Bøger af George Walsh

From the campaigns to the men who fought the battles, George Walsh takes the reader into the world of the most infamous fighting brigade of America's Civil War, The Army of Northern Virginia"Damage them all you can," the patrician Lee exhorts, and his Southern army, ragtag in uniform and elite in spirit, responds ferociously in one battle after another against their Northern enemies-from the Seven Days and the Valley Campaign through Chancellorsville and Gettysburg, from the Wilderness to Spotsylvania to the final siege of Richmond and Petersburg. Lee knows that the South's five-and-a-half million white population will be worn down in any protracted struggle by the North's twenty-two million. He is ever offensive-minded, ever seeking the victory that will destroy his enemies' will to fight. He uses his much shorter interior lines to rush troops to trouble spots by forced marches and by rail. His cavalry rides on raids around the entire union army. Lee divides his own force time and again, defying military custom by bluffing one wing of the enemy while striking furiously elsewhere.But this book is more than military history. Walsh's narrative digs deeper, revealing the humanity of Lee and his lieutenants as never before-their nobility and their flaws, their chilling acceptance of death, their tender relations with wives and sweethearts in the midst of carnage.Here we encounter in depth the men who still stir the imagination. The dutiful Robert E. Lee, haunted by his father's failures; stern and unbending Stonewall Jackson, cut down at the moment of his greatest triumph; stolid James Longstreet, who came to believe he was Lee's equal as a strategist, the enigmatic George Pickett.These men and scores of others, enlisted men as well as officers, carry the ultimately tragic story of the Army of Northern Virginia forward with heart rending force and bloody impact. As the war progresses we wonder above all else, had orders been strictly obeyed here or daylight lasted an extra hour there, what might have been. Only Appomattox brings an end to such speculation, when the tattered remnants of Lee's army, both the still living and the shadowy dead, stack their arms at last.

How the unprepossessing Ulysses S. Grant, whose military genius ultimately preserved the Union, came to the forefront in the Civil War is a story as surprising as it is compelling. Forced to resign his commission in the peacetime army for drinking, and thereafter reduced to eking out a living for himself and his family with hardscrabble jobs, at the outbreak of hostilities he suddenly found himself a colonel, and then a general, of volunteers. Grant made the most of unexpected commands. What he knew best, it turned out, was how to wage war, relentlessly and with irresistible force.Early in 1862, with the conflict a year old and both sides in the West reluctant to fight, Grant seized the initiative and took Forts Henry and Donelson, capturing an entire rebel army. Later, in Mississippi, he conducted the arduous campaign against Vicksburg, cutting the confederacy in half and capturing a second army. All the time Grant was forced to cope with jealous superiors, like General Henry Halleck, while finding staunch allies in General William Sherman and Admiral David Dixon Porter, and dealing with disloyalty, like that of General John McClernard, who actually came close to replacing him. But for his many victories Grant was named commander in the West, and sent to relieve the siege of Chattanooga, which earned him his promotion to general-in-chief."Whip the Rebellion" were Grant's watchwords every day of the war. This dramatic narrative--peopled with the heroics of hundreds of officers and enlisted men, crammed with first-hand accounts of battles, tactics, and civilian hardships--offers fresh insights into both the public and personal lives of Grant and his immediate circle.

This comprehensive survey of religion and its profound effects on history provides a historical context for in-depth analysis of theological, social, and political themes in which religion plays a major role.

Both William O'Dwyer, the 104th mayor of New York City, and Frank Costello, prime minister of the underworld, were immigrants, and there the similarity might have ended, except for the televised Kefauver hearings on organized crime in 1951 that linked them forever.