The Maps of Antietam breaks down the entire operation into 21 map sets or “action-sections” enriched with 124 full-colour original full-page maps. These spectacular cartographic creations bore down to the regimental and battery level and include the march into Maryland, the Harpers Ferry Operation, the Battle of South Mountain, the battle at Antietam, the retreat, and the fighting at Shepherdstown, as well as important marches and events. Each “action-section” is accompanied by as many as ten maps, and opposite each map is a full facing page of detailed, footnoted text describing the units, personalities, movements, and combat, including quotes from eyewitnesses, making the story of Lee’s raid into Maryland come alive. This original presentation masterfully leads readers on a journey through the campaign that many historians believe marked the beginning of the end for the Confederacy. Gottfried begins with the position of the opposing armies after the Second Bull Run Campaign before detailing their joint movements into Maryland. Readers will stand with D. H. Hill atop South Mountain as General McClellan tries to force his way through the mountain passes; surround, lay siege to, and capture Harpers Ferry (and ride with Col. Benjamin Davis’s cavalry on its breakout); fight blow-by-blow outside the small town of Sharpsburg (53 maps) through the bloodiest day in American history; retreat from the battlefield; and revisit the final bloodshed spilled at Shepherdstown.Perfect for the easy chair or for walking hallowed ground, The Maps of Antietam is a seminal work that, like Gottfried’s earlier Gettysburg and First Bull Run studies, belongs on the bookshelf of every serious and casual student of the Civil War.

June 1863, and the Gettysburg Campaign is in its opening hours. Harnesses jingled and hooves pounded as Confederate cavalryman James Ewell Brown Stuart leads his three brigades of troopers on a ride that triggers one of the Civil War’s most bitter controversies. Instead of finding glory and victory, Stuart reaped stinging criticism and substantial blame for one of the Confederacy’s most stunning and unexpected battlefield defeats. Stuart left Virginia acting on Gen. Robert E. Lee’s discretionary orders to advance into Maryland and Pennsylvania, where he was to screen Lt. Gen. Richard Ewell’s marching infantry corps and report on enemy activity. The mission jumped off its tracks from virtually the moment it began when one unexpected event after another unfolded across Stuart’s path. For days, neither Lee nor Stuart had any idea where the other was, and the enemy blocked the horseman’s direct route back to the Confederate army, which was advancing nearly blind north into Pennsylvania. By the time Stuart reached Lee on July 2, the armies had unexpectedly collided at Gettysburg and one of the campaign’s greatest controversies was born.Did the plumed cavalier disobey Lee’s orders by stripping the army of its “eyes and ears?” Was Stuart to blame for the unexpected combat that broke out at Gettysburg on July 1? Authors Wittenberg and Petruzzi, widely recognised for their study and expertise of Civil War cavalry operations, have drawn upon a massive array of primary sources, many heretofore untapped, to fully explore Stuart’s ride, its consequences, and the intense debate among participants shortly after the battle, early post-war commentators, and modern scholars.

“The first time I attended a National Guard family event, I felt like I had been abducted by aliens!” recalls Mary Corbett, the author of National Guard 101: A Handbook for Spouses. “I didn’t understand anything! I had never been in an armoury before. I didn’t know the difference between an officer and enlisted soldier. I didn’t even know how to address the commander or his wife!”America’s 365,000+ National Guardsmen and their family members live and work as civilians in nearly 3,000 communities across the United States and her territories, and fight abroad in the defence of our country. National Guard 101 is the only military lifestyle book written specifically for this unique audience.Corbett’s unique book covers a broad range of topics, from practical knowledge about the history of the National Guard and understanding rank to softer subjects like social life in the Guard and family programs. Corbett also details the benefits and assistance resources available to Guard families and guides readers through the process of setting up a Personal Assistance League to provide support during deployment.Acronym-free and written in a lively and informal style, National Guard 101: A Handbook for Spouses demystifies the Guard’s unique hybrid civilian-military lifestyle. It is a must-read book for every National Guard family member.About the AuthorMary Corbett is a professional writer and National Guard wife, and lives in Alpharetta, Georgia.

The 2d Ranger Infantry Company (Airborne) was the first and only all-black Ranger unit in the history of the United States Army. Its ten-month lifespan included selection, training, and seven months of combat deployment in Korea, after which the unit was deactivated. Edward Posey’s magnificent new study, now available in paperback, is the first complete history of this elite, all-volunteer unit, whose members were drawn from the 3rd Battalion of the 505th Airborne Infantry Regiment and the 80th Airborne Anti-Aircraft Battalion. The event that propelled the 2d Rangers into the record books was their airborne assault near Munsan-Ni on March 23, 1951—the first in Ranger history. Once on the ground, Posey and his comrades attacked and captured Hill 151. The fighting—often conducted at very close quarters, and some of it with the bayonet and rifle butt—demonstrated the courage of these tough African American soldiers. Heavy fighting marked their months at the front, including a magnificent attack and defense of Hill 581 that May. Throughout their deployment in Korea, the 2d Rangers served with honour and achieved an outstanding combat record.Posey’s long overdue book (written with the help of other Rangers) is based upon the firsthand experiences of many members of the unit, official records, interviews with survivors, and other archival material. Stitched together, this information offers a rich and worthy addition to the growing literature on the Korean War by explaining the obstacles these patriotic African Americans faced, their sacrifices, and their courageous actions on the far side of the world.

Air Force basic training is now more challenging than ever, both mentally and physically. In the past few years the Air Force has redesigned its basic military training requirements to prepare airmen for the ever-changing role the Air Force is now engaged in around the world in today’s War on Terror.The Ultimate Guide to Air Force Basic Training shows you, step by step, how to survive and thrive in today’s basic training program. Beginning with the recruiting process and taking you all the way through basic training graduation day, this book answers all your questions and will help alleviate your fears and concerns as you enter this new and exciting period of your life.Author SrA Nicholas Van Wormer’s book is a fresh and updated insider’s view of what you will encounter and how to perform to graduate at the top of your class. It also includes interviews with recent basic training graduates, recruiters and even military training instructors to better provide you with the most detailed guide to Air Force basic training ever published.Whether you are getting ready to ship out to basic training or just looking into the different military options available to you, The Ultimate Guide to Air Force Basic Training is an invaluable tool that will help guide you through an otherwise daunting and difficult process.About the AuthorNicholas Van Wormer graduated from Air Force basic military training as an honour graduate in 2007. Since that time he has served in multiple missions in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. These missions included deploying to Baghdad, Iraq in 2009-2010.

The months-long Saratoga campaign was one of the most important military undertakings of the American Revolution, and John Luzader’s impressive Saratoga: A Military History of the Decisive Campaign of the American Revolution, the first all-encompassing objective account of these pivotal months in American history, is now available in paperback.British General John Burgoyne’s army of 7,800 men intended to capture Albany, New York, wrest control of the vital Hudson River Valley from the colonists, carry a brutal war into the American interior, secure the Champlain-Hudson country, and make troops available for Sir William Howe’s 1778 campaign.Initial colonial opposition was paltry by comparison: widely separated fixed positions, small garrisons and commands, and feuding American commanders. Burgoyne’s primary opponent was General Horatio Gates, an ambitious and stubborn leader who eventually cobbled together some 8,000 men, including Benedict Arnold and Daniel Morgan. The series of battles large and small that Gates and his lieutenants would engineer stunned the world and spun the colonial rebellion in an entirely different direction.About the Author John Luzader is veteran of World War II and has worked for the U.S. Department of Defense as a research historian and for the National Park Service.

Now available in paperback, Sickles at Gettysburg, by licensed battlefield guide James Hessler, is the most deeply researched, full-length biography to appear on this remarkable American icon. And it is long overdue.No individual who fought at Gettysburg was more controversial than Major General Sickles. By 1863, Sickles was notorious as a disgraced former Congressman who murdered his wife’s lover on the streets of Washington and used America’s first temporary insanity defence to escape justice. With his political career in ruins, Sickles used his connections with President Lincoln to obtain a prominent command in the Army of the Potomac’s Third Corps, despite having no military experience. At Gettysburg, he openly disobeyed orders in one of the most controversial decisions in military history.No single action dictated the battlefield strategies of Robert E. Lee more than Sickles’ unauthorised advance to the Peach Orchard, and the mythic defence of Little Round Top might have occurred quite differently were it not for General Sickles. Fighting heroically, Sickles lost his leg on the field and thereafter worked to remove General Meade from command of the army. Sickles spent the remainder of his checkered life declaring himself the true hero of Gettysburg.About the AuthorJames A. Hessler is a native of Buffalo, NY, he resides in Gettysburg with his wife and children.

Thousands of books and articles have been written about Gettysburg, but the operation remains one of the most complex and difficult to understand. Bradley Gottfried’s groundbreaking The Maps of Gettysburg: An Atlas of the Gettysburg Campaign, June 3 – July 13, 1863 is a unique and thorough study of this multifaceted campaign.The Maps of Gettysburg breaks down the entire operation into thirty map sets or “action-sections” enriched with 144 detailed, full-page colour maps comprising the entire campaign. These cartographic originals bore down to the regimental and battery level and include the march to and from the battlefield and virtually every significant event in between. At least two, and as many as twenty, maps accompany each map set. Keyed to each piece of cartography is a full facing page of detailed text describing the units, personalities, movements, and combat (including quotes from eyewitnesses) depicted on the accompanying map, all of which makes the Gettysburg story come alive.About the AuthorBradley M. Gottfried, Ph.D., is the President of the College of Southern Maryland. An avid Civil War historian, Dr. Gottfried is the author of five books.

In Fighting Words, award-winning author Richard F. Miller (In Words and Deeds) looks to some of history's most successful battle speechmakers to answer the age-old question of how did it work? How did Pope Urban II's speech convince tens of thousands of Europeans to wage the First Crusade, a dangerous, and for many, a one-way journey to Jerusalem? How did George Patton's speech transform the green kids of the Third Army into the terror of the Third Reich? How did the words of General David Petraeus resurrect a losing effort in Iraq and in the process, retrain his soldiers for a new kind of war? Miller argues that human persuasion is seamless and that the persuasive strategies by which men (and increasingly women) are recruited, trained, and exhorted for war can be applied to politics and business. For those who manage, motivating, instructing, and preparing your people to perform their jobs is, for the competent manager, Job One. For those who recognize that in this partisan age, politics is just war by other means, Fighting Words applies the insights of battle speeches to politics. Miller concludes his study by analyzing three of President Obama's most successful and controversial speeches based on the lessons learned from the great military motivators of history. What did the president do right? What did he do wrong? Miller doesn't speculate, rather he analyzes real historical examples and extracts their lessons. As Miller aptly demonstrates, persuasive strategies based on love, hate, duty, patriotism, comradeship, fear, and shame are as widely used today as they were in antiquity.About the AuthorHistorian and journalist Richard F. Miller has served four stints as an embedded journalist, most recently, with the 101st Airborne at various posts in eastern Afghanistan (2008).

“In New Dawn, Richard Lowry presents not just a brilliant account of the battle for Fallujah, but also a useful overview of the history, economics, and culture of the region.” - Newt Gingrich, best selling author and former Speaker of the House of RepresentativesFallujah. Few names conjure up as many images of blood, sacrifice, and valour as does this ancient city in Al Anbar province forty miles west of Baghdad. This sprawling concrete jungle was the scene of two major U.S. combat operations in 2004. The first was Operation Vigilant Resolve, an aborted effort that April by U.S. Marines intent on punishing the city’s insurgents. The second, Operation Phantom Fury, was launched seven months later. Richard Lowry’s New Dawn: The Battles for Fallujah is the first comprehensive history of this fighting.Also known as the Second Battle for Fallujah, Operation Phantom Fury was a protracted house-to-house and street-to-street combat that began on November 7 and continued unabated for seven bloody and exhausting weeks. It was the largest fight of Operation Iraqi Freedom and the heaviest urban combat since the Battle of Hue City, Vietnam in 1968. Death and redemption were found everywhere, from narrow streets to courtyards, kitchens, bedrooms, and rooftops. Lowry spent years researching and writing his new campaign history. In addition to archival research, New Dawn is based upon the personal recollections of nearly 200 soldiers and Marines who participated in the battles for Fallujah, from the commanding generals who planned the operations to the privates who kicked in the doors. The result is a gripping, page-turning narrative of individual sacrifice and valour that also documents the battles for future military historians.About the AuthorRichard S. Lowry is an internationally recognized military historian, public speaker, and author.

The Maps of Chickamauga explores this largely misunderstood battle through the use of 120 full-colour maps, graphically illustrating the complex tangle of combat’s ebb and flow that makes the titanic bloodshed of Chickamauga one of the most confusing actions of the American Civil War. Track individual regiments through their engagements at fifteen to twenty-minute intervals or explore each army in motion as brigades and divisions manoeuvre and deploy to face the enemy. The Maps of Chickamauga allows readers to fully grasp the action at any level of interest. The maps lay out the troops and terrain as they were in September of 1863. Opening and closing chapters describe each army’s approach to the battlefield and the retreat and pursuit to Chattanooga in the aftermath of the bloody combat. In between, sections are devoted to the fighting of September 18, 19, and 20, following the battle as it unfolds from a series of limited collisions between isolated columns into the bloody action of the last two days. Situation maps reflect the posture of each army on an hourly basis, while tactical maps reveal the intricacies of regimental and battery movements.The text accompanying each map explains the action in succinct detail, supported by a host of primary sources. Eyewitness accounts vividly underscore the human aspect of the actions detailed in the maps as brigades and regiments collide. Meticulously researched and footnoted by David Powell with cartography by David Freidrichs, The Maps of Chickamauga relies on the participants’ own words to recreate the course of battle.

The campaign has all the drama any historian could want: the war’s top generals and admirals pitted against one another; decisive naval engagements; cavalry fighting; siege warfare; night bayonet attacks; and more. By the summer of 1781, America had been at war with England for six years. No one believed in 1775 that the colonists would put up such a long and credible struggle. France sided with the colonies in 1778, but it was the dispatch of 5,500 infantry under Rochambeau in the summer of 1780 that shifted the tide of war against the British.In early 1781, after his victories in the Southern Colonies, Lord Cornwallis marched his army north into Virginia. He believed the Americans could be decisively defeated in Virginia and the war brought to an end. George Washington believed Cornwallis’ move was a strategic blunder, and he moved vigourously to exploit it. With the assistance of Rochambeau’s infantry and a key French naval victory at the Battle off the Capes in September, Washington trapped Cornwallis on the tip of a narrow Virginia peninsula at a place called Yorktown. And so it began.Operating on the ill-conceived belief that Clinton would arrive with reinforcements, Cornwallis confidently remained within Yorktown’s inadequate defenses. Determined that nothing short of outright surrender would suffice, his opponent laboured day and night to achieve that end. With an almost flawless attack, Washington sealed Cornwallis’s fate. Trapped inside crumbling defenses, he surrendered on October 19, 1781, effectively ending the war in North America.Penned by historian Jerome A. Greene, this book offers a complete and balanced examination of the siege and the participants involved.

In 9 A.D., the 17th, 18th, & 19th Roman legions and their auxiliary troops under the command of Publius Quinctilius Varus vanished in the boggy wilds of Germania. They died by the hundreds over several days in a carefully planned ambush led by Arminius—a Roman-trained German warrior adopted and subsequently knighted by the Romans, but determined to stop Rome’s advance east beyond the Rhine River. By the time it was over, some 25,000 men, women, and children were dead and the course of European history had been forever altered. “Quinctilius Varus, give me back my legions!” Emperor Augustus agonized aloud when he learned of the devastating loss. As the decades slipped past, the location of the Varus defeat, one of the Western world’s most important battlefields, was lost to history. It remained so for two millennia.Convinced the running battle took place north of Osnabruck, Germany, Clunn set out to prove his point. His discovery of large numbers of Roman coins in the late 1980s, followed by a flood of thousands of other artifacts (including weapons and human remains), ended the mystery once and for all. Archaeologists and historians across the world agreed. Today, a multi-million dollar state-of-the-art museum houses and interprets these priceless historical treasures on the very site Varus’s legions were lost.A masterful retelling of the search to discover the Varus battlefield, Clunn alternates between his incredible modern quest, and the ancient tale of the Roman occupation of Germany (based upon actual finds from the battlefield) that ultimately ended so tragically in the peat bogs of Kalkriese.

The stunning Northern victory at Shiloh in 1942 thrust Union commander Ulysses S. Grant into the national spotlight, claimed the life of Confederate commander Albert S. Johnston, and forever buried the notion that the Civil War would be a short conflict. Anxious to attack the enemy, Johnston began concentrating Southern forces at Corinth, a major railroad center just below the Tennessee border. His bold plan called for his Army of the Mississippi to march north and destroy General Grant’s Army of the Tennessee before it could link up with another Union army on the way to join him.On the morning of April 6, Johnston boasted to his subordinates, “Tonight we will water our horses in the Tennessee!” They nearly did so. Johnston’s sweeping attack hit the unsuspecting Federal camps at Pittsburg Landing and routed the enemy from position after position as they fell back toward the Tennessee River. Johnston’s sudden death in the Peach Orchard, however, coupled with stubborn Federal resistance, widespread confusion, and Grant’s dogged determination to hold the field, saved the Union army from destruction. The arrival of reinforcements that enabled to Grant to seize the initiative and surprise the Confederates led to one of the bloodiest battles of the entire war, with nearly 24,000 men killed, wounded, and missing.Cunningham, a young Ph.D. candidate, researched and wrote the book in 1966. Although unpublished, many Shiloh experts and park rangers considered it to be the best overall examination of the battle ever written. Civil War historians Joiner and Smith have resurrected Cunningham’s manuscript updating citations, original maps, a complete order of battle and table of losses. This book will be welcomed by everyone who enjoys battle history at its finest.

The New Civil War Handbook: Facts and Photos from America’s Greatest Conflict is a complete up-to-date guide for American Civil War enthusiasts of all ages. Author Mark Hughes uses clear and concise writing, tables, charts, and more than 100 photographs to trace the history of the war from the beginning of the conflict through Reconstruction.Coverage includes battles and campaigns, the common soldier, technology, weapons, women and minorities at war, hospitals, prisons, generals, the naval war, artillery, and much more. In addition to these important areas, Hughes includes a fascinating section about the Civil War online, including popular blog sites and other Internet resources. Additional reference material in The New Civil War Handbook includes losses in battles, alternate names for battles, major causes of the deaths of Union soldiers (no data exists for Confederates), deaths in POW camps, and other rare information.Civil War buffs will find The New Civil War Handbook to be an invaluable quick reference guide, and one that makes an excellent addition for both the Civil War novice and the Civil War buff.About the Author: Mark Hughes is an electronics instructor widely recognized as the authority on Civil War cemeteries. He has written several books, including Bivouac of the Dead, The Unpublished Roll of Honor, and Confederate Cemeteries (2 vols.). An electronics instructor at Cleveland Community College, Mark, his wife Patty, and their daughter Anna Grace live on the family farm near Kings Mountain, NC.

Popular and scholarly history presents a one-dimensional image of Napoleon as an inveterate instigator of war who repeatedly sought large-scale military conquests. General Franceschi and Ben Weider dismantle this false conclusion in "The Wars Against Napoleon", a brilliantly written and researched study that turns our understanding of the French emperor on its head. Avoiding the simplistic cliches and rudimentary caricatures many historians use when discussing Napoleon, Franceschi and Weider argue persuasively that the caricature of the megalomaniac conqueror who bled Europe white to satisfy his delirious ambitions and insatiable love for war is groundless. By carefully scrutinizing the facts of the period and scrupulously avoiding the sometimes confusing cause and effect of major historical events, they paint a compelling portrait of a fundamentally pacifist Napoleon, one completely at odds with modern scholarly thought.This rigorous intellectual presentation is based upon three principal themes. The first explains how an unavoidable belligerent situation existed after the French Revolution of 1789. The new France inherited by Napoleon was faced with the implacable hatred of reactionary European monarchies determined to restore the ancient regime. All-out war was therefore inevitable unless France renounced the modern world to which it had just painfully given birth. The second theme emphasizes Napoleon's determined efforts ("bordering on an obsession," argue the authors) to avoid this inevitable conflict. The political strategy of the Consulate and the Empire was based on the intangible principle of preventing or avoiding these wars, not on conquering territory. Finally, the authors examine, conflict by conflict, the evidence that Napoleon never declared war.As he later explained at Saint Helena, it was he who was always attacked - not the other way around. His adversaries pressured and even forced the Emperor to employ his unequalled military genius. After each of his memorable victories Napoleon offered concessions, often extravagant ones, to the defeated enemy for the sole purpose of avoiding another war. Lavishly illustrated, persuasively argued, and carefully illustrated with original maps and battle diagrams, "The Wars Against Napoleon" presents a courageous and uniquely accurate historical idea that will surely arouse vigorous debate within the international historical community.