"It really matters very little who died last," wrote Civil War historian William Marvel, "but for some reason we seem fascinated with knowing." Drawing on a wide range of sources including correspondence with descendants, this book covers the last living Civil War veterans in each state, providing details of their wartime service as soldiers and sailors and their postwar lives as family men, entrepreneurs, politicians, frontier pioneers and honored veterans.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • An "extraordinary ... profoundly moving" history (The New York Times Book Review) of the American Civil War that reveals the ways that death on such a scale changed not only individual lives but the life of the nation. An estiated 750,000 soldiers lost their lives in the American Civil War. An equivalent proportion of today's population would be seven and a half million. In This Republic of Suffering, Drew Gilpin Faust describes how the survivors managed on a practical level and how a deeply religious culture struggled to reconcile the unprecedented carnage with its belief in a benevolent God. Throughout, the voices of soldiers and their families, of statesmen, generals, preachers, poets, surgeons, nurses, northerners and southerners come together to give us a vivid understanding of the Civil War's most fundamental and widely shared reality. With a new introduction by the author, and a new foreword by Mike Mullen, 17th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Prairie Fire is a guide for Red Counties to survive and thrive during what looks to be another Civil War brewing. Drawing on his experience in Special Forces with counter insurgency, the author creates a step by step road map to making it out alive. Featuring the same gallows humor mixed with real world examples as Concrete Jungle: A Green Beret's Guide to Urban Survival, Prairie Fire is the spiritual successor made specifically for those in rural areas. Food and water, firearms, security, equipment, planning, and tactics are all covered in depth, along with many other topics.
Focusing on the broad span of American social, cultural, and economic change over about 100 years, the book views the Civil War through the eyes of children listening to their father's stories and World War II through the eyes of the same children as grown-up participants.
It is clear that we are in the early stages of a Civil War brought on by the economic collapse of the entitlement state. "Surviving Civil War II " isn't a call to revolt, but a manual on how to survive the war already in progress. This book provides the reader with the historical, economic, political and social background necessary to cope with this modern civil war, which will look nothing like our first Civil War. The first great American Civil War was about ending slavery. Civil War II is about the same thing, except the slave owners in this case are the bureaucrat and entitlement classes who have yoked productive citizens and future generations to a grindstone of $100 trillion of unfunded social liabilities, environmental Gaia worship and bureaucratic strangulation. This time things are different. We cannot get out of our financial and regulatory black hole unless one of two things happens: A) The productive class resigns itself to being tethered to a permanent millstone of egregious taxation and inflation in support of the consumption class of bureaucrats and entitled, or B) There is a Civil War and revolt of the productive class, an economic default on the obligation to support the non-productive classes. One can always argue that big government is good for this or that social welfare - save the children, save the poor, save the racially dispossessed, save the whale. However, the absolute size of the unfunded financial liabilities to support expansive government social largesse (most of which does not realistically help the above social causes), argues that this time things are different. There is no need to spend time arguing about which option will be taken. That which cannot be, cannot be. There is no way to overcome the size of future entitlements except through default by the productive classes on the state's overextended promises. Since option A, the status quo which leaves the current governmental order in place is untenable; we are left with option B, revolt as the path of necessity. But this book is not advocating a war of freedom, an insurrection, uprisings or anything disruptive of any kind as solutions to our current dilemmas. Instead, the forces of disruption are already upon us and at work, so the nature of this book is entirely defensive and reactive, not proactive. This isn't a call to break into someone else's home, steal their property, rape their women and kill the owner (as anarchists might suggest) in the pursuit of some abstract revolutionary freedom. Instead, this is a call to bolt your door, hide your valuables and defend yourself from others who are now trying to get in to your home to rape, pillage and enslave you. In other words, you can't change the devolutionary course that we are on, except at the margins; the Leviathan of state is auguring in of its own colossal weight. If you are smart though, and hunker down tightly enough, you might just get through this upheaval with some health and a little wealth intact. DAXTON BROWN is also the author of "Going Galt: Surviving Economic Armageddon", and "Harry: Money Mob & Influence", a biography of Senator Harry Reid.
"A stunning portrayal of a tragedy endured and survived by women." --David W. Blight, author of Frederick Douglass "Readers expecting hoop-skirted ladies soothing fevered soldiers' brows will not find them here...It explodes the fiction that men fight wars while women idle on the sidelines." --Washington Post "As McCurry points out in this gem of a book, many historians who view the American Civil War as a 'people's war' nevertheless neglect the actions of half the people." --James M. McPherson, author of Battle Cry of Freedom "In this brilliant exposition of the politics of the seemingly personal, McCurry illuminates previously unrecognized dimensions of the war's elemental impact." --Drew Gilpin Faust, author of This Republic of Suffering The idea that women are outside of war is a powerful myth in western culture, one that shaped the Civil War and still determines how we write about it today. Through three dramatic stories that span the course of the war, this groundbreaking reconsideration invites us to see America's bloodiest conflict for what it was: not just a brothers' war but a women's war. When Union soldiers faced the unexpected threat of female partisans, saboteurs, and spies, long held assumptions about the innocence of enemy women were suddenly thrown into question. Stephanie McCurry shows how the case of Clara Judd, imprisoned for treason, transformed the writing of Lieber's Code, leading to lasting changes in the laws of war. Black women's fight for freedom had no place in the Union military's emancipation plans. Facing a massive problem of governance as former slaves fled to their ranks, officers re-classified black women as "soldiers' wives"--whether or not they were married--placing new obstacles on their path to freedom. Finally, Women's War offers a new perspective on the epic human drama of Reconstruction through the story of one slaveholding woman, Gertrude Thomas, whose losses went well beyond the material to intimate matters of family, love, and belonging. Thomas's response mixed grief with rage, recasting white supremacy in new, still relevant, terms.
James Leininger was just two years old when he began having disturbing nightmares that would not stop. He screamed out in the night: 'Plane on fire! Little man can't get out!' While nightmares are common among children, what happened next shocked those around him... James began to reveal details of planes and war tragedies that no two-year-old boy could know. His desperate parents were at a loss to help him until he said three things: 'Corsair', 'Natoma' and 'Jack Larsen'. From these tantalising clues, James's parents travelled thousands of miles and spent many long years piecing together these facts to try and find an answer that could end his torment. Finally, despite his mother's fears and his father's staunch Christian beliefs, they found only one possibility to the endless coincidences that surrounded every detail in James's life – that their son was reliving the past life of a World War II fighter pilot. Their touching story is one that will challenge sceptics and confirm the beliefs of those who already believe in life after death.
In 1864, six hundred Confederate prisoners of war, all officers, were taken out of a prison camp in Delaware and transported to South Carolina, where most were confined in a Union stockade prison on Morris Island. They were placed in front of two Union forts as "human shields" during the siege of Charleston and exposed to a fearful barrage of artillery fire from Confederate forts. Many of these men would suffer an even worse ordeal at Union-held Fort Pulaski near Savannah, Georgia, where they were subjected to severe food rationing as retaliatory policy. Author and historian Karen Stokes uses the prisoners' writings to relive the courage, fraternity and struggle of the "Immortal 600."
