reality. Although he never achieved the leadership role for which he strived, he became a trusted advisor to revolutionary leader Dr. Sun Yat-sen during the 1911 revolution that overthrew the Manchu Dynasty. As an author, Lea garnered fame for two books on geopolitics: The Valor of Ignorance, which examined weaknesses in the American defenses and included dire warnings of an impending Japanese-American war, and The Day of the Saxon, which predicted the decline of the British Empire. More than a character study, Homer Lea provides insight into the establishment and execution of underground reform and revolutionary movements within U.S. immigrant communities and in southern China, as well as early twentieth-century geopolitical thought.

The Man Who Tried to Burn New York
The Man Who Tried to Burn New York

Author: Nat Brandt

Publisher: iUniverse

Published: 1999-08

Total Pages: 314

ISBN-13: 1583483462

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In a desperate attempt to bring the North to the bargaining table and end what was to the South a losing war, Confederate spies in Canada launch a plot to burn New York City on the day after Thanksgiving in 1864. A group of rebel officers, escapees from Union prison camps who had fled to neutral Canada for safety, reach the city by train and, in disguise, take rooms in various hotels in downtown New York. They fail but only because, unknowingly, they use a chemical mixture that requires oxygen. Smoke from the incipient fires they set is quickly discovered and the fires put out. In the dramatic search for the conspirators that follows, only one of them is caught, Robert Cobb Kennedy, a captain from Louisiana. He is tried, convicted and hanged... the last rebel executed by the North before the end of the war. The Man Who Tried to Burn New York won the Douglas Southall Freeman History Award in 1987.

A Civil War Soldier of Christ and Country
A Civil War Soldier of Christ and Country

Author: John Rodgers Meigs

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 348

ISBN-13: 0252030761

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This collection of letters and documents offers a rare glimpse into a young officer's interesting but short life. Mary A. Giunta's A Civil War Soldier of Christ and Country tells the story of the relationships between the headstrong John Rodgers Meigs and his family and friends; his heartwarming eagerness to please his demanding parents; his West Point experiences that include a meeting with Abraham Lincoln; and his life as a combatant in the Civil War. John Rodgers Meigs was the son of Union Quartermaster General Montgomery C. Meigs, and his official correspondence reveals much about his duties as a military engineer and aide-de-camp to Union generals. The private correspondence between him and his father and mother is especially compelling. Approximately forty of the letters were written in an early version of Pitman shorthand and are here transcribed for the first time. Collectively, they provide an intimate picture of the young Meigs, uncover the concerns of a family with high expectations, and offer a unique look at a devastating war.

Civil War High Commands
Civil War High Commands

Author: John Eicher

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2002-06-01

Total Pages: 1062

ISBN-13: 9780804780353

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Based on nearly five decades of research, this magisterial work is a biographical register and analysis of the people who most directly influenced the course of the Civil War, its high commanders. Numbering 3,396, they include the presidents and their cabinet members, state governors, general officers of the Union and Confederate armies (regular, provisional, volunteers, and militia), and admirals and commodores of the two navies. Civil War High Commands will become a cornerstone reference work on these personalities and the meaning of their commands, and on the Civil War itself. Errors of fact and interpretation concerning the high commanders are legion in the Civil War literature, in reference works as well as in narrative accounts. The present work brings together for the first time in one volume the most reliable facts available, drawn from more than 1,000 sources and including the most recent research. The biographical entries include complete names, birthplaces, important relatives, education, vocations, publications, military grades, wartime assignments, wounds, captures, exchanges, paroles, honors, and place of death and interment. In addition to its main component, the biographies, the volume also includes a number of essays, tables, and synopses designed to clarify previously obscure matters such as the definition of grades and ranks; the difference between commissions in regular, provisional, volunteer, and militia services; the chronology of military laws and executive decisions before, during, and after the war; and the geographical breakdown of command structures. The book is illustrated with 84 new diagrams of all the insignias used throughout the war and with 129 portraits of the most important high commanders.