No community in the antebellum North better reflected the growing passion against slavery than Oberlin, Ohio. In many ways, this small college town represented the most advanced of Northern attitudes toward the issue of slavery and states' rights. Home to more than 300 anti-slave societies and a major stop on the Underground Railroad, it had long offered refuge and opportunity to many free blacks, who found a measure of equality there that was rare anywhere else in the United States. In his narrative, based on thorough primary research, Nat Brandt shows how the Oberlin-Wellington Rescue contributed directly to the tensions that led to the Civil War.

Charles Tubbs never actually went to war. He never volunteered nor was he drafted in the Union army, but his friends - ordinary young men from rural New York and Pennsylvania - wore the Union blue. These seventeen individuals made the Civil War come alive for Charles Tubbs, for they sent him some of the most eloquent letters to have emerged from that momentous conflict. Popular historian Nat Brandt, who has written extensively on the War Between the States, has drawn his material from more than 175 letters that Tubbs received from the seventeen friends who fought for the Union. The young soldiers vividly communicate the camaraderie of camp life and the loneliness of the soldier far from home. Their simple - at times ungrammatical - missives transport the reader to most of the major battles: Shiloh, Antietam, Gettysburg. Through their experiences - and Nat Brandt's expertise - we are given a frontline account of this crucial time in American history, from the first stirrings of war to the final surrender at Appomattox, and to their eventual march home.

The most infamous scandal to shake the nation's capital: a New York Congressman's murder of his wife's lover, Washington's district attorney, the son of the man who wrote "The Star Spangled Banner." Representative Dan Sickles shot Philip Barton Key in front of seven witnesses, his plea of not guilty based on a totally new legal defense, temporary insanity.

No community better reflected the growing passion against slavery than Oberlin College. In September 1858 the sudden kidnapping of a runaway slave who was living in Oberlin caused the entire community and its college students to rush to his rescue. The slave was rescued, but 37 of his rescuers were identified and put on trial for violating federal law, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. The case became a cause c l bre throughout the North.

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...all 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.

On the afternoon of December 30, 1903, during a sold-out matinee performance, a fire broke out in Chicago's Iroquois Theatre. In the short span of twenty minutes, more than six hundred people were asphyxiated, burned, or trampled to death in a panicked mob's failed attempt to escape. In "Chicago Death Trap: The Iroquois Theatre Fire of 1903, " Nat Brandt provides a detailed chronicle of this horrific event to assess not only the titanic tragedy of the fire itself but also the municipal corruption and greed that kindled the flames beforehand and the political cover-ups hidden in the smoke and ash afterwards.

Advertised as "absolutely fireproof, " the Iroquois was Chicago's most modern playhouse when it opened in the fall of 1903. With the approval of the city's building department, theater developers Harry J. Powers and William J. Davis opened the theater prematurely to take full advantage of the holiday crowds, ignoring flagrant safety violations in the process.

The aftermath of the fire proved to be a study in the miscarriage of justice. Despite overwhelming evidence that the building had not been completed, that fire safety laws were ignored, and that management had deliberately sealed off exits during the performance, no one was ever convicted or otherwise held accountable for the enormous loss of life.

Lavishly illustrated and featuring an introduction by Chicago historians Perry R. Duis and Cathlyn Schallhorn, "Chicago"" Death Trap: The IroquoisTheatre Fire of 1903 "is rich with vivid details about this horrific disaster, captivatingly presented in human terms without losing sight of the broader historical context.

Six years before the onset of the Civil War, two courageous figures - one a free white man and one an enslaved black woman - risked personal liberty to ensure each other's freedom in an explosive episode that captured the attention of a nation on the brink of cataclysmic change. In this deeply researched account of the rescue of the slave Jane Johnson by the Philadelphia Quaker and fervent abolitionist Passmore Williamson, of the federal court case that followed, and of Johnson's selfless efforts to free the jailed Williamson, veteran journalist Nat Brandt and Emmy-winning filmmaker Yanna Kroyt Brandt capture the heroism and humanity at the heart of this important moment in American history. In July 1855 Williamson and his colleague, William Still, responded to a written plea from Johnson and rushed to the Camden ferry dock to liberate her and her two children from their master in a daring confrontation. Unbeknownst to the abolitionists, Johnson's owner, Col. John Hill Wheeler, was connected to the highest levels of government and was a personal friend of President Franklin Pierce. As a result, Wheeler was able to have Williamson arrested and confined to Moyamensing Prison, an institution notorious for harboring Philadelphia's worst criminals. The case and Williamson's imprisonment became an international cause celebre with famous leaders of the abolitionist movement, black and white, visiting the prisoner. In one of the episode's most dramatic moments, Johnson returned to Philadelphia, risking her own freedom, to testify on Williamson's behalf. There were petitions in many states to impeach Judge John Kintzing Kane, who stubbornly refused to release Williamson. The case became a battle of wills between a man who was unwavering in his defiance of slavery and another determined to defend the so-called rights of the slave owner. Williamson's martyrdom spotlighted Philadelphia as one northern city where the growing rifts between states' rights, federal mandates, and personal liberties had come to the fore. Encompassing acts of brazen defiance, heroic self-sacrifice, high courtroom drama, and the rise of a cult of celebrity, the Brandts' brisk narrative takes readers into the lives of the central participants in this complex episode. Passmore Williamson, Jane Johnson, William Still, Colonel Wheeler, and Judge Kane are brought vibrantly to life as fully developed and flawed characters drawn unexpectedly into the annals of history. ""In the Shadow of the Civil War"" chronicles events that presage the divisive national conflict that followed and that underscore the passionate views on freedom and justice that continue to define the American experience.

This text tells the tragic story of the 18 missionaries from Oberlin College, Ohio, and the Chinese Christians, who were all killed during the Boxer Rebellion in 1900. Caught up in a clash of cultures, the missionaries were self-righteous and offensive symbols of Western imperialism.