Contains 45 full page maps showing military positions. Includes accompanying description.

"NEARLY FIFTY YEARS AGO, as a new assistant professor in the History Department at the U.S. Naval Academy, I shared an office suite with Elmer B. "Ned" Potter. Ned had taught at the Naval Academy since before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. He was also the co-editor with Chester Nimitz of the book Sea Power (1961), which we all used as a text in the required naval history course that I subsequently taught at the Academy for thirty years. Ned knew...

The United States Navy today is the greatest and most powerful sea force in the world. But it was not always so. In this book, Symonds traces the uneven historical path that transformed the U.S. Navy from a handful of small sailing craft in the late eighteenth century into a world superpower. The Navy's story is not merely, or even essentially, one of simple increase over time from small beginnings to global behemoth, but rather the Navy's changing...

To Jefferson Davis, he was the "Stonewall of the West"; to Robert E. Lee he was "a meteor shining from a clouded sky"; and to Braxton Bragg, he was an officer "ever alive to a success." He was Patrick Ronayne Cleburne, one of the greatest of all Confederate field commanders. In Stonewall of the West, Craig Symonds offers the first full-scale critical biography of this compelling figure. He explores all the sources of Cleburne's commitment to the Southern...

Abraham Lincoln began his presidency admitting that he knew "but little of ships." Written by a prize-winning historian, this work reveals how Lincoln managed the men who ran the naval side of the Civil War, and how the activities of the Union Navy ultimately affected the course of history.

In July 1883, just a few days after the twentieth anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, a group of editors at The Century Magazine engaged in a lively argument: Which Civil War battle was the bloodiest battle of them all? One claimed it was Chickamauga, another Cold Harbor. The argument inspired a brainstorm. Why not let the magazine's 125,000 readers in on the conversation by offering a series of articles written by officers in command of both...