Price: $44.95

The battle of the Crater on July 30, 1864, was the defining event in the 292-day campaign around Petersburg, Virginia, in the Civil War and one of the most famous engagements in American military history. Although the bloody combat of that "horrid pit" has been recently revisited as the centerpiece of the novel and film versions of Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain, the battle has yet to receive a definitive historical study. Distinguished Civil War historian Earl J. Hess fills that gap in the literature of the Civil War with Into the Crater.

In this narrative account of the Crater and its aftermath, Hess identifies the most reliable evidence to be found in hundreds of published and unpublished eyewitness accounts, official reports, and historic photographs. Archaeological studies and field research on the ground itself, now preserved within the Petersburg National Battlefield, complement the archival and published sources. Hess re-creates the battle in lively prose saturated with the sights and sounds of combat at the Crater in moment-by-moment descriptions that bring modern readers into the chaos of close range combat. Hess discusses field fortifications as well as the leadership of Union generals Ulysses S. Grant, George Meade, and Ambrose Burnside, and of Confederate generals Lee, P. G. T. Beauregard, and A. P. Hill. He also chronicles the atrocities committed against captured black soldiers, both in the heat of battle and afterward, and the efforts of some Confederate officers to halt this vicious conduct.

Earl J. Hess is the Stewart W. McClelland Chair in History at Lincoln Memorial University in Harrogate, Tennessee. Hess is the author of many studies of the Civil War, including Pickett's Charge: The Last Attack at Gettysburg, a Pultizer Prize nominee and winner of the James I. Robertson Literary Prize, and Lee's Tar Heels: The Pettigrew-Kirkland-MacRae Brigade, winner of the Douglas Southall Freeman Award. His recent books include In the Trenches at Petersburg: Field Fortifications and Confederate Defeat and The Rifle Musket in Civil War Combat: Reality and Myth.

	Price: $27.95

In the spring of 1865, Federal major general George Stoneman launched a cavalry raid deep into the heart of the Confederacy. Over the next two months, Stoneman’s cavalry rode across six Southern states, fighting fierce skirmishes and destroying supplies and facilities. When the raid finally ended, Stoneman’s troopers had brought the Civil War home to dozens of communities that had not seen it up close before. In the process, the cavalrymen pulled off one of the longest cavalry raids in U.S. military history.

Despite its geographic scope, Stoneman’s 1865 raid failed in its primary goal of helping to end the war. Instead, the destruction the raiders left behind slowed postwar recovery in the areas it touched. In their wake, the raiders left a legacy that resonates to this day, even in modern popular music such as The Band’s “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.”

Based on exhaustive research in 34 repositories in 12 states and from more than 200 books and newspapers, Hartley’s book tells the complete story of Stoneman’s 1865 raid for the first time.

Chris J. Hartley is lovingly referred to as a “history nerd” by his wife, Laurie, Chris J. Hartley graduated from the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill with a degree in journalism and a secondary concentration in history. Currently, he is the Vice President of Marketing at Blue Rhino. Stoneman's Raid is his second book. His first book, Stuart’s Tarheels: James B. Gordon and His North Carolina Cavalry, covered the history of a general from Chris’s hometown. In addition to his books, Chris contributes to popular history periodicals such as Blue & Gray and America’s Civil War, and is a frequent speaker for history groups. Chris lives in Pfafftown, N.C. with his wife and two daughters.

	Price: $32.95

.Born on the same day in 1809, Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were true contemporaries. Though shaped by vastly different environments, they had remarkably similar values, purposes, and approaches. In this exciting new study, James Lander places these two iconic men side by side and reveals the parallel views they shared of man and God.

While Lincoln is renowned for his oratorical prowess and for the Emancipation Proclamation, as well as many other accomplishments, his scientific and technological interests are not widely recognized; for example, many Americans do not know that Lincoln is the only U.S. president to obtain a patent. Darwin, on the other hand, is celebrated for his scientific achievements but not for his passionate commitment to the abolition of slavery, which in part drove his research in evolution. Both men took great pains to avoid causing unnecessary offense despite having abandoned traditional Christianity. Each had one main adversary who endorsed scientific racism: Lincoln had Stephen A. Douglas, and Darwin had Louis Agassiz.

With graceful and sophisticated writing, Lander expands on these commonalities and uncovers more shared connections to people, politics, and events. He traces how these two intellectual giants came to hold remarkably similar perspectives on the evils of racism, the value of science, and the uncertainties of conventional religion.

Dr. James Lander was born and raised in California but has spent most of his life in Britain. He holds degrees from American and British universities in History, Classics and Archaeology, and has taught United States and European History at an American school in England for twenty-five years. He has published works on archaeology and local history as well as articles in historical journals.

	Price: $27.99

In two weeks time, John Wilkes Booth would assassinate the president, and the nation was convinced that Davis was the mastermind of the crime. No longer merely a traitor, Davis became a murderer, a wanted man with a one-hundred-thousand-dollar bounty on his head. Over the course of several weeks, Union cavalry led an intense and thrilling chase through the Carolinas and Georgia. Davis' final journey into captivity, with its moments of great suffering and intense drama, transformed him into a martyr of the South's Lost Cause.

Another man was also undergoing his last journey. Abraham Lincoln's final sojourn began on April 19 after the White House funeral. From there a solemn procession escorted him to the Capitol rotunda, where tens of thousands of mourners viewed him in death. This was just the beginning. On April 21, one week after he was shot, four-hundred soldiers escorted him to the Baltimore and Ohio railroad depot and placed him aboard the special train that would carry him home on the nearly 1,700 mile trip to Springfield. By the time it was over, Lincoln's corpse had been unloaded from the train 10 times and placed on public view in all the great cities of the North between Washington and Springfield, making it the largest, most elaborate, and magnificent funeral pageant in American history.

The saga that began with Manhunt continues with the exciting and suspenseful "Bloody Crimes" and with the stories of two fallen leaders counterpoised, their final journeys shaping their legends among a wounded nation and throughout a bloody landscape.

James L. Swanson is the author of the New York Times bestseller Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer and along with Daniel Weinberg is co-author of Lincoln's Assassins: Their Trial and Execution. He is an attorney who has written about history, the Constitution, popular culture, and other subjects for a variety of publications, including the Wall Street Journal, American Heritage, Smithsonian, and the Los Angeles Times.

Mr. Swanson serves on the advisory council of the Ford's Theatre Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Campaign and is a member of the advisory committee of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission.

	Price: $40.00

In Washington: A Life celebrated biographer Ron Chernow provides a richly nuanced portrait of the father of our nation. With a breadth and depth matched by no other one-volume life of Washington, this crisply paced narrative carries the reader through his troubled boyhood, his precocious feats in the French and Indian War, his creation of Mount Vernon, his heroic exploits with the Continental Army, his presiding over the Constitutional Convention, and his magnificent performance as America's first president.

Despite the reverence his name inspires, Washington remains a lifeless waxwork for many Americans, worthy but dull. A laconic man of granite self-control, he often arouses more respect than affection. In this groundbreaking work, based on massive research, Chernow dashes forever the stereotype of a stolid, unemotional man. A strapping six feet, Washington was a celebrated horseman, elegant dancer, and tireless hunter, with a fiercely guarded emotional life. Chernow brings to vivid life a dashing, passionate man of fiery opinions and many moods. Probing his private life, he explores his fraught relationship with his crusty mother, his youthful infatuation with the married Sally Fairfax, and his often conflicted feelings toward his adopted children and grandchildren. He also provides a lavishly detailed portrait of his marriage to Martha and his complex behavior as a slave master.

At the same time, Washington is an astute and surprising portrait of a canny political genius who knew how to inspire people. Not only did Washington gather around himself the foremost figures of the age, including James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson, but he also brilliantly orchestrated their actions to shape the new federal government, define the separation of powers, and establish the office of the presidency.

In this unique biography, Ron Chernow takes us on a page-turning journey through all the formative events of America's founding. With a dramatic sweep worthy of its giant subject, Washington is a magisterial work from one of our most elegant storytellers.

Ron Chernow won the National Book Award in 1990 for his first book, The House of Morgan, and his second book, The Warburgs, won the Eccles Prize as the Best Business Book of 1993. His biography of John D. Rockefeller, Sr., Titan, was a national bestseller and a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist.

A McElfresh Map is like a chapter in American history spread out on one page. Open it and you are hooked. The large, colorful maps are filled with gripping details of history. It's not a story written down, but a vivid paper graphic. The particulars are there for you to explore.

McElfresh Map's vivid display of contemporaneous detail and exhaustive research have made McElfresh maps the guide of choice for the Smithsonian in its Civil War seminars and tours, as well as research tools and illustrations for the nations most acclaimed Civil War authors and historians. These maps are in the collections of libraries from Harvard University to Stanford, and from the Library of Congress (where McElfresh maps hang on the walls of the map reading room) to the Map Library of the British Museum.

"A splendid job..."
Shelby Foote, Author of The Civil War-A Narrative

"Your maps are wonderful, an essential aid to touring these battlefields."
James M. McPherson, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Battle Cry of Freedom

"... Amazingly accurate and a work of art..."
Edwin C. Bearss, Former Chief Historian of the National Park Service