From prominent historian and Pulitzer Prize finalist Jeffry D. Wert, a multi-biographical work of a remarkable yet largely unknown group of men whose contributions won the war and shaped America's future Before the Civil War, America had undergone a technological revolution that made large-scale industry possible, yet, except for the expanding reach of railroads and telegraph lines, the country remained largely rural, with only pockets of small manufacturing. Then the war came and woke the sleeping giant. The Civil War created a wave of unprecedented industrial growth and development, producing a revolution in new structures, ideas, and inventions that sustained the struggle and reshaped America. Energized by the country's dormant potential and wealth of natural resources, individuals of vision, organizational talent, and capital took advantage of the opportunity war provided. Their innovations sustained Union troops, affected military strategy and tactics, and made the killing fields even deadlier. Individually, these men came to dominate industry and amass great wealth and power; collectively, they helped save the Union and refashion the economic fabric of a nation. Utilizing extensive research in manuscript collections, company records, and contemporary newspapers, historian Jeffry D. Wert casts a revealing light on the individuals most responsible for bringing the United States into the modern age.

In an eerie preview to the Civil War, the Rio Grande Valley girds itself for battle as Martin Baron, head of the Baron family empire, struggles against greedy Matteo Aguilar, who threatens everything that Martin has built for himself. When Aguilar sends his vaqueros and assassins to take the Barons down, he starts a bloody war that won’t stop until one of them is dead. As the treachery continues to escalate, the Barons find themselves in a life-or-death-struggle that will change an entire family and an entire region forever.

The story of the twelfth-century rivalry for the throne between the daughter and the nephew of Henry I—a battle that tore England apart for over a decade. The Anarchy was the first civil war in post-Conquest England, enduring throughout the reign of King Stephen between 1135 and 1154. It ultimately brought about the end of the Norman dynasty and the birth of the mighty Plantagenet kings. When Henry I died having lost his only legitimate son in a shipwreck, his barons had sworn to recognize his daughter Matilda, widow of the Holy Roman Emperor, as his heir, and remarried her to Geoffrey, Count of Anjou. But when she was slow to move to England upon her father’s death, Henry’s favorite nephew, Stephen of Blois, rushed to have himself crowned, much as Henry himself had done on the death of his brother William Rufus. Supported by his brother Henry, Bishop of Winchester, Stephen made a promising start, but Matilda would not give up her birthright and tried to hold the English barons to their oaths. The result was more than a decade of civil war that saw England split apart. Empress Matilda is often remembered as aloof and high-handed, Stephen as ineffective and indecisive. By following both sides of the dispute and seeking to understand their actions and motivations, Matthew Lewis aims to reach a more rounded understanding of this crucial period of English history—and ask to what extent there really was anarchy.

Includes material on John D. Rockefeller, J. Pierpoint Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt, William H. Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, E.H. Harriman, Jay Gould, Jim Fisk, Jay Cooke, Daniel Drew, Henry C. Frick, James J. Hill, Charles M. Schwab, Henry Villard, Standard Oil Company, trusts.

Baron Roman Fedorovich von Ungern-Sternberg (1885–1921) was a Baltic German aristocrat and tsarist military officer who fought against the Bolsheviks in Eastern Siberia during the Russian Civil War. From there he established himself as the de facto warlord of Outer Mongolia, the base for a fantastical plan to restore the Russian and Chinese empires, which then ended with his capture and execution by the Red Army as the war drew to a close. In The Baron’s Cloak, Willard Sunderland tells the epic story of the Russian Empire’s final decades through the arc of the Baron’s life, which spanned the vast reaches of Eurasia. Tracking Ungern’s movements, he transits through the Empire’s multinational borderlands, where the country bumped up against three other doomed empires, the Habsburg, Ottoman, and Qing, and where the violence unleashed by war, revolution, and imperial collapse was particularly vicious. In compulsively readable prose that draws on wide-ranging research in multiple languages, Sunderland re-creates Ungern’s far-flung life and uses it to tell a compelling and original tale of imperial success and failure in a momentous time. Sunderland visited the many sites that shaped Ungern’s experience, from Austria and Estonia to Mongolia and China, and these travels help give the book its arresting geographical feel. In the early chapters, where direct evidence of Ungern’s activities is sparse, he evokes peoples and places as Ungern would have experienced them, carefully tracing the accumulation of influences that ultimately came together to propel the better documented, more notorious phase of his career. Recurring throughout Sunderland’s magisterial account is a specific artifact: the Baron’s cloak, an essential part of the cross-cultural uniform Ungern chose for himself by the time of his Mongolian campaign: an orangey-gold Mongolian kaftan embroidered in the Khalkha fashion yet outfitted with tsarist-style epaulettes on the shoulders. Like his cloak, Ungern was an imperial product. He lived across the Russian Empire, combined its contrasting cultures, fought its wars, and was molded by its greatest institutions and most volatile frontiers. By the time of his trial and execution mere months before the decree that created the USSR, he had become a profoundly contradictory figure, reflecting both the empire’s potential as a multinational society and its ultimately irresolvable limitations.

John Bainbridge, Jr.'s Gun Barons is a narrative history of six charismatic and idiosyncratic men who changed the course of American history through the invention and refinement of repeating weapons. Love them or hate them, guns are woven deeply into the American soul. Names like Colt, Smith & Wesson, Winchester, and Remington are legendary. Yet few people are aware of the roles these men played at a crucial time in United States history, from westward expansion in the 1840s, through the Civil War, and into the dawn of the Gilded Age. Through personal drive and fueled by bloodshed, they helped propel the young country into the forefront of the world's industrial powers. Their creations helped save a nation divided, while planting seeds that would divide the country again a century later. Their inventions embodied an intoxicating thread of American individualism—part fiction, part reality—that remains the foundation of modern gun culture. They promoted guns not only for the soldier, but for the Everyman, and also made themselves wealthy beyond their most fevered dreams. Gun Barons captures how their bold inventiveness dwelled in the psyche of an entire people, not just in the minds of men who made firearm fortunes. Whether we revere these larger-than-life men or vilify them, they helped forge the American character.

For two years in the mid-thirteenth century England was torn by a bloody civil war between the king and his nobles. For a short time, the country came close to unseating the monarchy, and the outcome changed the course of English history. Yet this critical episode receives far less attention than the Wars of the Roses and the English Civil Wars that followed. John Sadler, in this highly readable and perceptive study of the Barons' War, describes events in vivid detail. He explores the leading personalities, whose bitter quarrel gave rise to the conflict - Henry III, his son Prince Edward, later Edward I, and their most famous opponent, Simon de Montfort, whose masterful charisma galvanized support among the discontented nobility. The clash of interests between the king and his overmighty subjects is reconsidered, as are the personal and political tensions that polarized opinion and tested loyalties to the limit. But the main emphasis of John Sadler's account is on events in the field, in particular the two major campaigns that determined the course of the war and indeed the future government of England - the battles fought at Lewes and Evesham.