"This fine volume leaps straight onto the roster of essential reading for anyone even vaguely interested in Grant and the Civil War. The book is deeply researched, but it introduces its scholarship with a light touch that never interferes with the reader's enjoyment of Grant's fluent narrative."-Ron Chernow, author of Grant Ulysses S. Grant's memoirs, sold door-to-door by former Union soldiers, were once as ubiquitous in American households as the Bible. Mark Twain, Gertrude Stein, Henry James, and Edmund Wilson hailed them as great literature, and countless presidents, including Clinton and George W. Bush, credit Grant with influencing their own writing. Yet a judiciously annotated edition of these memoirs has never been produced until now. The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant is the first comprehensively annotated edition of Grant's memoirs, clarifying the great military leader's thoughts on his life and times through the end of the Civil War and offering his invaluable perspective on battlefield decision making. An introduction contextualizes Grant's life and significance, and lucid editorial commentary allows his voice and narrative to shine through. With annotations compiled by the editors of the Ulysses S. Grant Association's Presidential Library, this definitive edition enriches our understanding of the pre-war years, the war with Mexico, and the Civil War. Grant provides essential insight into how rigorously these events tested America's democratic institutions and the cohesion of its social order. The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant is a work of profound political, historical, and literary significance. This celebrated annotated edition will introduce a new generation of readers of all backgrounds to an American classic.

"Leaps straight onto the roster of essential reading for anyone even vaguely interested in Grant and the Civil War." -Ron Chernow, author of Grant "Provides leadership lessons that can be obtained nowhere else... Ulysses Grant in his Memoirs gives us a unique glimpse of someone who found that the habit of reflection could serve as a force multiplier for leadership." -Thomas E. Ricks, Foreign Policy Ulysses S. Grant's memoirs, sold door-to-door by former Union soldiers, were once as ubiquitous in American households as the Bible. Mark Twain and Henry James hailed them as great literature, and countless presidents credit Grant with influencing their own writing. This is the first comprehensively annotated edition of Grant's memoirs, clarifying the great military leader's thoughts on his life and times through the end of the Civil War and offering his invaluable perspective on battlefield decision making. With annotations compiled by the editors of the Ulysses S. Grant Association's Presidential Library, this definitive edition enriches our understanding of the pre-war years, the war with Mexico, and the Civil War. Grant provides essential insight into how rigorously these events tested America's democratic institutions and the cohesion of its social order. "What gives this peculiarly reticent book its power? Above all, authenticity... Grant's style is strikingly modern in its economy." -T. J. Stiles, New York Times "It's been said that if you're going to pick up one memoir of the Civil War, Grant's is the one to read. Similarly, if you're going to purchase one of the several annotated editions of his memoirs, this is the collection to own, read, and reread." -Library Journal

In the summer of 1862, President Lincoln called General Henry W. Halleck to Washington, D.C., to take command of all Union armies in the death struggle against the Confederacy. For the next two turbulent years, Halleck was Lincoln's chief war advisor, the man the President deferred to in all military matters. Yet, despite the fact that he was commanding general far longer than his successor, Ulysses S. Grant, he is remembered only as a failed man, ignored by posterity. In the first comprehensive biography of Halleck, the prize-winning historian John F. Marszalek recreates the life of a man of enormous achievement who bungled his most important mission. When Lincoln summoned him to the nation's capital, Halleck boasted outstanding qualifications as a military theorist, a legal scholar, a brave soldier, and a California entrepreneur. Yet in the thick of battle, he couldn't make essential decisions. Unable to produce victory for the Union forces, he saw his power become subsumed by Grant's emergent leadership, a loss that paved the way for Halleck's path to obscurity. Harnessing previously unused research, as well as the insights of modern medicine and psychology, Marszalek unearths the seeds of Halleck's fatal wartime indecisiveness in personality traits and health problems. In this brilliant dissection of a rich and disappointed life, we gain new understanding of how the key decisions of the Civil War were taken, as well as insight into the making of effective military leadership.

In The Petticoat Affair, prize-winning historian John F. Marszalek offers the first in-depth investigation of the earliest -- and perhaps greatest -- political sex scandal in American history. During Andrew Jackson's first term in office, Margaret Eaton, the wife of Secretary of State John Henry Eaton, was branded a "loose woman" for her unconventional public life and was snubbed by the other cabinet members' wives. The brash, outgoing, and beautiful daughter of a Washington innkeeper, Margaret had socialized with her father's guests and married Eaton very soon after the death of her first husband, shocking genteel society. Jackson saw attacks on Eaton as part of a conspiracy to topple his administration, and his strong defense of her character dominated the first two years of his term, led to the resignation of his entire cabinet, and sparked a bitter feud with his vice-president, John Calhoun.

With comparisons to modern-day politics inevitable, The Petticoat Affair vividly relates how a socially driven controversy could so strongly influence the politics of the age. Moreover, Margaret Eaton's story represents the struggle of many women throughout history to escape the limited roles deemed proper for them.

Two months before the Civil War broke out, Emma Holmes made the first entry in a diary that would eventually hold vivid firsthand accounts of several major historical events. Born into an elite South Carolina family, Holmes was in her twenties during the war years. She lived in Charleston during April, 1861, bombardment of Fort Sumter and was visiting there during the 1863 Union shelling of the city. Her description of the Charleston fire of December, 1861, which destroyed her family home and leveled much of the city, is one of the most powerful passages in the diary.

Holmes also spent extended periods of time on plantations and visited army camps, which she described in detail. Because of the Charleston fire, her family was uprooted to Camden, South Carolina, where she came face-to-face with Union forces: first Sherman's army, then black troops, and finally the small Reconstruction garrison. In presenting her picture of the wartime South, Holmes discussed numerous northern and southern military figures, the role of women in the war effort, the religious and social life of the day, and the heavy toll that fighting and disease took on the military and civilian population.

John F. Marszalek has eliminated extraneous details in order to highlight Holmes's individual insight, the vital heart of the volumn. His new Forward considers this valuable contribution to social history in the context of the current growing popularity of the Civil War and the relatively recent interest in that conflict among women's studies scholars.

This book chronicles the successful struggle of Douglas Conner to escape poverty and to provide advancement not only for himself but also for impoverished and oppressed blacks in his home state of Mississippi. In this poignant autobiography Conner tells of having to overcome the code that taught that blackness and subordination were interchangeable, though he never accepted it. His goal of becoming a physician provided motivation for continued hope. When he later attended Alcorn State University and then traveled north to Connecticut and Detroit and still later when he attended the Army's first integrated classes during World War II, he began to realize that his dream was possible. In 1950 he achieved it when he graduated from Howard University as a medical doctor. Thereafter he established his practice in Starkville, Mississippi and devoted himself to improving life for countless people. He provided leadership in the state's Democratic party and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and was instrumental in leading many blacks to the voting booths and in battling for the desegregation of schools and businesses. In the foreword to this book Aaron Henry, Dr. Conner's friend of many years, provides insights into this black physician's importance and into their common goals during the civil rights movement. For all readers this book tells what it was like to be a black Mississippian during the Jim Crow era and in the time of desegregation. All can learn from it.

Douglas L. Conner (deceased) was a physician in Starkville, Mississippi and a civil rights activist. John F. Marszalek is Giles Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Mississippi State University. Aaron Henry (deceased) was a pharmacist in Clarksdale, Mississippi and a civil rights activist.

After his triumphant capture of Atlanta in the fall of 1864, Union General William T. Sherman mobilized 62,000 of his veteran troops and waged destructive war across Georgia, from Atlanta to Savannah. Unhappy with the killing and maiming of Union and Confederate soldiers in combat blood baths, he decided on purposeful destruction, hoping to insure fewer casualties while helping bring the war to an end as quickly as possible. He repeatedly promised southerners that he would wage a hard war but would tender a soft peace once they stopped fighting. He was true to his word on both counts. In studying a main element of the Lost Cause view of the Civil War, award-winning author John F. Marszalek recounts the March's destructive details, analyzes William T. Sherman's strategy, and describes white and black southern reaction. The result is a gripping tale which demonstrates both how the March affected the Confederacy's last days and how it continues to influence Americans at the beginning of the twenty-first century.