DescriptionThe common wisdom is that John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of Abraham Lincoln, was a failed actor and a madman. But the truth is that he was the matinee idol of his time, and the attack on Lincoln was not the act of a maniac, but part of a plan developed at the highest levels of the Confederacy. In Consider the Elephant by Aram Schefrin, the story of John Wilkes Booth's life and death is told by his brother, Edwin Booth, the greatest Shakespearean actor of his age. The book suffused with the ambiance of the 19th century American theater and full of rich characters. It lays out in detail the path Wilkes took to the top of the celebrity heap, his growing involvement with the Southern rebels, and the development in Richmond of the plot to kidnap and later assassinate the Union's president.
DescriptionIn early March 1861, civil war loomed. By late April, Americans had begun to kill their fellow citizens. Cry Havoc! recounts in riveting detail the events that divided the states and reveals how quirks of timing, character, and place all conspired…
DescriptionIn this classic tale of adventure, a young American sea captain named James Riley, shipwrecked off the western coast of North Africa in 1815, was captured by a band of nomadic Arabs and sold into slavery. Thus begins an epic adventure of survival and a quest for freedom that takes him across the Sahara desert. This dramatic account of Captain Riley's trials and sufferings sold more that one million copies in his day and was even read by a young and impressionable Abraham Lincoln. The degradations of a slave existence and the courage to survive under the most harrowing conditions have rarely been recorded with such painful honesty. Sufferings in Africa is a classic travel-adventure narrative and a fascinating testament of white Americans enslaved abroad, during a time when slavery flourished throughout the United States.
DescriptionA powerful evocation of a dangerous, chaotic, and tragic time, Booth is the story of the most infamous assassination in our history, as well as a riveting portrait of an enigmatic figure who continues to haunt the American imagination. Narrated by…
DescriptionIn this startling and original work, best-selling author Charles Higham addresses one of the greatest historical mysteries: did John Wilkes Booth act alone on the night of Good Friday, 1865 or was he part of a wide conspiracy? Drawing from letters, diaries, previously unstudied records of official hearings, railway timetables, and obscure shipping manifests, Higham has woven a spellbinding account of intrigue. He proves conclusively that high-level figures, including those in government and trade, were involved in the murder plot, and not John Wilkes Booth alone. Higham shows for the first time that Lincoln unwittingly sealed his own doom. By allowing trading with the South in contradiction of his own laws, he enriched a circle of powerful people who, once he had outlived his usefulness and handed over the arrangements to others, marked him very quickly for assassination.
DescriptionThis collection of Lincoln's letters gives us a glimpse into the inner self of a great American president. After a brief autobiography, the letters appear chronologically, beginning with his courtship and early political life and continuing into the presi…
DescriptionThis extraordinary biography by one of the most highly regarded historians on the subject examines Lincoln both as a rising politician and as president. As a defender of national unity, a leader in war, and the emancipator of slaves, Abraham Lincoln lays ample claim to being the greatest of our presidents. While pursuing office, Lincoln drew strength from public opinion and from the machinery of his party. As a wartime president, he recognized the limits as well as the possibilities of power. In his struggle to end slavery, he found allies in the churches, their humanitarian agencies, and the volunteer Union Army. In illuminating the political talents that went hand in hand with large and serious moral purpose, Carwardine gives us a fresh, important portrait of the incomparable Abraham Lincoln.
DescriptionIn his own captivating words, General Ulysses S. Grant describes the Wilderness Campaign, the almost anti-climactic surrender of General Robert E. Lee at Appomattox, and the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. His depiction of the most crucial and hardest-fought battles of the Civil War, the near-disasters, and the bloody triumphs reveals a highly intelligent, profound, thinking man. Grant wrote his memoirs as he lay dying of cancer and completed the manuscript only a week before his death.
