Washoe County Library System

"Before 1862, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain had rarely left his home state of Maine, where he was a trained minister and mild-mannered professor at Bowdoin College. His colleagues were shocked when he volunteered for the Union army, but he was undeterred and later became known as one of the North's greatest heroes: On the second day at Gettysburg, after running out of ammunition at Little Round Top, he ordered his men to wield their bayonets in a desperate...

''The best-selling classic about a mixed-race child in the Civil War–era South that "chronicles the triumph of a free spirit over many kinds of bondage" (New York Times Book Review). Jubilee tells the true story of Vyry, the child of a white plantation owner and his black mistress. Vyry bears witness to the antebellum South in both its opulence and its brutality, its wartime ruin, and the promises of Reconstruction. Weaving her own family's oral...

"A dramatically illustrated biography of Private Rosetta "Lyons" Wakeman, the only soldier whose letters capture the Civil War from a woman's perspective. In 1862, the war between North and South showed no signs of stopping. In rural New York, nineteen-year-old Rosetta Wakeman longed for a life beyond the family farm. One day she made a brave, bold choice: she cut her braid and disguised herself as a man. No one suspected that "Lyons" was a woman—not...

"An authoritative biography of the second-highest-ranking and most controversial Confederate general, who rejoined the Union after the Civil War, advising other Confederate soldiers to put that war behind them. After joining an interracial government in New Orleans, Longstreet fought against white supremacists when they attacked these postwar elected officials, for which he was vilified and attacked by other Southerners, and blamed for the South's...

"A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist reveals the little-known story of the Union soldiers from Alabama who played a decisive role in the Civil War, and how they were scrubbed from the history books. We all know how the Civil War was won: by courageous Yankees who triumphed over the South. But as veteran journalist Howell Raines shows, it was not only soldiers from Northern states who helped General William Tecumseh Sherman burn Atlanta to the ground,...

"Big Bad Ironclad! covers the history of the amazing ironclad steam warships used in the Civil War. From the ship's inventor, who had a history of blowing things up and only 100 days to complete his project, to the mischievous William Cushing, who prankedhis way through the whole war, this book is filled with surprisingly true facts and funny, brave characters that modern readers will easily relate to"--Publisher's web site. "Ships are great for...