By closely studying the three-day battle, this book presents an alternative view of Longstreet as an effective military leader, and conducting an incisive historiographical inquiry into Longstreet's treatment by scholars, and refutes over a century of negative evaluations of his performance. The author argues that longstreet's record has been discredited unfairly, persistently, beginning with character assassination by his contemporaries after the war and, by historians in the decades since.

This is the first book-length, critical analysis of Lieutenant General James Longstreet's actions at the Battle of Gettysburg.

Gettysburg's Peach Orchard: Longstreet, Sickles, and the Bloody Fight for the "Commanding Ground" Along the Emmitsburg Road

Robert E. The historiography of the battle’s second day is usually dominated by the Union’s successful defense of Little Round Top, but the day’s most influential action occurred nearly one mile west along the Emmitsburg Road in farmer Joseph Sherfy’s peach orchard. Lee ordered skeptical subordinate Lt.

Gen. The offensive was intended to seize the Peach Orchard and surrounding ground along the Emmitsburg Road for use as an artillery position to support the ongoing attack. Daniel sickles, a scheming former congressman from New York, misinterpreted his orders and occupied the orchard first. What followed was some of Gettysburg’s bloodiest and most controversial fighting.

Hessler and isenberg, both gettysburg licensed Battlefield Guides, combine the military aspects of the fighting with human interest stories in a balanced treatment of the bloody attack and defense of Gettysburg’s Peach Orchard. The command decisions made in and around the Sherfy property influenced actions on every part of the battlefield.

General sickles’s questionable advance forced Longstreet’s artillery and infantry to fight for every inch of ground to Cemetery Ridge. The confederate attack crushed the Peach Orchard salient and other parts of the Union line, threatening the left flank of Maj. Despite its overriding importance, no full-length study of this pivotal action has been written until now.

James hessler’s and britt isenberg’s gettysburg’s peach Orchard: Longstreet, Sickles, and the Bloody Fight for the “Commanding Ground” Along the Emmitsburg Road corrects that oversight.

"Lee is Trapped, and Must be Taken": Eleven Fateful Days after Gettysburg: July 4 - 14, 1863

Meade organized and motivated his army of the Potomac in response to President Abraham Lincoln’s mandate to bring about the “literal or substantial destruction” of Gen. Lee is trapped, 1863, and must be taken”: eleven Fateful Days after Gettysburg: July 4 to July 14, by Thomas J. Gen. Robert E. The eleven-day period after gettysburg was a battle of wits to determine which commander better understood the information he received, and directed the movements of his army accordingly.

Prepare for some surprising revelations. Woven into this account is the fate of thousands of Union prisoners who envisioned rescue to avoid incarceration in wretched Confederate prisons, and a characterization of how the Union and Confederate media portrayed the ongoing conflict for consumption on the home front.

The authors utilized a host of primary sources to craft their study, diaries, and telegrams, including letters, memoirs, newspapers, official reports, and have threaded these intelligence gems in an exciting and fast-paced narrative that includes a significant amount of new information. Earnhart civil war scholarship awardcountless books have examined the battle of Gettysburg, but the retreat of the armies to the Potomac River and beyond has not been as thoroughly covered.

George G. Lee’s retreating Army of Northern Virginia. As far as the president was concerned, if Meade aggressively pursued and confronted Lee before he could escape across the flooded Potomac River, “the rebellion would be over. The long and bloody three-day battle exhausted both armies.

Conquered: Why the Army of Tennessee Failed Civil War America

Here, esteemed military historian Larry J. Operating in the vast and varied trans-Appalachian west, the Army of Tennessee was crucially important to the military fate of the Confederacy. Surpassing previous work that has focused on questions of command structure and the force's fate on the fields of battle, Daniel provides the clearest view to date of the army's inner workings, from top-level command and unit cohesion to the varied experiences of common soldiers and their connections to the home front.

Johnston, and john bell hood, it won few major battles, and many regard its inability to halt steady Union advances into the Confederate heartland as a matter of failed leadership. Daniel offers a far richer interpretation. But under the principal leadership of generals such as Braxton Bragg, Joseph E. Drawing from his mastery of the relevant sources, Daniel's book is a thought-provoking reassessment of an army's fate, with important implications for Civil War history and military history writ large.

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The Great Partnership: Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and the Fate of the Confederacy

It has been over two decades since any author attempted a joint study of the two generals. 16 pages of B&W photographs. At best, in the end, it will significantly revise how we evaluate Confederate strategy during the height the war and our understanding of why, the South lost. The story of the unique relationship between Lee and Jackson, two leaders who chiseled a strategic path forward against the odds and almost triumphed.

Those relationships in the confederate high command were particularly critical for victory, especially the one that existed between the two great Army of Northern Virginia generals. At the very least, the book will inspire a very lively debate among the thousands of students of Civil War his- tory. Why were generals lee and jackson so successful in their partner- ship in trying to win the war for the South? What was it about their styles, friendship, even their faith, that cemented them together into a fighting machine that consistently won despite often overwhelming odds against them?The Great Partnership has the power to change how we think about Confederate strategic decision-making and the value of personal relationships among senior leaders responsible for organizational survival.

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The Confederacy's Most Modern General: James Longstreet and the American Civil War

Other areas show progressive applications with artillery, staff work, force projection, and operational-level thinking. Ltc knudsen’s thoughtful study ties comparatives from the Napoleonic era through World War II and beyond back to the Civil War, and in doing so, demonstrates that Longstreet evolved his thinking across several battles, and how his innovations appeared in future wars.

Not everyone will agree with ltc’s Knudsen’s conclusions, but it will now be impossible to write about the general without referencing this important study. On the confederate side, a careful comparison of Longstreet’s body of work in the field to modern military doctrine reveals several large-scale innovations.

Lee. More modern writers have taken up the cudgel with their pens, skewing the general’s legacy. The confederacy’s most modern general draws heavily on 20th Century Army doctrine, command, field training, staff planning, and combat experience, and is the first serious treatment of Longstreet’s generalship vis a vis modern warfare.

Longstreet’s ability to launch and control powerful offensives was on display at Second Manassas in August 1862, and his offensive plan at Chickamauga in Georgia the following September was similar, if not the forerunner to, World War II tactical-level German armored tactics. The civil war is often called the first “modern war.

Sandwiched between the napoleonic wars and world war I, the Civil War spawned a host of “firsts” and is often looked upon as a precursor to the larger and more deadly 20th century conflicts. Longstreet was not the sole agent of all modern change away from the Napoleonic method, executed on a large scale, but his contributions were very significant, and demonstrated that he was a modern thinker unparalleled in the Confederate Army.

Gettysburg's Most Hellish Battleground: The Devil's Den, July 2, 1863

Nevertheless, the dramatic story of the successful turning of the first Union left flank has been long overlooked and ignored largely because of the giant historical shadow cast by the more famous struggle at Little Round Top, which was only the second and last fight for the southern flank of both armies on July 2.

The tenacious struggle that raged beyond control at the battle-line's southern end was all-important, because the Devil's Den and Houck's Ridge anchored the left flank of the over-extended Union battle-line, before Federal troops occupied Little Round Top to the east. The battle-hardened veterans of lieutenant general james Longstreet's First Corps captured this vital sector-- the first Union left flank--in one of the few Southern successes of the second day, after some of the war's most bitter fighting.

Therefore, the important contest for possession of the first Union left flank at the Devil's Den and Houck's Ridge was crucial on the bloody afternoon that decided the fate of America. This jumble of huge boulders situated at the southern end of Houck's Ridge was truly a hell on earth during the decisive afternoon of July 2, 1863.

During the crucial three days of combat at Gettysburg, the most nightmarish place on the entire battlefield was appropriately named the Devil's Den.

"Too Much for Human Endurance": The George Spangler Farm Hospitals and the Battle of Gettysburg

Stories rarely if ever told of nurses, surgeons, ambulance workers, teenage fighters, and others are weaved seamlessly through gripping, musicians, smooth-flowing prose. A host of notables spent time at the Spangler farm, including Union officers George G. Happily, though, their stories remain, and noted journalist and George Spangler Farm expert Ronald D.

They have finally received the recognition their place in history deserves. The bloodstains are gone, but the worn floorboards remain. Zook. Nixon, would die there, as would Confederate Gen. The doctors, nurses, and patients who toiled and suffered and ached for home at the Army of the Potomac’s XI Corps hospital at the George Spangler Farm in Gettysburg have long since departed.

Lewis A. Armistead, who fell mortally wounded at the height of Pickett’s Charge. Cross, francis barlow, francis Mahler, Freeman McGilvery, and Samuel K. In addition to including the most complete lists ever published of the dead, and surgeons at the Spanglers’ XI Corps hospital, wounded, this study breaks new ground with stories of the First Division, II Corps hospital at the Spanglers’ Granite Schoolhouse.

Kirkwood also establishes the often-overlooked strategic importance of the property and its key role in the Union victory. George nixon iii, great-grandfather of President Richard M.

Armies of Deliverance: A New History of the Civil War

In their quest for political unity Confederates relentlessly played up two themes: Northern barbarity and Southern victimization. Armies of deliverance offers innovative insights on the conflict for those steeped in Civil War history and novices alike. Varon also offers new perspectives on major battles, illuminating how soldiers and civilians alike coped with the physical and emotional toll of the war as it grew into a massive humanitarian crisis.

But such appeals failed to convince Confederates to accept peace on the victor's terms, ultimately sowing the seeds of postwar discord. Loyal americans marched off to war in 1861 not to conquer the South but to liberate it. The theme of deliverance was essential in mobilizing a Unionist coalition of Northerners and anti Confederate Southerners.

Varon in armies of deliverance, a sweeping narrative of the Civil War and a bold new interpretation of Union and Confederate war aims. Confederates, fighting to establish an independent slaveholding republic, were determined to preempt, discredit, and silence Yankee appeals to the Southern masses. Northerners imagined the war as a crusade to deliver the Southern masses from slaveholder domination and to bring democracy, prosperity, and education to the region.

The union's politics of deliverance helped it to win the war. Casting the union army as ruthless conquerors, Confederates argued that the emancipation of blacks was synonymous with the subjugation of the white South.

Normandy '44: D-Day and the Epic 77-Day Battle for France

Drawing freshly on widespread archives and on the testimonies of eye-witnesses, the story of how hundreds of thousands of men, were transported across the English Channel, and mountains of materiel, Holland relates the extraordinary planning that made Allied victory in France possible; indeed, is as dramatic a human achievement as any battlefield exploit.

Yet as familiar as it is, many parts of the overLORD campaign, as James Holland makes clear in his definitive history, as it was known, are still shrouded in myth and assumed knowledge. Ultimately ingenuity, determination, and immense materiel strength―delivered with operational brilliance―made the difference.

A stirring narrative by a pre-eminent historian, Normandy ‘44 offers important new perspective on one of history’s most dramatic military engagements and is an invaluable addition to the literature of war. D-day, june 6, have become the defining episode of world war ii in the west―the object of books, television series, 1944, and the seventy-six days of bitter fighting in Normandy that followed the Allied landing, films, and documentaries.

For both sides, the challenges were enormous. The brutal landings on the five beaches and subsequent battles across the plains and through the lanes and hedgerows of normandy―a campaign that, Rommel, German ordnance officer Hans Heinze, Thunderbolt pilot Archie Maltbie, French resistance leader Robert Leblanc, and through the memories of paratrooper Lieutenant Dick Winters of Easy Company, and other commanders were made, Montgomery, was worse than any in World War I―come vividly to life in conferences where the strategic decisions of Eisenhower, British corporal and tanker Reg Spittles, in terms of daily casualties, and many others.

The allies confronted a disciplined German army stretched to its limit, which nonetheless caused tactics to be adjusted on the fly.

Storming the Wheatfield: John Caldwell's Union Division in the Gettysburg Campaign

From colonel edward cross’s black bandana, james smith’s storming the Wheatfield goes deep into the lives the soldiers, to a lone young man from Washington County whose grave is marked in stone nearby, to the famed Irish Brigade's charge on Stoney Hill, evoking a personal connection with the troops.

Caldwell’s division made a desperate stand against a tough and determined Confederate force in farmer George Rose's nearly 20-acre Wheatfield. This gripping narrative is an in-depth study of the valiant men of General John Caldwell’s Union Division during the Gettysburg Campaign. Smith painstakingly contacted nearly one hundred descendants of Caldwell's soldiers, producing one of the most extensively researched narratives to date.

Table of contentsforewordacknowledgmentsintroduction1: caldwell’s commanders and brigade histories2: The Long March to Gettysburg3: Saviors of the Wheatfield4: The Bloody Aftermath of July 25: A Stiff Fight on July 36: Pursuing Lee’s Army7: Conclusion and EpilogueAppendix: Losses in Caldwell's Division at GettysburgNotesBibliography.

Ready for harvest, the infamous wheatfield would change hands nearly six times in the span of two hours of fighting on July 2, bloody, becoming a trampled, no-man's land for thousands of wounded soldiers. Smith examines the lives of the union soldiers in the ranks—as well as leaders Cross, Zook, Brooke, Kelly, and Caldwell himself.

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