Eager to enlist, fifteen-year-old Charley has a change of heart after experiencing both the physical horrors and mental anguish of Civil War combat.

Esther Hill Hawks went south in the 1860s to minister to black Union troops and newly freed slaves both as a teacher and a doctor. She kept a diary and described the South she saw.

"Lee's surrender to Grant at Appomattox Court House evokes a highly gratifying image in the popular mind-it was, many believe, a moment that transcended politics, a moment of healing, a moment of patriotism untainted by ideology. But as Elizabeth Varon reveals in this vividly narrated history, this rosy image conceals a seething debate over precisely what the surrender meant and what kind of nation would emerge from war. The combatants in that debate...

"In early 1860, pundits and political operatives across America confidently predicted the victory of Illinois senator Stephen A. Douglas in the coming presidential election. Douglas, after all, led the Democrats, the only party that bridged North and South. But the Democracy would splinter over the issue of slavery, opening the way for the upstart Republicans, exclusively Northern, to steal the Oval Office. Dark horse Abraham Lincoln, not the first...

"Grounding the causes and philosophies of the Civil War in an international context, Andre Fleche examines how questions of national self-determination, race, class, and labor the world over influenced American interpretations of the strains on the Union and the growing differences between North and South. Setting familiar events in an international context, Fleche enlarges our understanding of nationalism in the nineteenth century"--Jacket.

"A deeply-researched, dramatic, and character-driven narrative account of the violent struggle between Union and Confederate forces to claim the American West during the Civil War"--