General Benjamin H. Grierson is most widely known as the brilliant cavalryman whose actions in the Civil War's Mississippi Valley campaign facilitated Ulysses S. Grant's capture of Vicksburg. There is, however, much more to this key Union officer than a successful raid into Confederate-held Mississippi. In A Just and Righteous Cause: Benjamin H. Grierson's Civil War Memoir, edited by Bruce J. Dinges and Shirley A. Leckie, Grierson tells his story in forceful, direct, and highly engaging prose. A Just and Righteous Cause paints a vivid picture of Grierson's prewar and Civil War career, touching on his antislavery views, Republican Party principles, and military strategy and tactics. His story begins with his parents' immigration to the United States and follows his childhood, youth, and career as a musician; the early years of his marriage; his business failures prior to becoming a cavalry officer in an Illinois regiment; his experiences in battle; and his Reconstruction appointment. Grierson also provides intimate accounts of his relationships with such prominent politicians and Union leaders as Abraham Lincoln, Richard Yates, Andrew Johnson, William T. Sherman, Ulysses S. Grant, John C. Frémont, and Benjamin Prentiss. Because Grierson wrote the memoir mainly with his family as the intended audience, he manages to avoid the self-promotion that plagues many of his contemporaries' chronicles. His reliance on military records and correspondence, along with family letters, lends an immediacy rarely found in military memoirs. His reminiscences also add fuel to a reemerging debate on soldiers' motivations for enlisting—in Grierson's case, patriotism and ideology—and shed new light on the Western theater of the Civil War, which has seen a recent surge in interest among Civil War enthusiasts. A non–West Point officer, Grierson owed his developing career to his independent studies of the military and his connections to political figures in his home state of Illinois and later to important Union leaders. Dinges and Leckie provide a helpful introduction, which gives background on the memoir and places Grierson's career into historical context. Aided by fourteen photos and two maps, as well as the editors' superb annotations, A Just and Righteous Cause is a valuable addition to Civil War history.

Charles Dew’s Apostles of Disunion has established itself as a modern classic and an indispensable account of the Southern states’ secession from the Union. Addressing topics still hotly debated among historians and the public at large more than a century and a half after the Civil War, the book offers a compelling and clearly substantiated argument that slavery and race were at the heart of our great national crisis. The fifteen years since the original publication of Apostles of Disunion have seen an intensification of debates surrounding the Confederate flag and Civil War monuments. In a powerful new afterword to this anniversary edition, Dew situates the book in relation to these recent controversies and factors in the role of vast financial interests tied to the internal slave trade in pushing Virginia and other upper South states toward secession and war.

THE PRESENTLY DOMINANT NARRATIVE about Civil War causes is the work of historians obsessed with social activism instead o historical facts. They point to the 13th, 14th and 15th postbellum amendments as proof that the North was fighting to provide slaves with an honorable freedom but deny that the increase in tariffs from 19% before the war before to an average of 45% for fifty years thereafter reflected a Northern war aim. They hold Southern secession responsible for the war but fail to teach that the Northeastern states threatened to secede five times between 1789 and 1850. They also decline to note that Southern secession need not have led to war. Southerners had no purpose to overthrow the Washington government, they merely wanted a government of their own. Northerners could have evacuated Fort Sumter and let the first seven cotton states depart in peace thereby avoiding the war. Modern historians normally focus on the reasons the cotton states seceded instead of examining the economic reasons Northerner chose to militarily coerce them back into the Union thereby inaugurating civil war. The Republican Party could have stopped the spread of slavery peacefully by endorsing Popular Sovereignty during the 1860 presidential election. After Kansas used it to reject slavery in an 1858 local-option vote, nearly every politico realized that the doctrine would quarantine slavery in the South. If Popular Sovereignty could not make a slave state out of Kansas, it could not do it in any of the remaining 1860 Federal territories. Republicans rejected the doctrine simply to survive as an independent Party because Lincoln's two chief opposing presidential candidates supported it. Beyond what Poplar Sovereignty would have gained, the Republican ban added nothing except to inflame the sectional passions that led to civil war. * * * * * "Philip Leigh does not hesitate to challenge what Voltaire called 'The propaganda of the victorious. This work is not to be missed by any who are interested in the truth." - H. V. Traywick Author: Empire of the Owls and Virginia Iliad "Philip Leigh's new book gives readers hard, historical, economic facts showing that the causes of the American Civil War date back decades and were multi-layered. Read this book if you want a full understanding of what the war was really about." - Clint Johnson Author: Tin Cans and Greyhounds and The Politically Incorrect Guide to the South "For two generations mainline historians have taught that Southerners committed treason by seceding and virtuous Northerners invaded the South to abolish slavery. For many of America's elite this so-called truth has enabled them to support, or stand silent, as Confederate memorials are vandalized or removed. Phil Leigh's new book shows that the thesis is simply untrue." - Don Livingston, Ph.D. Author: Hume's Philosophy of Common Life and Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium: Hume's Pathology of Philosophy

"Ty Seidule scorches us with the truth and rivets us with his fierce sense of moral urgency." --Ron Chernow In a forceful but humane narrative, former soldier and head of the West Point history department Ty Seidule's Robert E. Lee and Me challenges the myths and lies of the Confederate legacy—and explores why some of this country’s oldest wounds have never healed. Ty Seidule grew up revering Robert E. Lee. From his southern childhood to his service in the U.S. Army, every part of his life reinforced the Lost Cause myth: that Lee was the greatest man who ever lived, and that the Confederates were underdogs who lost the Civil War with honor. Now, as a retired brigadier general and Professor Emeritus of History at West Point, his view has radically changed. From a soldier, a scholar, and a southerner, Ty Seidule believes that American history demands a reckoning. In a unique blend of history and reflection, Seidule deconstructs the truth about the Confederacy—that its undisputed primary goal was the subjugation and enslavement of Black Americans—and directly challenges the idea of honoring those who labored to preserve that system and committed treason in their failed attempt to achieve it. Through the arc of Seidule’s own life, as well as the culture that formed him, he seeks a path to understanding why the facts of the Civil War have remained buried beneath layers of myth and even outright lies—and how they embody a cultural gulf that separates millions of Americans to this day. Part history lecture, part meditation on the Civil War and its fallout, and part memoir, Robert E. Lee and Me challenges the deeply-held legends and myths of the Confederacy—and provides a surprising interpretation of essential truths that our country still has a difficult time articulating and accepting.

No Rest for the Righteous By: J. G. Schwam Elliot Christmas is not certain he is the Messiah—he is not that keen on labels. His life has been spent on the Bitterroot Range in Montana, seeing to the particular needs of his family and his land with dignity and kindness. Yet suddenly God, for some obscure reason, has become particularly attentive to his wishes. So begins No Rest for the Righteous, a novel that imagines what it might look like if the Messiah were to appear here and now, in 21st century America. Elliot comes to grips with the miraculous scope of his new responsibility throughout a story that is by turns humorous and compassionate. With the full apparatus of the media following his every move and government agencies racing to determine what sort of risk he poses to existing structures of power, the Montana rancher sets off across the country with a simple plan to make all of us get righteous.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • An "extraordinary ... profoundly moving" history (The New York Times Book Review) of the American Civil War that reveals the ways that death on such a scale changed not only individual lives but the life of the nation. An estiated 750,000 soldiers lost their lives in the American Civil War. An equivalent proportion of today's population would be seven and a half million. In This Republic of Suffering, Drew Gilpin Faust describes how the survivors managed on a practical level and how a deeply religious culture struggled to reconcile the unprecedented carnage with its belief in a benevolent God. Throughout, the voices of soldiers and their families, of statesmen, generals, preachers, poets, surgeons, nurses, northerners and southerners come together to give us a vivid understanding of the Civil War's most fundamental and widely shared reality. With a new introduction by the author, and a new foreword by Mike Mullen, 17th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.