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"In The Yankee Widow, gifted storyteller Linda Lael Miller explores the complexities and heartbreak that families experienced as men took up arms to preserve the nation and defend their way of life. Told in a smart, assured and compelling voice, this is the story of Caroline, the young wife and childhood sweetheart of Jacob, who together live on a farm raising their daughter, Rachel, just outside of Gettysburg. When Jacob joins the Northern army to...
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Already excerpted in the New Yorker, Black Cloud Rising is a compelling and important historical novel that takes us back to an extraordinary moment when enslaved men and women were shedding their bonds and embracing freedom
By fall of 1863, Union forces had taken control of Tidewater Virginia, and established a toehold in eastern North Carolina, including along the Outer Banks. Thousands of freed slaves and runaways flooded
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This historically accurate espionage thriller follows a group of abolitionists who enact a plan to inspire a slave revolt
The period just before the Civil War was a time of dark division that challenged the essence of our American Democracy, much like our divided country of today.
In New England during the antebellum period also known as the plantation era before the Civil War, Josh and Emily, two young white abolitionists,
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"Union soldier John Chenneville suffered a traumatic head wound in battle. His recovery took the better part of a year as he struggled to regain his senses and mobility. By the time he returned home, the Civil War was over, but tragedy awaited. John's beloved sister and her family had been brutally murdered. Their killer goes by many names. He fought for the North in the late unpleasantness, and wore a badge in the name of the law. But the man John...
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"In the waning days of the Civil War, brothers Prentiss and Landry, freed by the Emancipation Proclamation, seek refuge on the homestead of George Walker and his wife, Isabelle. The Walkers, wracked by the loss of their only son to the war, hire the brothers to work their farm, hoping through an unexpected friendship to stanch their grief. Prentiss and Landry, meanwhile, plan to save money for the journey north and a chance to reunite with their mother,...
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"In the fall of 1863, the Union army is in control of the Mississippi River. Much of Louisiana, including New Orleans and Baton Rouge, is occupied. The Confederate army is retreating toward Texas, and being replaced by Red Legs, irregulars commanded by a maniacal figure, and enslaved men and women are beginning to glimpse freedom. When Hannah Laveau, an enslaved woman working on the Lufkin plantation, is accused of murder, she goes on the run with...
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"Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe is a classic work of American literature that explores the harsh realities of slavery in the nineteenth century. Published in 1852, the novel follows the lives of several characters, including the titular character Tom, a long-suffering slave on a plantation in Kentucky. Through the characters' stories, Stowe paints a vivid picture of life in slavery, as well as its psychological, emotional, and spiritual...
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"1863: In a small Creole cottage in New Orleans, an ingenious young Black woman named Stella embroiders intricate maps on repurposed cloth to help enslaved men flee and join the Union Army. Bound to a man who would kill her if he knew of her clandestine activities, Stella has to hide not only her efforts but her love for William, a Black soldier and a brilliant musician. Meanwhile, in New York City, a Jewish woman stitches a quilt for her husband,...
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"Talk of impending war is a steady drumbeat throughout North Carolina, though Joetta McBride pays it little heed. She and her husband, Ennis, have built a modest but happy life for themselves, raising two sons, fifteen-year-old Henry, and eleven-year-old Robert, on their small subsistence farm. They do not support the Confederacy's position on slavery, but Joetta considers her family to be neutral, believing this is simply not their fight. Her opinion...
11) The Removes
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Spanning the years of the first great settlement of the West, The Removes tells the intertwining stories of fifteen-year-old Anne Cummins, frontierswoman Libbie Custer, and Libbie's husband, the Civil War hero George Armstrong Custer. When Anne survives a surprise attack on her family's homestead, she is thrust into a difficult life she never anticipated - living among the Cheyenne as both a captive and, eventually, a member of the tribe. Libbie,...
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"Gold Rush California's notorious "Legislature of a Thousand Drinks" launches a secret consortium of frontier barons, triggering the collapse of independent mines throughout Sierra Nevada. James MacLaren, a fugitive from Scotland, embarks on a new life in California, escaping his secrets but not his hatred for the upper class. He is a man always on his guard, leery of the entitled and wary of his own temper. While raising a beautiful, headstrong daughter,...
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From USA Today best-selling and multi-award-winning author Jacqueline Friedland comes a gripping work of fiction based on the true story of female abolitionist Ann Phillips and her connection to Anthony Burns, a young man who briefly escaped American slavery and rocked the nation with his astoundingly heroic story.
A passionate advocate of abolition from her earliest years, Ann's activism was derailed just before her twenty-fourth...
A passionate advocate of abolition from her earliest years, Ann's activism was derailed just before her twenty-fourth...
14) Libertie
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"Coming of age as a free-born Black girl in Reconstruction-era Brooklyn, Libertie Sampson is all too aware that her mother, a physician, has a vision for their future together: Libertie will go to medical school and practice alongside her. But Libertie feels stifled by her mother's choices and is constantly reminded that, unlike her mother, Libertie has skin that is too dark. When a young man from Haiti proposes to Libertie and promises she will be...
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Now a major motion picture, Manhattan Night, starring Adrien Brody, Campbell Scott, Yvonne Strahovski, and Linda Lavin
Porter Wren is a Manhattan tabloid writer with an appetite for scandal. On the beat he sells murder, tragedy, and anything that passes for the truth. At home, he is a dedicated husband and father. But when a seductive stranger asks him to dig into the unsolved murder of her husband, he is drawn into a very nasty case of sexual obsession...
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The son of a wealthy plantation owner and a doting mother, Augustus Mungo St John is accustomed to the wealth and luxuries his privilege has afforded him. That is until he returns from university to discover his family ruined, his inheritance stolen and his childhood sweetheart, Camilla, taken by the conniving Chester Marion. Fuelled by anger, and love, Mungo swears vengeance and devotes his life to saving Camilla - and destroying Chester. Camilla,...
17) Marmee: a novel
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In 1861, Margaret March, with her husband serving as an army chaplain, finds the comfort and security of her four daughters resting on her shoulders alone as she faces financial hardships, secrets, and tragedy, in this revealing retelling of Little Women from the perspective of the beloved matriarch known as Marmee.
18) Watchfires
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The marriage of Dexter and Rosalie Fairchild-a relationship reflecting the security and privilege of their upper-class New York City lives-is disrupted by personal and political tensions arising from the Civil War.
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Journalist, short story writer, poet, and critic Ambrose Bierce has been called one of America's greatest wits and an uncompromising satirist. He wrote unsparingly and with haunting realism of his Civil War experiences. His finest and most famous Civil War writings are gathered in this volume of six essays and twenty stories, including "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," "What I Saw of Shiloh," and "A Horseman in the Sky." Edited and introduced by...
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"Josephine N. Leary is determined to build a life of her own, and a future for her family. When she moves to Edenton, North Carolina from the plantation where she was born, she is free, newly married, and ready to follow her dreams. As the demands of life pull Josephine's attention-deepening her marriage, mothering her daughters, supporting her grandmother-she struggles to balance her real estate aspirations with the realities of keeping life going...