Step behind the battle lines with generals on both sides of the Civil War as AMERICAN EXPERIENCE explores the military prowess and political ambition of Union victor Ulysses S. Grant and his Confederate foe, Robert E. Lee.

A New York Times bestselling author's revealing account of General Robert E. Lee's life after Appomattox: After his surrender at Appomattox in 1865, Robert E. Lee, commanding general for the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia during the Civil War, lived only five more years. It was the great forgotten chapter of his remarkable life, during which Lee did more to bridge the divide between the North and the South than any other American. The South...

"A journalist's memoir-plus-reporting about modern-day conflicts over Southern monuments to Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate hero and original leader of the Ku Klux Klan, as well as a personal examination of the legacy of white supremacy through the US today, tracing the throughline from Appomattox to Charlottesville."--

At 3 A.M. on February 21, 1865, a band of 65 Confederate horsemen slowly made its way down Greene Street in Cumberland, Maryland. Thinking the riders were disguised Union scouts, the few Union soldiers out that bitterly cold morning paid little attention to them. In the meantime, over 3,500 Yankee soldiers peacefully slept. Within thirty minutes McNeill's Rangers had kidnapped Union generals George Crook and Benjamin Kelley from their hotels and spirited...

"The history of the Civil War is the stories of its soldiers," writes Ronald S. Coddington in the preface to Faces of the Confederacy. This book tells the stories of seventy-seven Southern soldiers, young farm boys, wealthy plantation owners, intellectual elites, uneducated poor, who posed for photographic portraits, cartes de visite, to leave with family, friends, and sweethearts before going off to war. Coddington, a passionate collector of Civil...

Mortally wounded in battle when he was only thirty-one, the dashing J. E. B. Stuart, the South's "plumed warrior knight," stands with Stonewall Jackson as one of the Confederacy's most revered martyrs. Union General John Sedgwick called him "the greatest cavalryman ever foaled in America." Jeffry D. Wert, however, offers a more balanced assessment in this comprehensive biography.Wert's narrative portrait of Stuart-audacious and daring in battle, contentious...

During the Civil War, Union forces blockade the port of Charleston so the Confederate army seeks a way to attack the Yankee ships. George Dixon is part of the group of men given the task of creating and building the 'fish boat,' a submarine. The H.L. Hunley ultimately sets out on its mission to sink Yankee ships, but fails to return, its whereabouts unknown. For more than 100 years, the mystery of the Hunley and the fate of its crew stayed buried....

An account of General Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson's rise to prominence during the Civil War "Stonewall Jackson has long been a figure of legend and romance. As much as any person in the Confederate pantheon, even Robert E. Lee, he embodies the romantic Southern notion of the virtuous lost cause. Jackson is also considered, without argument, one of our country's greatest military figures. His brilliance at the art of war tied Abraham Lincoln and the...