The stirring history of a president and a capital city on the front lines of war and freedom. In the late 1840s, Representative Abraham Lincoln resided at Mrs. Sprigg’s boardinghouse on Capitol Hill. Known as Abolition House, Mrs. Sprigg’s hosted lively dinner-table debates of antislavery politics by the congressional boarders. The unusually rapid turnover in the enslaved staff suggested that there were frequent escapes north to freedom from Abolition House, likely a cog in the underground railroad. These early years in Washington proved formative for Lincoln. In 1861, now in the White House, Lincoln could gaze out his office window and see the Confederate flag flying across the Potomac. Washington, DC, sat on the front lines of the Civil War. Vulnerable and insecure, the capital was rife with Confederate sympathizers. On the crossroads of slavery and freedom, the city was a refuge for thousands of contraband and fugitive slaves. The Lincoln administration took strict measures to tighten security and established camps to provide food, shelter, and medical care for contrabands. In 1863, a Freedman’s Village rose on the grounds of the Lee estate, where the Confederate flag once flew. The president and Mrs. Lincoln personally comforted the wounded troops who flooded wartime Washington. In 1862, Lincoln spent July 4 riding in a train of ambulances carrying casualties from the Peninsula Campaign to Washington hospitals. He saluted the “One-Legged Brigade” assembled outside the White House as “orators,” their wounds eloquent expressions of sacrifice and dedication. The administration built more than one hundred military hospitals to care for Union casualties. These are among the unforgettable scenes in Lincoln’s Citadel, a fresh, absorbing narrative history of Lincoln’s leadership in Civil War Washington. Here is the vivid story of how the Lincoln administration met the immense challenges the war posed to the city, transforming a vulnerable capital into a bastion for the Union.

Richmond, Virginia: pride of the founding fathers, doomed capital of the Confederate States of America. Unlike other Southern cities, Richmond boasted a vibrant, urban industrial complex capable of producing crucial ammunition and military supplies. Despite its northern position, Richmond became the Confederacy's beating heart—its capital, second-largest city, and impenetrable citadel. As long as the city endured, the Confederacy remained a well-supplied and formidable force. But when Ulysses S. Grant broke its defenses in 1865, the Confederates fled, burned Richmond to the ground, and surrendered within the week. Confederate Citadel: Richmond and Its People at War offers a detailed portrait of life's daily hardships in the rebel capital during the Civil War. Here, barricaded against a siege, staunch Unionists became a dangerous fifth column, refugees flooded the streets, and women organized a bread riot in the city. Drawing on personal correspondence, private diaries, and newspapers, author Mary A. DeCredico spotlights the human elements of Richmond's economic rise and fall, uncovering its significance as the South's industrial powerhouse throughout the Civil War.

Beneath the surface of the apparently untutored and deceptively frank Abraham Lincoln ran private tunnels of self-taught study, a restless philosophical curiosity, and a profound grasp of the fundamentals of democracy. Now, in Lincoln: A Very Short Introduction, the award-winning Lincoln authority Allen C. Guelzo offers a penetrating look into the mind of one of our greatest presidents. If Lincoln was famous for reading aloud from joke books, Guelzo shows that he also plunged deeply into the mainstream of nineteenth-century liberal democratic thought. Guelzo takes us on a wide-ranging exploration of problems that confronted Lincoln and liberal democracy--equality, opportunity, the rule of law, slavery, freedom, peace, and his legacy. The book sets these problems and Lincoln's responses against the larger world of American and trans-Atlantic liberal democracy in the 19th century, comparing Lincoln not just to Andrew Jackson or John Calhoun, but to British thinkers such as Richard Cobden, Jeremy Bentham, and John Bright, and to French observers Alexis de Tocqueville and François Guizot. The Lincoln we meet here is an Enlightenment figure who struggled to create a common ground between a people focused on individual rights and a society eager to establish a certain moral, philosophical, and intellectual bedrock. Lincoln insisted that liberal democracy had a higher purpose, which was the realization of a morally right political order. But how to interject that sense of moral order into a system that values personal self-satisfaction--"the pursuit of happiness"--remains a fundamental dilemma even today. Abraham Lincoln was a man who, according to his friend and biographer William Henry Herndon, "lived in the mind." Guelzo paints a marvelous portrait of this Lincoln--Lincoln the man of ideas--providing new insights into one of the giants of American history. About the Series: Combining authority with wit, accessibility, and style, Very Short Introductions offer an introduction to some of life's most interesting topics. Written by experts for the newcomer, they demonstrate the finest contemporary thinking about the central problems and issues in hundreds of key topics, from philosophy to Freud, quantum theory to Islam.

Soon to be an Apple TV+ Series “A terrific narrative of the hunt for Lincoln’s killers that will mesmerize the reader from start to finish.”—Doris Kearns Goodwin The murder of Abraham Lincoln set off the greatest manhunt in American history--the pursuit and capture of John Wilkes Booth. From April 14 to April 26, 1865, the assassin led Union cavalry troops on a wild, 12-day chase from the streets of Washington, D.C., across the swamps of Maryland, and into the forests of Virginia, while the nation, still reeling from the just-ended Civil War, watched in horror and sadness. Based on rare archival materials, obscure trial transcripts, and Lincoln’s own blood relics Manhunt is a fully documented, fascinating tale of murder, intrigue, and betrayal. A gripping hour-by-hour account told through the eyes of the hunted and the hunters, it is history as it’s never been read before.

Memories of my grandfather, Frederick John Burns (18751956), a homeopathic doctor who graduated from Rush Medical School in Chicago, and his daughter who was my mother, Lois Burns Stoddard (19162003), a graduate of the Henry Ford Nurses Training School in Detroit, stirred my interest in the history of medicine. I have read books on the subject for years and was impressed by my visit to the Civil War Museum of Medicine in Hagerstown, Maryland. In June 2015, I began volunteering as a guide at the Indiana Medical History Museum, located in the old Pathology Building on the grounds of Central State Hospital. This facility, originally called the Indiana Hospital (never asylum) for the Insane, is now gone, but the science laboratory built in 1896 still stands. Miss Dorothea Dix spoke to Indiana legislators in 1844 to convince them to build an insane asylum, which they did. The building intended for a hundred mentally ill people was constructed as two connected log cabins in downtown Indianapolis, but it is doubtful that any patients ever used the structure. Instead, the Indiana Hospital for the Insane was built on one hundred sixty acres just three miles west of downtown Indianapolis. The idea about the two soldiers who, during the Peninsula Campaign, suffered from malaria that resulted in their developing a high fever, and the fever killing the syphilis spirochetes, came from my work at the Indiana Medical History Museum. In that building, the doctors studied the malarial treatment for syphilis. Dr. Walter Bruetsch (18961977) came from Heidelberg, Germany, to Indianapolis in 1925 to further his research on this groundbreaking cure for syphilis. However, only about thirty percent of the patients with syphilis at Central State Hospital were cured. When Dr. Bruetsch also experimented with penicillin, the German doctor concluded that drug to be far superior, and the malarial treatment ended. The books on the history of insanity, which I used as research, are listed at the end. The possibility of people being incarcerated against their will in an insane asylum was not uncommon in the nineteenth century. In July 2016, I traveled to Alexandria, Virginia, and Washington, DC, to do research for this book. I was especially interested in historic buildings in order to describe the area. I walked the streets of Alexandria in ninety-degree heat. At the Book Bank Used Books on King Street, I talked to Ms. Becky Squires, who lives on Queen Street and who was very helpful in providing historic information. In Washington, I observed the contrast of the wide streets, so different from Old Town Alexandria. The trip was beneficial in helping me visualize the two locations at the time of the Civil War. In many languages, story and history are the same word. Therefore, to create a fictional story by using historical characters and events seems a reasonable endeavor. According to his son, John Steinbeck said that the purpose of writing is to reconnect people to their own humanity. My purpose for writing is to connect people to our Civil War and thereby learn how we have become who we are as Americans because of what happened during that four-year period.

A groundbreaking, revelatory history of Abraham Lincoln's plan to secure a just and lasting peace after the Civil War-a vision that inspired future presidents as well as the world's most famous peacemakers, including Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr. It is a story of war and peace, race and reconciliation

Few American cities have experienced the trauma of wartime destruction. As the capital of the new Confederate States of America, situated only ninety miles from the enemy capital at Washington, D.C., Richmond was under constant threat. The civilian population suffered not only shortage and hardship but also constant anxiety. During the war, the city more than doubled in population and became the industrial center of a prolonged and costly war effort. The city transformed with the creation of a massive hospital system, military training camps, new industries and shifting social roles for everyone, including women and African Americans. Local historians Jack Trammell and Guy Terrell detail the excitement, and eventually bitter disappointment, of Richmond at war.