Download or read book The Secret Civil War written by John Reynolds Sawyer and published by New Word City. This book was released on 2016-06-21 with total page 117 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The American Civil War was one of the most harrowing conflicts in history. What many of us don't know is the key role that spies played on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line during the four-year struggle. This secret war was waged by an intriguing lineup of participants: detective agency chief Allan Pinkerton, who was said to have thwarted a conspiracy to assassinate President-elect Abraham Lincoln; Elizabeth Van Lew, known as "Crazy Bet," the operator of a Union spy ring right in the heart of the Confederacy in Richmond, Virginia; and John Singleton Mosby, or the "Gray Ghost" as he was known, who created havoc by attacking Union troops behind their own lines - and disappearing into the countryside, seemingly without a trace. The Secret Civil War tells their stories and more in a compelling tale of espionage, daring, and in many cases, conflicting loyalties.
Download or read book Secret Missions of the Civil War written by Philip Van Doren Stern and published by Garrett County Press. This book was released on 2012-07-30 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Civil War historian and celebrated author Philip Van Doren Stern presents an underground history woven from first hand accounts of Civil War spies, scouts, detectives and double agents. Secret Missions of the Civil War gives an inside look into the birth of modern spy warfare: secret codes, Allen Pinkerton, assassinations, McClellan's personal spy, European arms dealing, the Secret Service, Morgan and Mosby, the stunning Mrs. Rose O’Neal, privateers, the New York draft riots and torpedoes. Through astute and carefully documented commentary, Stern shows how seemingly random acts of underground warfare dramatically influenced the course of the war and American history.
Download or read book A Secret Society History of the Civil War written by Mark A. Lause and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2011-12-01 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This unique history of the Civil War considers the impact of nineteenth-century American secret societies on the path to as well as the course of the war. Beginning with the European secret societies that laid the groundwork for Freemasonry in the United States, Mark A. Lause analyzes how the Old World's traditions influenced various underground groups and movements in America, particularly George Lippard's Brotherhood of the Union, an American attempt to replicate the political secret societies that influenced the European revolutions of 1848. Lause traces the Brotherhood's various manifestations, the most conspicuous being the Knights of the Golden Circle (out of which developed the Ku Klux Klan), and the Confederate secret groups through which John Wilkes Booth and others attempted to undermine the Union. Lause profiles the key leaders of these organizations, with special focus on George Lippard, Hugh Forbes, and George Washington Lafayette Bickley. Antebellum secret societies ranged politically from those with progressive or even revolutionary agendas to those that pursued conservative or oppressive goals. This book shows how, in the years leading up to the Civil War, these clandestine organizations exacerbated existing sectional tensions in the United States. Lause's research indicates that the pervasive influence of secret societies may have played a part in key events such as the Freesoil movement, the beginning of the Republican party, John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry, Lincoln's election, and the Southern secession process of 1860-1861. This exceptional study encompasses both white and African American secret society involvement, revealing the black fraternal experience in antebellum America as well as the clandestine operations that provided assistance to escaped slaves via the Underground Railroad. Unraveling these pervasive and extensive networks of power and influence, A Secret Society History of the Civil War demonstrates that antebellum secret societies played a greater role in affecting Civil War-era politics than has been previously acknowledged.
Download or read book Secret Lives of the Civil War written by Cormac O'Brien and published by Quirk Books. This book was released on 2007 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides the birth and death dates, astrological sign, nicknames, famous words, and little-known or bizarre facts about the lives of over twenty-five people on the Union and Confederate sides of the Civil War.
Download or read book Lincoln s Spies written by Douglas Waller and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2019-08-06 with total page 624 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This major addition to the history of the Civil War is a “fast-paced, fact-rich account” (The Wall Street Journal) offering a detailed look at President Abraham Lincoln’s use of clandestine services and the secret battles waged by Union spies and agents to save the nation—filled with espionage, sabotage, and intrigue. Veteran CIA correspondent Douglas Waller delivers a riveting account of the heroes and misfits who carried out a shadow war of espionage and covert operations behind the Confederate battlefields. Lincoln’s Spies follows four agents from the North—three men and one woman—who informed Lincoln’s generals on the enemy positions for crucial battles and busted up clandestine Rebel networks. Famed detective Allan Pinkerton mounted a successful covert operation to slip Lincoln through Baltimore before his inauguration after he learns of an assassination attempt from his agents working undercover as Confederate soldiers. But he proved less than competent as General George McClellan’s spymaster, delivering faulty intelligence reports that overestimated Confederate strength. George Sharpe, an erudite New York lawyer, succeeded Pinkerton as spymaster for the Union’s Army of the Potomac. Sharpe deployed secret agents throughout the South, planted misinformation with Robert E. Lee’s army, and outpaced anything the enemy could field. Elizabeth Van Lew, a Virginia heiress who hated slavery and disapproved of secession, was one of Sharpe’s most successful agents. She ran a Union spy ring in Richmond out of her mansion with dozens of agents feeding her military and political secrets that she funneled to General Ulysses S. Grant as his army closed in on the Confederate capital. Van Lew became one of the unsung heroes of history. Lafayette Baker was a handsome Union officer with a controversial past, whose agents clashed with Pinkerton’s operatives. He assembled a retinue of disreputable spies, thieves, and prostitutes to root out traitors in Washington, DC. But he failed at his most important mission: uncovering the threat to Lincoln from John Wilkes Booth and his gang. Behind these operatives was Abraham Lincoln, one of our greatest presidents, who was an avid consumer of intelligence and a ruthless aficionado of clandestine warfare, willing to take whatever chances necessary to win the war. Lincoln’s Spies is a “meticulous chronicle of all facets of Lincoln’s war effort” (Kirkus Reviews) and an excellent choice for those wanting “a cracking good tale” (Publishers Weekly) of espionage in the Civil War.
Download or read book Churchill s Secret War With Lenin written by Damien Wright and published by Helion and Company. This book was released on 2017-07-27 with total page 578 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An account of the little-known involvement of Royal Marines as they engaged the new Bolsheviks immediately after the Russian Revolution. After three years of great loss and suffering on the Eastern Front, Imperial Russia was in crisis and on the verge of revolution. In November 1917, Lenin’s Bolsheviks (later known as “Soviets”) seized power, signed a peace treaty with the Central Powers and brutally murdered Tsar Nicholas (British King George’s first cousin) and his children so there could be no return to the old order. As Russia fractured into loyalist “White” and revolutionary “Red” factions, the British government became increasingly drawn into the escalating Russian Civil War after hundreds of thousands of German troops transferred from the Eastern Front to France were used in the 1918 “Spring Offensive” which threatened Paris. What began with the landing of a small number of Royal Marines at Murmansk in March 1918 to protect Allied-donated war stores quickly escalated with the British government actively pursuing an undeclared war against the Bolsheviks on several fronts in support of British trained and equipped “White Russian” Allies. At the height of British military intervention in mid-1919, British troops were fighting the Soviets far into the Russian interior in the Baltic, North Russia, Siberia, Caspian and Crimea simultaneously. The full range of weapons in the British arsenal were deployed including the most modern aircraft, tanks and even poison gas. British forces were also drawn into peripheral conflicts against “White” Finnish troops in North Russia and the German “Iron Division” in the Baltic. It remains a little-known fact that the last British troops killed by the German Army in the First World War were killed in the Baltic in late 1919, nor that the last Canadian and Australian soldiers to die in the First World War suffered their fate in North Russia in 1919 many months after the Armistice. Despite the award of five Victoria Crosses (including one posthumous) and the loss of hundreds of British and Commonwealth soldiers, sailors and airmen, most of whom remain buried in Russia, the campaign remains virtually unknown in Britain today. After withdrawal of all British forces in mid-1920, the British government attempted to cover up its military involvement in Russia by classifying all official documents. By the time files relating to the campaign were quietly released decades later there was little public interest. Few people in Britain today know that their nation ever fought a war against the Soviet Union. The culmination of more than 15 years of painstaking and exhaustive research with access to many previously classified official documents, unpublished diaries, manuscripts and personal accounts, author Damien Wright has written the first comprehensive campaign history of British and Commonwealth military intervention in the Russian Civil War 1918-20. “Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War remains forgotten. Wright’s book addresses that oversight, interspersing the broader story with personal accounts of participants.” —Military History Magazine
Download or read book The Hour of Peril written by Daniel Stashower and published by Minotaur Books. This book was released on 2013-01-29 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "It's history that reads like a race-against-the-clock thriller." —Harlan Coben Daniel Stashower, the two-time Edgar award–winning author of The Beautiful Cigar Girl, uncovers the riveting true story of the "Baltimore Plot," an audacious conspiracy to assassinate Abraham Lincoln on the eve of the Civil War in THE HOUR OF PERIL. In February of 1861, just days before he assumed the presidency, Abraham Lincoln faced a "clear and fully-matured" threat of assassination as he traveled by train from Springfield to Washington for his inauguration. Over a period of thirteen days the legendary detective Allan Pinkerton worked feverishly to detect and thwart the plot, assisted by a captivating young widow named Kate Warne, America's first female private eye. As Lincoln's train rolled inexorably toward "the seat of danger," Pinkerton struggled to unravel the ever-changing details of the murder plot, even as he contended with the intractability of Lincoln and his advisors, who refused to believe that the danger was real. With time running out Pinkerton took a desperate gamble, staking Lincoln's life—and the future of the nation—on a "perilous feint" that seemed to offer the only chance that Lincoln would survive to become president. Shrouded in secrecy—and, later, mired in controversy—the story of the "Baltimore Plot" is one of the great untold tales of the Civil War era, and Stashower has crafted this spellbinding historical narrative with the pace and urgency of a race-against-the-clock thriller. A Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Book of 2013 Winner of the 2014 Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime Winner of the 2013 Agatha Award for Best Nonfiction Winner of the 2014 Anthony Award for Best Critical or Non-fiction Work Winner of the 2014 Macavity Award for Best Nonfiction
Download or read book Hidden History of Civil War Charleston written by Margaret Middleton Rivers Eastman and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2012-07-31 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Forgotten tales of Charleston's Civil War history have been collected into this new compendium for today's history lovers. In a city as old as Charleston, it's only natural for some stories to become less well-known over time, but the Palmetto State's history should never be forgotten entirely. Author Margaret Middleton Rivers Eastman recounts some of Charleston's amazing Civil War stories that have faded from memory, including the shady story of how an association of Charleston elites conspired to push South Carolina toward secession in 1860, and the Stone Fleet of old whaling ships that were sunk in Charleston Harbor in an attempt to choke out Confederate blockade runners, as well as a cast of real-life characters such as Amarinthia Yates Snowden, William Richard Catheart, and Tom Lockwood, just to name a few.
Download or read book Smithsonian Civil War written by Smithsonian Institution and published by Smithsonian Institution. This book was released on 2013-10-29 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Smithsonian Civil War is a lavishly illustrated coffee-table book featuring 150 entries in honor of the 150th anniversary of the Civil War. From among tens of thousands of Civil War objects in the Smithsonian's collections, curators handpicked 550 items and wrote a unique narrative that begins before the war through the Reconstruction period. The perfect gift book for fathers and history lovers, Smithsonian Civil War combines one-of-a-kind, famous, and previously unseen relics from the war in a truly unique narrative. Smithsonian Civil War takes the reader inside the great collection of Americana housed at twelve national museums and archives and brings historical gems to light. From the National Portrait Gallery come rare early photographs of Stonewall Jackson and Ulysses S. Grant; from the National Museum of American History, secret messages that remained hidden inside Lincoln's gold watch for nearly 150 years; from the National Air and Space Museum, futuristic Civil War-era aircraft designs. Thousands of items were evaluated before those of greatest value and significance were selected for inclusion here. Artfully arranged in 150 entries, they offer a unique, panoramic view of the Civil War.
Download or read book The Secret Civil War written by New Word City Editors and published by . This book was released on 2018-08 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The American Civil War was one of the most harrowing conflicts in history. What many of us don't know is the key role that spies played on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line during the four-year struggle. This secret war was waged by an intriguing lineup of participants: detective agency chief Allan Pinkerton, who was said to have thwarted a conspiracy to assassinate President-elect Abraham Lincoln; Elizabeth Van Lew, known as "Crazy Bet," the operator of a Union spy ring right in the heart of the Confederacy in Richmond, Virginia; and John Singleton Mosby, or the "Gray Ghost" as he was known, who created havoc by attacking Union troops behind their own lines - and disappearing into the countryside, seemingly without a trace. The Secret Civil War tells their stories and more in a compelling tale of espionage, daring, and in many cases, conflicting loyalties.
Download or read book The Secret War for the Union written by Edwin C. Fishel and published by HMH. This book was released on 2014-07-01 with total page 761 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A treasure trove for historians . . . A real addition to Civil War history” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). At the end of the American Civil War, most of the intelligence records disappeared—remaining hidden for over a century. As a result, little has been understood about the role of espionage and other intelligence sources, from balloonists to signalmen with their telescopes. When, at the National Archives, Edwin C. Fishel discovered long-forgotten documents—the operational files of the Army of the Potomac’s Bureau of Military Information—he had the makings of this, the first book to thoroughly and authentically examine the impact of intelligence on the Civil War, providing a new perspective on this period in history. Drawing on these papers as well as over a thousand pages of reports by General McClellan’s intelligence chief, the detective Allan Pinkerton, and other information, he created an account of the Civil War that “breaks much new ground” (The New York Times). “The former chief intelligence reporter for the National Security Agency brings his professional expertise to bear in this detailed analysis, which makes a notable contribution to Civil War literature as the first major study to present the war’s campaigns from an intelligence perspective. Focusing on intelligence work in the eastern theater, 1861–1863, Fishel plays down the role of individual agents like James Longstreet’s famous ‘scout,’ Henry Harrison, concentrating instead on the increasingly sophisticated development of intelligence systems by both sides. . . . Expertly written, organized and researched.” —Publishers Weekly “Fundamentally changes our picture of the secret service in the Civil War.” —The Washington Post
Download or read book Secret Weapons in the Civil War written by Victor Brooks and published by Chelsea House Pub. This book was released on 1999-12-01 with total page 64 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Describes some of the new weapons and devices which both Confederates and Yankees produced during the Civil War making it the first truly "modern" war in history.
Download or read book Our Man in Charleston written by Christopher Dickey and published by Crown. This book was released on 2015 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The little-known story of a British diplomat who serves as a spy in South Carolina at the dawn of the Civil War, posing as a friend to slave-owning aristocrats when he was actually telling Britain not to support the Confederacy"--
Download or read book The Next Civil War written by Stephen Marche and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2023-01-03 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Should be required reading for anyone interested in preserving our 246-year experiment in self-government.” —The New York Times Book Review * “Well researched and eloquently presented.” —The Atlantic * “Delivers Cormac McCarthy-worthy drama; while the nonfictional asides imbue that drama with the authority of documentary.” —The New York Times Book Review A celebrated journalist takes a fiercely divided America and imagines five chilling scenarios that lead to its collapse, based on in-depth interviews with experts of all kinds. The United States is coming to an end. The only question is how. On a small two-lane bridge in a rural county that loathes the federal government, the US Army uses lethal force to end a standoff with hard-right anti-government patriots. Inside an ordinary diner, a disaffected young man with a handgun takes aim at the American president stepping in for an impromptu photo-op, and a bullet splits the hyper-partisan country into violently opposed mourners and revelers. In New York City, a Category 2 hurricane plunges entire neighborhoods underwater and creates millions of refugees overnight—a blow that comes on the heels of a financial crash and years of catastrophic droughts—and tips America over the edge into ruin. These nightmarish scenarios are just three of the five possibilities most likely to spark devastating chaos in the United States that are brought to life in The Next Civil War, a chilling and deeply researched work of speculative nonfiction. Drawing upon sophisticated predictive models and nearly two hundred interviews with experts—civil war scholars, military leaders, law enforcement officials, secret service agents, agricultural specialists, environmentalists, war historians, and political scientists—journalist Stephen Marche predicts the terrifying future collapse that so many of us do not want to see unfolding in front of our eyes. Marche has spoken with soldiers and counterinsurgency experts about what it would take to control the population of the United States, and the battle plans for the next civil war have already been drawn up. Not by novelists, but by colonels. No matter your political leaning, most of us can sense that America is barreling toward catastrophe—of one kind or another. Relevant and revelatory, The Next Civil War plainly breaks down the looming threats to America and is a must-read for anyone concerned about the future of its people, its land, and its government.
Download or read book Knights of the Golden Circle written by David C. Keehn and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2013-04-15 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1860, during their first attempt to create the Golden Circle, several thousand Knights assembled in southern Texas to "colonize" the northern Mexico. Due to insufficient resources and organizational shortfalls, however, that filibuster failed. Later, the Knights shifted their focus and began pushing for disunion, spearheading prosecession rallies, and intimidating Unionists in the South. They appointed regional military commanders from the ranks of the South's major political and military figures, including men such as Elkanah Greer of Texas, Paul J. Semmes of Georgia, Robert C. Tyler of Maryland, and Virginius D. Groner of Virginia. Followers also established allies with the South's rabidly prosecession "fire-eaters," which included individuals such as Barnwell Rhett, Louis Wigfall, Henry Wise, and William Yancy.
Download or read book The Secret Civil War written by John Sawyer and published by . This book was released on 2017-01-02 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The American Civil War was one of the most harrowing conflicts in history. What many of us don't know is the key role that spies played on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line during the four-year struggle. This secret war was waged by an intriguing lineup of participants: detective agency chief Allan Pinkerton, who was said to have thwarted a conspiracy to assassinate President-elect Abraham Lincoln; Elizabeth Van Lew, known as "Crazy Bet," the operator of a Union spy ring right in the heart of the Confederacy in Richmond, Virginia; and John Singleton Mosby, or the "Gray Ghost" as he was known, who created havoc by attacking Union troops behind their own lines - and disappearing into the countryside, seemingly without a trace. The Secret Civil War tells their stories and more in a compelling tale of espionage, daring, and in many cases, conflicting loyalties.
Download or read book Weird Civil War written by Mark Sceurman and published by Weird. This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Compiles stories of paranormal activities and other strange anomalies connected to the Civil War, including ghost sightings, unusual artifacts, battlefields and other historic sites, and other oddities.
