First published in 1974, The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock grew out of a magazine article coauthored by Jan Reid. His first book was a sensation in Texas. It portrayed an Austin-based live music explosion variously described as progressive country, cosmic cowboys, and outlaw country. The book has been hailed as a model of how to write about popular music and the life of performing musicians. Written in nine months, Reid's account focuses on predecessors of the 1960s and the swarm of newborn venues, the most enduring one the justly famed Armadillo World Headquarters; profiles of singer-songwriters that included Jerry Jeff Walker, Michael Martin Murphey, Steven Fromholz, B.W. Stevenson, Willis Alan Ramsey, Bobby Bridger, Rusty Wier, Kinky Friedman, and the one who became an international star and one of America's most treasured performers, Willie Nelson; and the rowdy heat-stricken debut of Willie's Fourth of July Picnics. Though Reid has resisted the writerly trend of specialization in his career, his debut brought him back to popular music and musicians' lives in Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs, Texas Tornado: The Music and Times of Doug Sahm, and now a related novel, The Song Leader. The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock is a landmark of popular culture in Texas and the Southwest. Readers will be glad to once more have it back.

From the founder of IrishCentral, a fascinating piece of Civil War history: Lincoln's relationship with the immigrants arriving in America to escape the Irish famine. "If you're a Lincoln fan like me, you'll love this book." -Liam Neeson When Pickett charged at Gettysburg, it was the all-Irish Pennsylvania 69th who held fast while the surrounding regiments broke and ran. And it was Abraham Lincoln who, a year earlier at Malvern Hill, picked up a corner of one of the Irish colors, kissed it, and said, "God bless the Irish flag." Renowned Irish-American journalist Niall O'Dowd gives unprecedented insight into a relationship that began with mutual disdain. Lincoln saw the Irish as instinctive supporters of the Democratic opposition, while the Irish saw the English landlord class in Lincoln's Republicans. But that dynamic would evolve, and the Lincoln whose first political actions included intimidating Irish voters at the polls would eventually hire Irish nannies and donate to the Irish famine fund. When he was voted into the White House, Lincoln surrounded himself with Irish staff, much to the chagrin of a senior aide who complained about the Hibernian cabal. And the Irish would repay Lincoln's faith-their numbers and courage would help swing the Civil War in his favor, and among them would be some of his best generals and staunchest advocates.

The first full investigation of John Brown's trusted co-conspirator and his betrayal of the doomed Harper's Ferry raiders John Brown's Spy tells the nearly unknown story of John E. Cook, the person John Brown trusted most with the details of his plans to capture the Harper's Ferry armory in 1859. Cook was a poet, a marksman, a boaster, a dandy, a fighter, and a womanizer-as well as a spy. In a life of only thirty years, he studied law in Connecticut, fought border ruffians in Kansas, served as an abolitionist mole in Virginia, took white hostages during the Harper's Ferry raid, and almost escaped to freedom. For ten days after the infamous raid, he was the most hunted man in America with a staggering $1,000 bounty on his head. Tracking down the unexplored circumstances of John Cook's life and disastrous end, Steven Lubet is the first to uncover the full extent of Cook's contributions to Brown's scheme. Without Cook's participation, the author contends, Brown might never have been able to launch the insurrection that sparked the Civil War. Had Cook remained true to the cause, history would have remembered him as a hero. Instead, when Cook was captured and brought to trial, he betrayed John Brown and named fellow abolitionists in a full confession that earned him a place in history's tragic pantheon of disgraced turncoats.

In DIXIE BETRAYED, David Eicher reveals for the first time the story of the political conspiracy, discord and dysfunction in Richmond that cost the South the Civil War. Drawing on a wide variety of previously unexploited sources, Eicher shows how President Jefferson Davis fought not only with the Confederate House and Senate and with State Governers but also with his own vice-president and secretary of state. He interfered with his generals in the field, micro-managing their campaigns and playing favourites, ignoring the chain of command. He trusted a number of men who were utterly incompetent. Secession didn't end with the breakaway of the Confederacy and Davis' election as president; some states, led by their governors, debated setting themselves up as separate nations, further undermining efforts to conduct a unified war effort. Sure to be one of the most provocative and controversial books about the Civil War to be published in decades, DIXIE BETRAYED blasts away previous theories with the force of a cannonball and the grace of a gentleman.

When Confederate troops fired on Fort Sumter in April of 1861, Walt Whitman declared it "the volcanic upheaval of the nation"-the bloody inception of a war that would dramatically alter the shape and character of American culture along with its political, racial, and social landscape. Prior to the war, America's leading writers had been integral to helping the young nation imagine itself, assert its beliefs, and realize its immense potential. When the Civil War erupted, it forced them to witness not only unimaginable human carnage on the battlefield, but also the disintegration of the foundational symbolic order they had helped to create. The war demanded new frameworks for understanding the world and new forms of communication that could engage with the immensity of the conflict. It fostered both social and cultural experimentation. From Battlefields Rising explores the profound impact of the war on writers including Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emily Dickinson, and Frederick Douglass. As the writers of the time grappled with the war's impact on the individual and the national psyche, their responses multiplied and transmuted. Whitman's poetry and prose, for example, was chastened and deepened by his years spent ministering to wounded soldiers; off the battlefield, the anguish of war would come to suffuse the austere, elliptical poems that Emily Dickinson was writing from afar; and Hawthorne was rendered silent by his reading of military reports and talks with soldiers. Calling into question every prior presumption and ideal, the war forever changed America's early idealism-and consequently its literature-into something far more ambivalent and raw. Sketching an absorbing group portrait of the period's most important writers, From Battlefields Rising flashes with forgotten historical details and elegant new ideas. It alters previous perceptions about the evolution of American literature and how Americans have understood and expressed their common history.

Abraham Lincoln grew up in the long shadow of the Founding Fathers. Seeking an intellectual and emotional replacement for his own taciturn father, Lincoln turned to the great men of the founding--Washington, Paine, Jefferson--and their great documents--the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution--for knowledge, guidance, inspiration, and purpose. Out of the power vacuum created by their passing, Lincoln emerged from among his peers as the true inheritor of the Founders' mantle, bringing their vision to bear on the Civil War and the question of slavery.
In "Founders' Son," celebrated historian Richard Brookhiser presents a compelling new biography of Abraham Lincoln that highlights his lifelong struggle to carry on the work of the Founding Fathers. Following Lincoln from his humble origins in Kentucky to his assassination in Washington, D.C., Brookhiser shows us every side of the man: laborer, lawyer, congressman, president; storyteller, wit, lover of ribald jokes; depressive, poet, friend, visionary. And he shows that despite his many roles and his varied life, Lincoln returned time and time again to the Founders. They were rhetorical and political touchstones, the basis of his interest in politics, and the lodestars guiding him as he navigated first Illinois politics and then the national scene.
But their legacy with not sufficient. As the Civil War lengthened and the casualties mounted Lincoln wrestled with one more paternal figure--God the Father--to explain to himself, and to the nation, why ending slavery had come at such a terrible price.
Bridging the rich and tumultuous period from the founding of the United States to the Civil War, "Founders' Son" is unlike any Lincoln biography to date. Penetrating in its insight, elegant in its prose, and gripping in its vivid recreation of Lincoln's roving mind at work, this book allows us to think anew about the first hundred years of American history, and shows how we can, like Lincoln, apply the legacy of the Founding Fathers to our times.

At 3 a.m. on February 21, 1865, a band of 65 Confederate horsemen slowly made its way down Greene Street in Cumberland, Maryland. Thinking the riders were disguised Union scouts, the few Union soldiers out that bitterly cold morning paid little attention to them. In the meantime, over 3,500 Yankee soldiers peacefully slept. Within thirty minutes McNeill's Rangers had kidnapped Union generals George Crook and Benjamin Kelley from their hotels and spirited them out of town. Despite a determined effort by Union pursuers to intercept the kidnappers, the Rangers reached safety deep in the South Fork River Valley, over fifty miles away. Not long afterward, the generals were shipped to Richmond's Libby Prison. Southern general John B. Gordon later called the mission "one of the most thrilling incidents of the war." In September 1862, John Hanson McNeill recruited a company of troopers for Col. John D. Imboden's 1st Virginia Partisan Rangers. In early 1863, Imboden took most of his men into the regular army, but McNeill and his son Jesse offered their men an opportunity to continue in independent service; seventeen soldiers joined them. In the coming months, other young hotspurs enlisted in McNeill's Rangers. Operating mostly in the Potomac Highlands of what is now eastern West Virginia, the Rangers bedeviled the Union troops guarding the B&O Railroad line. Favoring American Indian battle tactics, they ambushed patrols, attacked wagon trains, and heavily damaged railroad property and rolling stock. Phantoms of the South Fork is the thrilling result of Steve French's carefully researched study of primary source material, including diaries, memoirs, letters, and period newspaper articles. Additionally, he traveled throughout West Virginia, western Maryland, southern Pennsylvania, and the Shenandoah Valley following the trail of Captain McNeill and his "Phantoms of the South Fork.

This historical account covers the 25th Regiment North Carolina Infantry Troops during the Civil War. Farmers and farmers' sons left their mountain homesteads to enlist with the regiment at Asheville in July and August 1861 and to defend their homeland from a Yankee invasion. The book chronicles the unit's defensive activities in the Carolina coastal regions and the battlefield actions at Seven Days, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Plymouth, Richmond and Petersburg. In addition, casualty and desertion statistics are included, along with a complete regimental roster and 118 photos, illustrations, and maps.

What happens when partisanship is pushed to its extreme? In With Ballots and Bullets, Nathan P. Kalmoe combines historical and political science approaches to provide new insight into the American Civil War and deepen contemporary understandings of mass partisanship. The book reveals the fundamental role of partisanship in shaping the dynamics and legacies of the Civil War, drawing on an original analysis of newspapers and geo-coded data on voting returns and soldier enlistments, as well as retrospective surveys. Kalmoe shows that partisan identities motivated mass violence by ordinary citizens, not extremists, when activated by leaders and legitimated by the state. Similar processes also enabled partisans to rationalize staggering war casualties into predetermined vote choices, shaping durable political habits and memory after the war's end. Findings explain much about nineteenth century American politics, but the book also yields lessons for today, revealing the latent capacity of political leaders to mobilize violence.

This is the first biography of Union General William S. Rosecrans in more than fifty years. It tells the story of his military successes and the important results that led to the Union victory in the Civil War: winning the first major campaign of the war in West Virginia in 1861; victories in northeastern Mississippi that made the Vicksburg Campaign possible; gaining the victory without which Abraham Lincoln said the ""nation could scarcely have lived over""; conducting two brilliant campaigns in Tennessee and fighting the battle of Chickamauga (giving permanent possession of Chattanooga to the federals); defending Missouri from an invasion in 1864. The book also attempts to explain why Rosecrans was removed four times despite his military successes and examines the important part politics played in the war. Additionally it reveals a man who promoted many advances in medical care, transportation and cartography; a man interested in engineering as well as theology.

Peer through history at Confederate Lieutenant General James Longstreet, whose steady nature and dominating figure earned him the nicknames "War Horse," "Bulldog," and "Bull of the Woods." Years after the war, Longstreet's reputation swung between Confederate hero and brutish scoundrel. A dutiful soldier with a penchant for drink and gambling, Longstreet spoke little but inspired many, and he continues to fascinate Civil war historians. In his memoir From Manassas to Appomattox, Longstreet reveals his inner musings and insights regarding the War between the States. Ever the soldier, he skims over his personal life to focus on battle strategies, war accounts, and opinions regarding other officers who were as misunderstood as him. The principle subordinate under General Robert E. Lee, Longstreet provides several accounts of Lee's leadership and their strong partnership. An invaluable firsthand account of life during the Civil War, From Manassas to Appomattox not only illuminates the life and ambitions of Lieutenant General James Longstreet, but it also offers an in-depth view of army operations within the Confederacy. An introduction and notes by prominent historian James I. Robertson Jr. and a new foreword by Christian Keller offer insight into the impact of Longstreet's career on American history.

American Sovereigns: The People and America's Constitutional Tradition Before the Civil War challenges traditional American constitutional history, theory and jurisprudence that sees today's constitutionalism as linked by an unbroken chain to the 1787 Federal constitutional convention. American Sovereigns examines the idea that after the American Revolution, a collectivity - the people - would rule as the sovereign. Heated political controversies within the states and at the national level over what it meant that the people were the sovereign and how that collective sovereign could express its will were not resolved in 1776, in 1787, or prior to the Civil War. The idea of the people as the sovereign both unified and divided Americans in thinking about government and the basis of the Union. Today's constitutionalism is not a natural inheritance, but the product of choices Americans made between shifting understandings about themselves as a collective sovereign.

This book presents the little-studied story of the history and documents of the pardons, passes, paroles and promises of loyalty used by both North and South. The words of the loyalty oaths required for passes, paroles and pardons grew from a few simple lines to several paragraphs, over time. Conditions were added and pre-qualifications modified. This history provides insights into the politics, culture and battlefield realities present during the conduct of the war.

Soldiers in the Union Army volunteered for many reasons--to reunite the country, to put down the southern rebellion. For most, however, slavery was a peripheral issue. Sympathy for slaves often came only after the soldiers actually witnessed their plight.
In November 1863, thirty-eight men of the Minnesota Ninth Regiment responded to a fugitive slave's desperate plea by holding a train at gunpoint and liberating his wife, five children, and three other family members who were being shipped off to be sold. But this rescue happened in Missouri, where Union soldiers had firm orders not to interfere with loyal slaveholders. Charged with mutiny, the Minnesotans were confined for two months without being tried. Their case was even debated in the U.S. Senate. This remarkable and unprecedented incident remains virtually unknown today.
"One Drop in a Sea of Blue" is the story of these thirty-eight Liberators and of the Ninth Minnesota through the entire Civil War. After a humiliating defeat at Brice's Crossroads, Mississippi, many were held at Andersonville and other notorious Confederate prisons, where the Ninth Minnesota as a whole suffered a death rate exceeding 60 percent. Yet the regiment also helped destroy the Confederate Army of Tennessee at Nashville and capture Mobile. In August 1865, when the Ninth Minnesota was mustered out, only fourteen Liberators stood in its ranks. With vital details won through assiduous research, John Lundstrom uncovers the true stories of ordinary men who lived and died in extraordinary times.
John B. Lundstrom, curator emeritus of history at the Milwaukee Public Museum, is the award-winning author of "Black Shoe Carrier Admiral" and four other books of military history.

On April 14, 1860, the day Fort Sumter fell to Confederate forces, Washington, D.C.-surrounded by slave states and minimally defended-was ripe for invasion. In The Siege of Washington, John and Charles Lockwood offer a heart-pounding, minute-by-minute account of the first twelve days of the Civil War, when the fate of the Union hung in the balance. The fall of Washington would have been a disaster: it would have crippled the federal government, left the remaining Northern states in disarray, and almost certainly triggered the secession of Maryland. Indeed, it would likely have ended the fight to preserve the Union before it had begun in earnest. On April 15, Lincoln quickly issued an emergency proclamation calling upon the Northern states to send 75,000 troops to Washington. The North, suddenly galvanized by the attack on Sumter, responded enthusiastically. Yet one crucial question gripped Washington, and the nation at large-who would get to the capital first, Northern defenders or Southern attackers? Drawing from rarely seen primary documents, this compelling history places the reader on the scene with immediacy, brilliantly capturing the precarious first days of America's Civil War.