Books in His Civil war series series

When the first shots of the Civil War were fired, nearly one-third of Germantown's sons and daughters answered the call to duty. Generals and soldiers, doctors and nurses all fought to preserve the Union. Many were lost, but some returned home to carry on the memory of their fallen comrades through the efforts of the Grand Army of the Republic. The Philadelphia neighborhood was itself transformed when the town hall became Cuyler Hospital and local nurses like Catherine Keyser and Hannah Zell cared for the wounded of Gettysburg and other battles. In this intimate and sharply focused account, local historian Eugene Glenn Stackhouse commemorates the sacrifices of Germantown's proud citizenry.

For sixteen days the armies had grappled—a grueling horror-show of nonstop battle, march, and maneuver that stretched through May of 1864. Federal commander Ulysses S. Grant had resolved to destroy his Confederate adversaries through attrition if by no other means. He would just keep at them until he used them up.Meanwhile, Grant’s Confederate counterpart, Robert E. Lee, looked for an opportunity to regain the offensive initiative. “We must strike them a blow,” he told his lieutenants.The toll on both armies was staggering.But Grant’s war of attrition began to take its toll in a more insidious way. Both army commanders—operating on the dark edge of exhaustion, fighting off illness, pressure-cooked by stress—began to feel the effects of that continuous, merciless grind in very personal ways. Punch-drunk tired, they began to second-guess themselves, began missing opportunities, began making mistakes.As a result, along the banks of the North Anna River, commanders on both sides brought their armies to the brink of destruction without even knowing it.Picking up the story started in the Emerging Civil War Series book A Season of Slaughter: The Battle of Spotsylvania Courthouse, historian Chris Mackowski follows the road south to the North Anna River. Strike Them a Blow: Battle Along the North Anna River offers a concise, engaging account of the mistakes and missed opportunities of the third—and least understood—phase of the Overland Campaign.

This collection of fictional sightings creates the potential for a few nightmares a la Stephen King. -School Library JournalA Union Lieutenant keeps his promise to return to his sweetheart in Brooklyn and waltz to "The Blue Danube," even in death. In rural Virginia, a group of privileged pranksters suffer for dismissing the legend of the ghost who guards a Confederate shot tower. In a small town in South Carolina, a washer woman goes mad when she hears an army of the dead march through the streets night after night, at the stroke of midnight. After a war where passions were so intense, where so many died before they could finish the business of living, is it any wonder that stories of ghosts persist 130 years later? Some of these stories were written at the time of the Civil War, and some decades later. They vary from the interior horror of Ambrose Bierce's “Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” to the deceptively nostalgic tone of Mary Elizabeth Councilman's “Shot-Tower Ghost.” Some center on Union soldiers, others on Confederates. But what unifies these stories is the horror of the losses we sustained, a horror that cannot be measured in numbers or dollars but can only be conveyed in the language of our nation's imagination. These eerie stories teach readers about resourcefulness, courage and responsibility.

"You have the keenest eyes in the troop. Can you see anything ahead?" asked Colonel Winchester. "Nothing living, sir," replied Dick Mason, as he swept his powerful glasses in a half-curve. "There are hills on the right and in the center, covered with thick, green forest, and on the left, where the land lies low, the forest is thick and green too, although I think I catch a flash of water in it." "That should be the little river of which our map tells. And you, Warner, what do your eyes tell you?" "The same tale they tell to Dick, sir. It looks to me like a wilderness." "And so it is. It's a low-lying region of vast forests and thickets, of slow deep rivers and creeks, and of lagoons and bayous. If Northern troops want to be ambushed they couldn't come to a finer place for it. Forrest and five thousand of his wild riders might hide within rifle shot of us in this endless mass of vegetation. And so, my lads, it behooves us to be cautious with a very great caution. You will recall how we got cut up by Forrest in the Shiloh time." "I do, sir," said Dick and he shuddered as he recalled those terrible moments. "This is Mississippi, isn't it?" Colonel Winchester took a small map from his pocket, and, unfolding it, examined it with minute care. "If this is right, and I'm sure it is," he replied, "we're far down in Mississippi in the sunken regions that border the sluggish tributaries of the Father of Waters. The vegetation is magnificent, but for a home give me higher ground, Dick."

"The Shades of the Wilderness" is the seventh book of the Civil War Series by Joseph A. Altsheler. Picking up where "The Star of Gettysburg" left off, this story continues the Civil War experiences of Harry Kenton and his friends in the Southern army, from the retreat after Gettysburg, to Richmond, and then through the battles of the Wilderness and Spottsylvania, to Robert E. Lee's heroic stand during the siege of Petersburg. Other books in the Civil War series are: "The Guns of Bull Run," "The Guns of Shiloh," "The Scouts of Stonewall," "The Sword of Antietam", "The Star of Gettysburg", "The Rock of Chickamauga", and "The Tree of Appomattox."