As a five-feet-three-inch hunchback who weighed about 100 pounds, Homer Lea (1876–1912), was an unlikely candidate for life on the battlefield, yet he became a world-renowned military hero. Homer Lea: American Soldier of Fortune paints a revealing portrait of a diminutive yet determined man who never earned his valor on the field of battle, but left an indelible mark on his times. Lawrence M. Kaplan draws from extensive research to illuminate the life of a "man of mystery," while also yielding a clearer understanding of the early twentieth-century Chinese underground reform and revolutionary movements. Lea's career began in the inner circles of a powerful Chinese movement in San Francisco that led him to a generalship during the Boxer Rebellion. Fixated with commanding his own Chinese army, Lea's inflated aspirations were almost always dashed by reality. Although he never achieved the leadership role for which he strived, he became a trusted advisor to revolutionary leader Dr. Sun Yat-sen during the 1911 revolution that overthrew the Manchu Dynasty. As an author, Lea garnered fame for two books on geopolitics: The Valor of Ignorance, which examined weaknesses in the American defenses and included dire warnings of an impending Japanese-American war, and The Day of the Saxon, which predicted the decline of the British Empire. More than a character study, Homer Lea provides insight into the establishment and execution of underground reform and revolutionary movements within U.S. immigrant communities and in southern China, as well as early twentieth-century geopolitical thought.

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, 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. The Man Who Tried to Burn New York won the Douglas Southall Freeman History Award in 1987.

This collection of letters and documents offers a rare glimpse into a young officer's interesting but short life. Mary A. Giunta's A Civil War Soldier of Christ and Country tells the story of the relationships between the headstrong John Rodgers Meigs and his family and friends; his heartwarming eagerness to please his demanding parents; his West Point experiences that include a meeting with Abraham Lincoln; and his life as a combatant in the Civil War. John Rodgers Meigs was the son of Union Quartermaster General Montgomery C. Meigs, and his official correspondence reveals much about his duties as a military engineer and aide-de-camp to Union generals. The private correspondence between him and his father and mother is especially compelling. Approximately forty of the letters were written in an early version of Pitman shorthand and are here transcribed for the first time. Collectively, they provide an intimate picture of the young Meigs, uncover the concerns of a family with high expectations, and offer a unique look at a devastating war.