Bearing the Torch stands as a comprehensive history of the University of Tennessee, replete with anecdotes and vignettes of interest to anyone interested in UT, from the administrators and chancellors to students and alums, and even to the Vols fans whose familiarity with the school comes mainly from the sports page. It is also a biography of a school whose history reflects that of its state and its nation. The institution that began as Blount College in 1794 in a frontier village called Knoxville exemplifies the relationship between education and American history. This is the first scholarly history of UT since 1984. T. R. C. Hutton not only provides a much-needed update, but also seeks to present a social history of the university, fully integrating historical context and showing how the volume's central "character"-the university itself-reflects historical themes and concerns. For example, Hutton shows how the school's development was hampered in the early nineteenth century by stingy state funding (a theme that also appears in subsequent decades) and Jacksonian fears that publicly funded higher education equaled elite privilege. The institution nearly disappeared as the Civil War raged in a divided region, but then it flourished thanks to policies that never could have happened without the war. In the twentieth century, students embraced dramatic social changes as the university wrestled with race, gender, and other important issues. In the Cold War era, UT became a successful research institution and entered into a deep partnership with Oak Ridge National Laboratories that persists to this day. All the while UT athletics experienced the highs of national championships and the lows of lawsuits and losing seasons. UT is a university with a universe of historical experiences. The University of Tennessee's story has always been defined by inclusion and exclusion, and the school has triumphed when it practiced the former and failed when it took part in the latter. Bearing the Torch traces that ongoing process, richly detailing the University's contributions to what one president, Joseph Estabrook, called the "diffusion of knowledge among the people."

By the acclaimed author of the classic "Patriots "and "Union 1812, "this major work of narrative history portrays four of the most turbulent decades in the growth of the American nation.
After the War of 1812, President Andrew Jackson and his successors led the country to its manifest destiny across the continent. But that expansion unleashed new regional hostilities that led inexorably to Civil War. The earliest victims were the Cherokees and other tribes of the southeast who had lived and prospered for centuries on land that became Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia.
Jackson, who had first gained fame as an Indian fighter, decreed that the Cherokees be forcibly removed from their rich cotton fields to make way for an exploding white population. His policy set off angry debates in Congress and protests from such celebrated Northern writers as Ralph Waldo Emerson. Southern slave owners saw that defense of the Cherokees as linked to a growing abolitionist movement. They understood that the protests would not end with protecting a few Indian tribes.
Langguth tells the dramatic story of the desperate fate of the Cherokees as they were driven out of Georgia at bayonet point by U.S. Army forces led by General Winfield Scott. At the center of the story are the American statesmen of the day--Henry Clay, John Quincy Adams, John C. Calhoun--and those Cherokee leaders who tried to save their people--Major Ridge, John Ridge, Elias Boudinot, and John Ross.
"Driven West "presents wrenching firsthand accounts of the forced march across the Mississippi along a path of misery and death that the Cherokees called the Trail of Tears. Survivors reached the distant Oklahoma territory that Jackson had marked out for them, only to find that the bloodiest days of their ordeal still awaited them.
In time, the fierce national collision set off by Jackson's Indian policy would encompass the Mexican War, the bloody frontier wars over the expansion of slavery, the doctrines of nullification and secession, and, finally, the Civil War itself.
In his masterly narrative of this saga, Langguth captures the idealism and betrayals of headstrong leaders as they steered a raw and vibrant nation in the rush to its destiny.

The Battle of Peach Tree Creek marked the beginning of the end for the Confederacy, for it turned the page from the patient defence displayed by General Joseph E. Johnston to the bold offense called upon by his replacement, General John Bell Hood. Until this point in the campaign, the Confederates had fought primarily in the defensive from behind earthworks, forcing Federal commander William T. Sherman to either assault fortified lines, or go around them in flanking moves. At Peach Tree Creek, the roles would be reversed for the first time, as Southerners charged Yankee lines. The Gate City, as Atlanta has been called, was in many ways the capstone to the Confederacy's growing military-industrial complex and was the transportation hub of the fledgling nation. For the South it had to be held. For the North it had to be taken. With General Johnston removed for failing to parry the Yankee thrust into Georgia, the fate of Atlanta and the Confederacy now rested on the shoulders of thirty-three-year-old Hood, whose body had been torn by the war. Peach Tree Creek was the first of three battles in eight days in which Hood led the Confederate Army to desperate, but unsuccessful, attempts to repel the Federals encircling Atlanta. This particular battle started the South on a downward spiral from which she would never recover. After Peach Tree Creek and its companion battles for Atlanta, the clear-hearing Southerner could hear the death throes of the Confederacy. It was the first nail in the coffin of Atlanta and Dixie.