Although the Civil War and the Great War were fought only fifty years apart, the perceived time between these two cataclysmic events seems far longer in popular American memory: the Civil War was the centerpiece of the nineteenth century and lies deep in America’s past whereas World War I was a modern prelude to World War II, a conflict still in living memory. Wars Civil and Great breaks down these barriers of time and memory and shows how close and how similar these two conflicts really were in the American experience. Setting both wars in the long nineteenth century, the authors of this volume reveal how the Civil War cast its long shadow over the events of the Great War. President Wilson looked to Lincoln during the Great War for guidance on national leadership at wartime; General John J. Pershing remembered the Civil War of his childhood and sought to learn lessons from Grant and McClellan; and the doughboys on European battlefields held firm to the culture of honor and duty that had inspired their forefathers to take up arms. In this volume, every author as an expert in their own field addresses four overarching questions: What legacy did the Civil War leave? Did the Great War generation interpret the lessons of the Civil War, and if so, how? How did the Great War change the lessons from the Civil War era? And finally, how did both wars contribute to the modernization of the United States? Wars Civil and Great highlights the striking similarities between the two wars by analyzing how the Civil War affected the American reaction to and experience in the Great War while attending to enlisted men, military officers, and political leaders. Other chapters address the environmental effects of both wars, the wars’ impacts on medicine and mental trauma, and the experiences of Black American soldiers in both wars as they fought for a country that treated them so terribly. This volume, while at first appearing as a disparate pairing of conflicts, deftly opens a new window into the past and establishes an illuminating paradigm in the two wars of the long nineteenth century.

Alan Axelrod identifies 18 smaller wars that led to great changes in history, from the Afghan Civil War that precipitated the rise of the Taliban history, from the Afghan Civil War that precipitated the rise of the to the Algerine War in 1815, seen as the first war on terror, to King Philip's War in 1675 that, in proportion to the population at the time, was the costliest war in American history and changed the colonies forever. Axelrod takes a fascinating look at the turning points in world history that people often overlook. Filled with more than 75 maps, illustrations, and paintings. An in-depth and gripping read for people who want to know more about important historical events.

Centuries of warfare that changed the world are captured in History’s Greatest Wars. This book acts as a perfect primer for novices while offering seasoned history readers new perspectives on many famous and some not-so-well-known conflicts. Each chapter includes a quick-reference summary, a timeline, an overview of the war, essays on its principal leaders, a series of short, often offbeat features on aspects of the conflict, and a detailed account of a pivotal battle.

Lesser Civil Wars: Civilians Defining War and the Memory of War is an edited volume that surveys three hundred years of the Memory of war and the Will to war in the greater Ohio River Valley and Great Lakes region. Military theorists from von Clausewitz, to Dingiswayo and Chandragupta, calculated the Will of their own soldiers and of the enemy's soldiers. Sometimes the Will is assigned an erroneously low strength, as Abraham Lincoln learned quickly at the onset of the United States Civil War. In this volume, we examine the civilian production of the national Will to fight future wars through the least civil war - each individual's war to remember or to forget - and no armistice or accord brings this internal battle to an end. This is not a book about the atrocities committed during war. This is a book about the very nature of the Will-Memory-Will cycle, where the Memory of war continues for generations until a new war requires the resurrection of the Will. As these essays show, sometimes it only takes a few individuals to prosecute these Memory wars with rules of engagement that do not necessarily include civil behavior. By focusing on microhistories from a specific region and by bracketing the US Civil War with an essay about a century prior to it and essays about the century following it, we are able to demonstrate the power and energy of the incubating stage of Memory in the Will-Memory-Will cycle. In the greater Ohio River Valley and Great Lakes region, ordinary civilians controlled and incubated the memories of the Iroquois Wars, the French and Indian/Sevens' Years War (1756-1763), the American Revolution (1776-1783) and the War of 1812, and they converted Memory into the Will to fight the US Civil War and the Vietnam War. In these chapters, we present micro-wars between civilians over control of the Will of a nation. They are, indeed, lesser civil wars.

The Civil War and the World War II stand as the two great cataclysms of American history. They were our two costliest wars, with well over a million casualties suffered in each. And they were transforming moments in our history as well, times when the life of the nation and the great experiment in democracy--government of the people, by the people, for the people--seemed to hang in the balance. Now, in War Comes Again, eleven eminent historians--including three Pulitzer Prize winners, all veterans of the Second World War--offer an illuminating comparison of these two epic events in our national life. The range of essays here is remarkable, the level of insight consistently high, and the quality of the writing is superb. For instance, Stephen Ambrose, the bestselling author of D-Day, June 6th, 1944, offers an intriguing comparison of the two great military leaders of each war--Grant and Eisenhower. Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Robert V. Bruce takes a revealing look at the events that foreshadowed the two wars. Gerald Linderman, author of Embattled Courage, examines the two wars from the point of view of the combat soldier. And Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., describes how both Lincoln and FDR went around strict observance of the Constitution in order to preserve the Constitution. There is, in addition, a fascinating discussion of the crucial role played by spying during the two wars, by Peter Maslowski; a look at the diplomacy of Lincoln and Roosevelt, by Howard Jones; and essays on the impact of the wars on women and on African Americans, by D'Ann Campbell, Richard Jensen, and Ira Berlin. In perhaps the most gripping piece in the book, Michael C.C. Adams offers an unflinching look at war's destructiveness, as he argues that the evils we associate with "bad wars" (such as Vietnam) are equally true of "good wars." And finally, in perhaps the most provocative essay in the book, Russell Weigley, one of America's most eminent military historians, maps the evolution of American attitudes toward war to our present belief that the only acceptable war is one that is short, inexpensive, and certain of victory. Would any great commander, Weigley asks, would a Lee or a Grant or a Marshall, refuse to fight unless he knew he couldn't lose? "Is not a willingness to run risks for the sake of cherished values and interests close to the heart of what defines greatness in a human being or in a nation?" Another Pulitzer winner and World War II veteran, Don E. Fehrenbacher, concludes War Comes Again with a very personal look at two common soldiers who have no monuments, who have not been mentioned in previous histories, but who point at the essence of these two wars and are "embedded in the very structure of the enduring nation and the world we live in."

A military leader of legendary genius, Caesar was also a great writer, recording the events of his life with incomparable immediacy and power. The Civil War is a tense and gripping depiction of his struggle with Pompey over the leadership of Republican Rome - a conflict that spanned the entire Roman world, from Gaul and Spain to Asia and Africa. Where Caesar's own account leaves off in 48 BC, his lieutenants take up the history, describing the vital battles of Munda, Spain and Thapsus, and the installation of Cleopatra, later Caesar's mistress, as Queen of Egypt. Together these narratives paint a full picture of the events that brought Caesar supreme power - and paved the way for his assassination only months later.