In the years following the Civil War, a new battle began. Newly freed African American men had gained their voting rights and would soon have a chance to transform Southern politics. Former Confederates and other white supremacists mobilized to stop them. Thus, the KKK was born. After the first political assassination carried out by the Klan, Washington power brokers looked for help in breaking the growing movement. They found it in Hiram C. Whitley....

This book provides an account of the day President Lincoln was shot. Hour by hour, it chronicles the movements of the President and his assassin during the day of the tragedy.

"The bestselling authors of The First Conspiracy, which covers the secret plot against George Washington, now turn their attention to a little-known, but true story about a failed assassination attempt on President Lincoln. Everyone knows the story of Abraham Lincoln's assassination in 1865, but few are aware of the original conspiracy to kill him four years earlier in 1861, literally on his way to Washington, D.C., for his first inauguration. The...

"The life of Abraham Lincoln, America's greatest president, in a new, illustrated edition of the Newbery Honor classic. Clara Ingram Judson's Newbery Honor Book is a richly drawn biography of Abraham Lincoln from his backwoods boyhood, to his days as a shopkeeper and lawyer, his entry into politics, and finally through his extraordinary presidency and tragic assassination. Judson presents Lincoln as he was--the plain-spoken and practical man, often...

More fascinating than fiction, this is the moving story of the most misunderstood woman in American history…The truth about Mary Lincoln has for nearly a century been hidden under a mountain of myth.They said Lincoln really loved Ann Rutledge. That he had tried to avoid marriage to Mary Todd, that his wife hurt him politically though she drove him to the Presidency, that she embarrassed him financially as well as socially and inflicted on him the...

"A president who governed a divided country has much to teach us in a twenty-first-century moment of polarization and political crisis. Abraham Lincoln was president when implacable secessionists gave no quarter in a clash of visions inextricably bound up with money, power, race, identity, and faith. He was hated and hailed, excoriated and revered. In Lincoln we can see the possibilities of the presidency as well as its limitations. At once familiar...

"From the National Book Award-winning and best-selling author Timothy Egan comes the epic story of one of the most fascinating and colorful Irishman in nineteenth-century America. The Irish-American story, with all its twists and triumphs, is told through the improbable life of one man. A dashing young orator during the Great Famine of the 1840s, in which a million of his Irish countrymen died, Thomas Francis Meagher led a failed uprising against...

In December 1848, a young enslaved couple named Ellen and William Craft traveled openly by rail, coach and steamship from Macon, Georgia, to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Ellen, who passed for white, disguised herself as a wealthy disabled man, with William as "his" slave. Woo follows their journey north, and in joining the abolitionist lecture circuit. When the new Fugitive Slave Law in 1850 put them at risk, they fled from the United States. Their...

In the winter of 1852, a group of Philadelphia abolitionists dedicated to assisting runaway slaves in their flight to freedom formed a new assistance group to be part of the Underground Railroad—the General Vigilance Committee. William Still, himself a son of slaves, was named its secretary and executive director. Deeply moved by the stories of the fugitive slaves he helped conduct northward, Still took his committee record-keeping to a higher...

Courage under Fire. Self-Sacrifice. Battles that Changed America. American history is full of men and women who have acted courageously when their families, communities and country needed them most. Henry Cabot Lodge and Theodore Roosevelt discovered they both loved telling the stories of these outstanding individuals who helped make America. They pared down their favorite stories to 26 and gave them as a gift to the young people of America in 1895. The...