Six months after the Declaration of Independence, the American Revolution was all but lost. A powerful British force had routed the Americans at New York, occupied three colonies, and advanced within sight of Philadelphia. Yet, as David Hackett Fischer recounts in this riveting history, George Washington--and many other Americans--refused to let the Revolution die. On Christmas night, as a howling nor'easter struck the Delaware Valley, he led his...

The Battle of Antietam, fought on September 17, 1862, was the bloodiest single day in American history, with more than 6,000 soldiers killed--four times the number lost on D-Day, and twice the number killed in the September 11th terrorist attacks. In Crossroads of Freedom, America's most eminent Civil War historian, James M. McPherson, paints a masterful account of this pivotal battle, the events that led up to it, and its aftermath. As McPherson...

"In this raw, searing new narrative account, Howard Jones reopens the case of My Lai by examining individual accounts of both victims and soldiers through extensive archival and original research. Jones evokes the horror of the event itself, the attempt to suppress it, as well as the response to Calley's sentence and the seemingly unanswerable question of whether he had merely been following orders. My Lai also surveys how news of the slaughter intensified...

What did Abraham Lincoln envision when he talked about "reconstruction?" Assassinated in 1865, the president did not have a chance to begin the work of reconciling the North and South, nor to oversee Reconstruction as an official postwar strategy. Yet his final speech, given to thousands gathered in the rain outside the White House on April 11, 1865, gives a clear indication of what Lincoln's postwar policy might have looked like-one that differed...

Chronicles the critical months between October 1, 1768, and the winter of 1770 when British troops occupied Boston, a time that galvanized the colonists against Great Britain and sowed the seeds of the American Revolution

Jones provides a concise, incisive, and dramatic account of President Eisenhower's disastrous attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro. He deftly examines the train of missteps and self-deceptions that led to the invasion of U.S.-trained exiles at the Bay of Pigs.