Pitting fascists and communists in a showdown for supremacy, the Spanish Civil War has long been seen as a grim dress rehearsal for World War II. Francisco Franco's Nationalists prevailed with German and Italian military assistance-a clear instance, it seemed, of like-minded regimes joining forces in the fight against global Bolshevism. In Hitler's Shadow Empire Pierpaolo Barbieri revises this standard account of Axis intervention in the Spanish Civil War, arguing that economic ambitions-not ideology-drove Hitler's Iberian intervention. The Nazis hoped to establish an economic empire in Europe, and in Spain they tested the tactics intended for future subject territories. "The Spanish Civil War is among the 20th-century military conflicts about which the most continues to be published...Hitler's Shadow Empire is one of few recent studies offering fresh information, specifically describing German trade in the Franco-controlled zone. While it is typically assumed that Nazi Germany, like Stalinist Russia, became involved in the Spanish Civil War for ideological reasons, Pierpaolo Barbieri, an economic analyst, shows that the motives of the two main powers were quite different. -Stephen Schwartz, Weekly Standard

Who were the greatest commanders of the American Civil War, and what made them so? In The Great Commanders of the American Civil War, the best military leaders of both sides are pitted against each other and their strengths and weaknesses examined - Robert E. Lee versus George Meade at Gettysburg, Ulysses S. Grant versus Albert Sidney Johnston at Shiloh, William Tecumseh Sherman versus John Bell Hood in the March to the Sea, along with eight other pairs. The book also explores a decisive battle between each pair of adversaries, highlighting the decisions made and why the battle was won. Each featured battle includes a contextual introduction, a description of the action, and an analysis of the aftermath. A specially commissioned colour map illustrating the dispositions and movement of forces brings the subject to life and helps the reader grasp the course of each battle. Featuring full-colour illustrations, paintings and photographs alongside the battle maps, The Great Commanders of the American Civil War is a fascinating comparison of the greatest Confederate and Union military leaders.

"The Union" meant meant many things to Americans in the years between the Revolution and the Civil War. Nagel's thesis is that the idea served as a treasure-trove of the values and images by which Americans tried to understand their nature and destiny. By tracing the idea of Union through the crucial, formative years of America's history, he makes clear the nature of the intellectual and emotional responses Americans have had to their country.

"The Blue, the Gray, and the Green" is one of only a handful of books to apply an environmental history approach to the Civil War. This book explores how nature--disease, climate, flora and fauna, and other factors--affected the war and also how the war shaped Americans' perceptions, understanding, and use of nature. The contributors use a wide range of approaches that serve as a valuable template for future environmental histories of the conflict.
In his introduction, Brian Allen Drake describes the sparse body of environmental history literature related to the Civil War and lays out a blueprint for the theoretical basis of each essay. Kenneth W. Noe emphasizes climate and its effects on agricultural output and the battlefield; Timothy Silver explores the role of disease among troops and animals; Megan Kate Nelson examines aridity and Union defeat in 1861 New Mexico; Kathryn Shively Meier investigates soldiers' responses to disease in the Peninsula Campaign; Aaron Sachs, John C. Inscoe, and Lisa M. Brady examine philosophical and ideological perspectives on nature before, during, and after the war; Drew Swanson discusses the war's role in production and landscape change in piedmont tobacco country; Mart A. Stewart muses on the importance of environmental knowledge and experience for soldiers, civilians, and slaves; Timothy Johnson elucidates the ecological underpinnings of debt peonage during Reconstruction; finally, Paul S. Sutter speculates on the future of Civil War environmental studies. "The Blue, the Gray, and the Green" provides a provocative environmental commentary that enriches our understanding of the Civil War.

While conscientious objection in the twentieth century has been well documented, there has been surprisingly little study of its long history in America's early conflicts. Peter Brock, one of the foremost historians of American pacifism, seeks to remedy this oversight by presenting a rich and varied collection of documents, many drawn from obscure sources, that shed new light on American religious and military history. These include legal findings, church and meeting proceedings, appeals by non-conformists to government authorities, and illuminating excerpts from personal journals.One of the most striking features to emerge from these documents is the critical role of religion in the history of American pacifism. Brock finds that virtually all who refused military service in this period were inspired by religious convictions, with Quakers frequently being the most ardent dissenters. A dramatic, powerful portrait of early American pacifism, Liberty and Conscience presents not only the thought and practice of the objectors themselves, but also the response of the authorities and the general public.

George Downing came of age as a Puritan pioneer in colonial Massachusetts, before crossing the Atlantic to sign up for the English Civil War. He fast became Oliver Cromwell's chief of military intelligence and was later a diplomat and an MP. However, Downing spectacularly switched sides, shamelessly betraying his friends. He prospered under Charles II, yet he remains one of the most elusive figures of his age. In Turncoat he emerges as the extraordinary - if troubling - anti-hero of his own life story. Judged by contemporaries to be 'a fearful gentleman' and a 'perfidious rogue', Downing was a double-dealer who bribed and blackmailed his way to diplomatic success across Europe; and, when it was expedient, betrayed friends to horrifically violent deaths. He pioneered the practice of judicial kidnapping known today as 'extraordinary rendition', was a booster of the Atlantic slave trade and had a hand in starting two major wars. Always at the centre of events, Downing engaged with the most illustrious men and women of his times. His patrons were Oliver Cromwell and King Charles II. Samuel Pepys was his clerk; John Milton prepared his letters and dispatches. William of Orange was godfather to his son; his next-door neighbour was Queen Elizabeth of Bohemia; and when Downing finally built his street, his surveyor was Sir Christopher Wren. Turncoat follows George Downing from the asceticism of Puritan New England, across English battlefields, through courts, chancelleries and parliaments, to the fleshpots of Restoration London, where he would spend his final years in unrestrained indulgence as one of the richest men in the kingdom.

General John A. Wickham, commander of the famous 101st Airborne Division in the 1970s and subsequently Army Chief of Staff, once visited Antietam battlefield. Gazing at Bloody Lane where, in 1862, several Union assaults were brutally repulsed before they finally broke through, he marveled, "You couldn't get American soldiers today to make an attack like that." Why did those men risk certain death, over and over again, through countless bloody battles and four long, awful years ? Why did the conventional wisdom -- that soldiers become increasingly cynical and disillusioned as war progresses -- not hold true in the Civil War?

It is to this question--why did they fight-- that James McPherson, America's preeminient Civil War historian, now turns his attention. He shows that, contrary to what many scholars believe, the soldiers of the Civil War remained powerfully convinced of the ideals for which they fought throughout the conflict. Motivated by duty and honor, and often by religious faith, these men wrote frequently of their firm belief in the cause for which they fought: the principles of liberty, freedom, justice, and patriotism. Soldiers on both sides harkened back to the Founding Fathers, and the ideals of the American Revolution. They fought to defend their country, either the Union--"the best Government ever made"--or the Confederate states, where their very homes and families were under siege. And they fought to defend their honor and manhood. "I should not lik to go home with the name of a couhard," one Massachusetts private wrote, and another private from Ohio said, "My wife would sooner hear of my death than my disgrace." Even after three years of bloody battles, more than half of the Union soldiers reenlisted voluntarily. "While duty calls me here and my country demands my services I should be willing to make the sacrifice," one man wrote to his protesting parents. And another soldier said simply, "I still love my country."

McPherson draws on more than 25,000 letters and nearly 250 private diaries from men on both sides. Civil War soldiers were among the most literate soldiers in history, and most of them wrote home frequently, as it was the only way for them to keep in touch with homes that many of them had left for the first time in their lives. Significantly, their letters were also uncensored by military authorities, and are uniquely frank in their criticism and detailed in their reports of marches and battles, relations between officers and men, political debates, and morale. For Cause and Comrades lets these soldiers tell their own stories in their own words to create an account that is both deeply moving and far truer than most books on war.

Battle Cry of Freedom, McPherson's Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the Civil War, was a national bestseller that Hugh Brogan, in The New York Times, called "history writing of the highest order." For Cause and Comrades deserves similar accolades, as McPherson's masterful prose and the soldiers' own words combine to create both an important book on an often overlooked aspect of our bloody Civil War, and a powerfully moving account of the men who fought it.

One of the preeminent Black scholars of his era traces the life and bold aspirations of a man who devoted his life to opposing slavery at any cost. W.E.B. Du Bois examines John Brown as a man as well as a motive force behind the abolitionist sympathies that helped lead to the Civil War. He traces Brown's sympathy for slaves to an incident in his youth when he was warmly received by a family that treated their slave with casual brutality. At the time it was written, John Brown was widely considered a fanatic at best, a lunatic at worst, but here he is seen clearly as a man driven by his Christianity and his personal morals to oppose what he clearly perceived as a tremendous wrong in society, and to do so regardless of whatever toll it might take upon him. The author examines Brown's impact on the minds of those who understood that the abolitionist cause was supported primarily by Blacks, on the lives of Blacks who discovered a white man willing to fight and die for their freedom, and by the masses who found that slavery was not only an actionable moral issue, but one of deadly urgency. Originally published in 1909, on the 50th anniversary of Brown's execution, this is W.E.B. Du Bois's only work of biography. Although less known than the author's The Souls of Black Folk or Black Reconstruction in America, John Brown remains a classic distinguished by its author's deep understanding and eloquence. With an eye-catching new cover, and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of John Brown is both modern and readable.

The author's first book, The 50th Pennsylvania's Civil War Odyssey, addressed the wartime journey of a regiment that fought in six Southern states. In this, his second Civil War tale, you follow the hardships faced by a regiment that fought in only two. It fought in McClellan's Virginia Peninsula Campaign and then, in its second major fight at Plymouth, NC in April 1864, the entire Union garrison was captured by General Hoke's Confederate forces. This book also focuses on a lucky lieutenant from Bedford, Pennsylvania, who escaped from rebel captivity with two companions and, with help from field slaves and Unionists in the mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee, walked 250 miles in 42 days to Union lines. His regiment, the 101st Pennsylvania, was not so fortunate. Captured in April of 1864 in its entirety at Plymouth, NC, nearly half of its enlisted men perished in Confederate POW camps.

This study describes the creation of the Primitive Baptist movement and discusses the main outlines of their thought. It also weaves the story of the Primitive Baptists with other developments in American Christianity in the Early Republic.

The battle of Shiloh, fought in April 1862 in the wilderness of south central Tennessee, marked a savage turning point in the Civil War. In this masterful book, Larry Daniel re-creates the drama and the horror of the battle and discusses in authoritative detail the political and military policies that led to Shiloh, the personalities of those who formulated and executed the battle plans, the fateful misjudgments made on both sides, and the heroism of the small-unit leaders and ordinary soldiers who manned the battlefield.

Abraham Lincoln's two great legacies to history--his extraordinary power as a writer and his leadership during the Civil War--come together in this close study of the President's use of the telegraph. Invented less than two decades before he entered office, the telegraph came into its own during the Civil War. In a jewel-box of historical writing, Wheeler captures Lincoln as he adapted his folksy rhetorical style to the telegraph, creating an intimate bond with his generals that would ultimately help win the war.

The South's raiding cavalry on campaign
This substantial, well known and highly regarded work presents itself to the reader as a history of a renowned unit of Confederate Cavalry. Whilst that is undoubtedly the case, the narrative is made the more relevant, interesting and indeed entertaining because its author rode within its ranks. So the book also works admirably as a first hand account of the experiences of a cavalier of the South at war. John Hunt Morgan was a Kentuckian and a regular soldier who was drawn, in common with so many of his native state, reluctantly into war against the federal government. He raised the 2nd Kentucky Cavalry regiment and as its Colonel fought at Shiloh, but it was as a raider that Morgan's Cavalry achieved most fame and, for some, notoriety. 'Morgan's Raid' which took place in July 1863 was a remarkable feat of cavalry command. With lightning manoeuvres Morgan broke past the Union lines and led nearly 2,500 Confederate cavalrymen deep into Kentucky, Indiana and Ohio making this action the deepest incursion into the north of any body of uniformed Confederate troops in the war. For those interested in the dash, elan and actions of this redoubtable body of horse soldiers and their talented commander, Duke's book-a deservedly recognised classic-is essential. Available in soft cover and hard cover with dust jacket for collectors."

Right-Wing Spain in the Civil War Era explores the lives of the leading Spanish conservatives in the turbulent period 1914-1945. The volume is a collection of biographies of the most important figures of the Spanish Right during the last years of the Restoration (1914-1923), the Dictatorship of Primo de Rivera (1923-1930), the Second Republic (1931-1936), the Civil War (1936-39) and the early years of the Franco regime (1939-45). This book brings together a number of leading historians of twentieth-century Spain. By adopting a biographical approach, the volume aims at providing a new insight of the origins, development and aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. Contrary to the traditional view, Right-Wing Spain in the Civil War Era shows a diverse and fragmented Spanish right which, far from being isolated, was profoundly influenced by German Nazism, Italian Fascism and French Traditionalism. This remarkable and innovative collection of essays will be welcomed by students and lecturers of Spanish history alike.