Books published by publisher Bigwig Books

Long considered one of the most vibrant and compelling accounts of the battle of Gettysburg by a young resident of the town. Fifteen-year-old Matilda "Tillie" Pierce saw Union general Buford enter town with his cavalry, saw the rout of the first day of fighting, and the Confederates streaming through the town. She gave water to many Union soldiers, including General George Gordon Meade, the new commander of the Army of the Potomac. She went on to help the nurses and surgeons care for wounded at a house down on Taneytown Road, sitting to comfort the dying General Stephen Weed. Tillie saw the mangled bodies of men and horses, and the incredible destruction of the fields and farms. A quarter-century later, Tillie, now married and a mother, sat down and penned this remarkable account for her family. Every memoir of the American Civil War provides us with another view of the catastrophe that changed the country forever. For the first time, this long out-of-print volume is available as an audiobook.

When legendary Charlie Siringo wrote this classic work, he was only 30 years old and had already spent half that life as a cowboy. With enduring wit, he tells the tale of long cattle drives, small-town beauties, meetings with Billy the Kid, and growing up on the Texas frontier. In plain language you'll hear what it was like to live on the "hurricane deck of a Spanish pony" for months on end, earning enough to head into town and have a good time. Crisscrossing the Lone Star State, he lived a vanishing way of life. After only a few years of setting down, he was back in the saddle as a Pinkerton detective, a career he tells of in later books.

Fifty years of service at the White House in various capacities, including bodyguard to Abraham Lincoln, William H. Crook's memoir brings an astonishing array of personal details of life in the executive mansion. His sensitive observations of Lincoln are especially moving.A well-known figure in Washington, Crook knew every president from Lincoln until Crook's death in 1915. He was a keen observer and his stories will entertain and sometimes surprise you. Here are also stories of presidents Andrew Johnson, Rutherford B. Hayes, and James Garfield.A friend of Ulysses S. Grant, a guest at the White House wedding of Grant's daughter, Nellie, he also tells stories of racing with Grant in buggies.For the first time, this long out-of-print volume is available as an affordable, well-formatted book for e-readers and smartphones. Be sure to LOOK INSIDE by clicking the cover above or download a sample.

NOTE: This edition contains the original illustrations and is annotated with updated information.Victorian traveler Amelia Edwards was already a successful writer when she traveled a thousand miles up the Nile with an Egyptian crew and a few friends. The trip changed her life.A best seller of Victorian travel when published in 1877, A Thousand Miles Up the Nile has enthralled readers for more than a century and a quarter. With the original illustrations and footnotes, this is an enhanced version with a new introduction and additional, modern footnotes.Edwards' prodigious knowledge and research of ancient Egypt, Egyptian gods, pharaohs, and classical history places her travels in context for you. But it is her sensitive, romantic descriptions of Egyptian people and places that makes the book a delight to read over and over.Her understanding of music, poetry, and art all combine in A Thousand Miles. The book is a symphony of love for time and place. It begins quietly, swells to heights, then is relieved by minute details and humor. She educates the reader and then loses herself in rapturous descriptions of life on the Nile.On her return, she spent two years writing this book and was the driving force in the founding of the Egypt Exploration Fund. This superb account of Egypt in the 19th century will remain a classic for years to come.This long out-of-print volume is available as an affordable, well-formatted book for e-readers and smartphones. With the original illustrations and footnotes, this is an enhanced version with a new introduction and additional, modern footnotes.Be sure to LOOK INSIDE by clicking the cover above or download a sample.

If David Sedaris, Chelsea Handler, Larry David, and Caitlin Moran had the unlikeliest orgy in history, the resulting love child might one day write a book like this rollicking collection of true tales from Roy Sekoff, the founding editor of the Huffington Post. Whether he's describing a teenage pilgrimage to a Times Square porn superstore, life-changing experiences with high colonics and psychic readings, an ill-fated attempt to make off with a tissue containing Oprah's tears, or that time Chevy Chase grabbed his balls at a funeral, Sekoff is a lively, irreverent raconteur whose sharp observations wring laughs out of a ludicrous-yet-relatable life. Told with zinging wit and zero propriety, Lacks Self-Control is a testament to his unwavering commitment to overshare.

Having lived all of her nineteen years in New York City, Fannie Mullen could hardly have known what life lay ahead of her when she married Civil War veteran, Lieutenant Orsemus B. Boyd. They would spend the next twenty years moving from post to post on the American frontier, raising three children, making lifelong friendships, and seeing some of the wildest and most beautiful country on earth.Yet she adapted remarkably well and came to love the West and her home in the wilds of the territories. When her husband died suddenly in 1885, she went back to the east and eventually wrote this lovely account of her time with the United States Cavalry on the border.She was made of tough stuff and survived scorpions, snakes, Indians, and army politics. You'll find her classic memoir fascinating and charming.Every memoir of the American West provides us with another view of the movement that changed the country forever.For the first time, this long out-of-print volume is available as an affordable, well-formatted book for e-readers and smartphones. Be sure to LOOK INSIDE by clicking the cover above or download a sample.

Bushwhackers in the American Civil War operated as guerrillas, outside the normal chain of military command. Like William Clarke Quantrill and "Bloody Bill" Anderson, Samuel Hildebrand was a proud Missouri bushwhacker.In this long out of print book, Hildebrand describes raids and executions his band of men carried out. He remained at the end of the war and unreconstructed rebel and fervent racist. Like many of his southern brethren who fought, he never owned slaves but kept a captured black man with him after the war.This self-serving but fascinating account is a valuable addition to the canon of Civil War literature. In it, Hildebrand claims that others have tried to tell his story but have gotten it wrong, so he has a notarized statement by prominent men included as verification of authenticity.Every memoir of the American Civil War provides us with another view of the catastrophe that changed the country forever.For the first time ever, this long-out-of-print book is available as an affordable, well-formatted book for e-readers and smartphones.Be sure to LOOK INSIDE or download a sample.

"What he writes has the stamp of first-hand knowledge and the grace of a sympathetic style. The world owes a debt of gratitude that the accident of the discovery of the tomb brought to it so painstaking a workman as the author—one who was willing to sacrifice the golden possibility of haste and fame to the slow accumulation of scientific knowledge."—The New York Times"Let me try and tell the story of it all. It will not be easy, for the dramatic suddenness of the initial discovery left me in a dazed condition, and the months that have followed have been so crowded with incident that I have hardly had time to think."Among the hundreds of books written about ancient Egypt and Tutankhamun, you won't find an equal to archaeologist Howard Carter's powerful book about his discovery. His great work in many ways remained unfinished.He left us, however, this remarkable document of discovery. The book is Carter's personal story of the greatest adventure of his life—one that has not been surpassed in a century of archaeology.In 1904, retired American lawyer, Theodore Davis, famously declared that The Valley of the Kings in Thebes had given up all of its secrets, leaving nothing more to be discovered. He relinquished his exclusive rights to dig in The Valley.But as Howard Carter states in this volume, "The history of The Valley has never lacked the dramatic element." Some 18 years later, Carter made the richest archaeological discovery in history within yards of where Davis had dug.The world immediately became obsessed with everything Tutankhamun. From architecture, to household goods, to fashion, a early 20th-century surge in fascination with ancient Egypt took hold across the globe.This is not a dry scientific treatment of the excavation or the artifacts. What he imparts with this book is a sense of excitement, wonder, and mystery set expertly into a concise context of history and Egyptology, captivating layperson and specialist alike, young or old.Intertwining notes on Egyptian gods, religion, mythology, and magic, Carter spins an alluring real-life tale, setting the context for Egyptian history and Tutankamun.For the first time this amazing work is available for Kindle. With a new Introduction and updated footnotes, you'll have more context to follow this book than Carter's original readers did. Much information that was yet to be understood or discovered in 1922 is included in the Introduction.Care has been taken to create a well-formatted book for Kindle. It includes images from the original publication. You can even take it with you on your smartphone if you have the Kindle app installed, and then refer to it while visiting the Tutankhamun exhibit in one of the cities it visits in North America.Remember to LOOK INSIDE by clicking the cover image in the upper left of this page. Buy this book today and you'll read it again and again.

"A race, no less than a nation, is prosperous in proportion to the intelligence of its women." (M.A. Majors, 1893)Reconstruction after the Civil War was a fraught with overwhelming new challenges for millions of African Americans, not all of whom were recently-emancipated slaves. The next 100 years would see a struggle for American citizens to claim full citizenship and to end the reign of terror that accompanied emancipation.Yet flourishing in this cauldron of oppression were people who, despite being held down not only because of their race but also because of their sex, succeeded beyond what their birth circumstances would have predicted. They were businesswomen, teachers, doctors, lawyers poets, singers, agitators, scientists, and mathematicians.Dr. Monroe A. Majors wrote this volume in 1893 to let the world know that women of color were helping to lead the way to a new order. Some of the names you'll be familiar with, like Elizabeth Keckley and Sojourner Truth. But from Octavia Albert to Anna Zinga, Majors presents sketches of over 100 women of note whom most of America no longer remembers.The significance of Majors' contribution was not its breadth, detail, or prose but the very fact that he saw the importance of the accomplishments of these women for the future of America itself. We have his record and from this book, many single biographies could be researched and written about a fascinating group of women who succeeded against odds that most of us will never know.Be sure to LOOK INSIDE or download a copy.

Approximately 150,000 African-American soldiers, officers and men went to France to serve in WWI. Alongside them were thousands of African-American women who served in the various volunteer relief organizations like the Red Cross and the Y.M.C.A.Addie Hunton and Kathryn Johnson were two of the women who served. With keen observation and intelligence, they tell the story of what it was like to be overseas "fighting for democracy" with only a glimmer of hope of achieving it back home after the war.They relate the soldiers' stories as well as their own excitement at their new experiences in Europe.Their experience of interacting with the French sharply contrasted with the segregation and humiliation exported from America to France with the Yankee troops. Yet they did not carry bitterness home with them. They remained proud and glad that they had the privilege to serve.For less than you'd spend on gas going to the library, this long out-of-print volume is available as an affordable, well-formatted book for e-readers and smartphones.Be sure to LOOK INSIDE by clicking the cover above or download a sample.

Your journey through the discovery of Tutankhamun cannot be complete without Volume III.In this third and final volume of Howard Carter's classic work on his historic discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun, he gets down to the details of the objects contained in the Treasury and the Annexe. Neither of these chambers had escaped the attentions of the tomb-robbers who had entered the tomb in antiquity. As Carter describes, both rooms had objects that suffered at the hands of the robbers (and probably the officials charged with resealing the tomb).Nevertheless, with his usual style, Carter treats the objects and the science of the discovery with sensitivity and detail. One is a little tempted to wonder in places (such as the description of desert plants) whether he was trying to fill a contractual length for the book. But even here, Carter shows an extraordinary breadth of knowledge that makes the reading interesting.A specific example is Carter's very good detective work on determining the likely source of moisture that permeated the tomb infrequently during the more than 3,000 years during which it was sealed. Carter's understanding of the geology of the Valley of the Kings and his very intimate knowledge of the state of the tombs that intersect the same stony hillock as the tomb of Tutankhamun gave him particular advantage in this analysis. Thus he tells a very interesting tale about an otherwise dull subject, i.e. rainfall and ground seepage.Howard Carter's book is as relevant today as when it was first published. His long and remarkable career in Egypt added much to our understanding of Egyptian history and burial culture.For the first time, this entire series is available for Kindle. These rare and fascinating books are now affordable and you can take them with you anywhere.For the first time, this long out-of-print volume is available as an affordable, well-formatted book for e-readers and smartphones. Be sure to LOOK INSIDE by clicking the cover above or download a sample.

If David Sedaris, Chelsea Handler, Larry David, and Caitlin Moran had the unlikeliest orgy in history, the resulting love child might one day write a book like this rollicking collection of true tales from Roy Sekoff, the founding editor of the Huffington Post. Whether he’s describing a teenage pilgrimage to a Times Square porn superstore, life-changing experiences with high colonics and psychic readings, an ill-fated attempt to make off with a tissue containing Oprah’s tears, or that time Chevy Chase grabbed his balls at a funeral, Sekoff is a lively, irreverent raconteur whose sharp observations wring laughs out of a ludicrous-yet-relatable life. Told with zinging wit and zero propriety, Lacks Self-Control is a testament to his unwavering commitment to overshare.