* More than 700 illustrations, including a hundred and fifty in full color, ranging from rare contemporary photographs and period cartoons to etchings, woodcuts, and paintings 

* 24 full-color maps depicting the major battles of the war plus key economic and political developments 

* Extensive captions (some 35,000 words in all), many of which add new information and interpretations that significantly enhance the original text 

* A streamlined version of the finest one-volume history of the Civil War in print, both a New York Times bestseller and the winner of a Pulitzer Prize 

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for History and a New York Times bestseller, Battle Cry of Freedom has been acclaimed as the finest one-volume history of the American Civil War ever published. James McPherson's epic narrative captures the political, social, and military events that crowded the two decades from the outbreak of one war in Mexico to the ending of another at Appomattox. This illustrated edition adds a rich new dimension to the acclaimed text with more than seven hundred pictures chosen by the author -- many rarely or never before published, and over one hundred and fifty in full color. James McPherson has supplied extensive original commentary for each illustration, including new information unavailable in the original edition. Twenty-four new maps in full color have been prepared specially for this volume. 

Battle Cry of Freedom matches stirring drama with analytical insight, presenting the critical episodes of the era in vivid detail against the backdrop of economic and social changes that hastened war as well as those that followed in its aftermath. McPherson traces the momentous episodes that preceded the Civil War -- the Dred Scott decision, the Lincoln-Douglas debates, John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry, and then moves into a panoramic chronicle of the war itself. The bloody struggles at Manassas, Shiloh, Antietam, Gettysburg, and many other battlefields are grippingly retold; we read of the fall of Richmond and, in a truly moving passage, of the surrender of Lee's army. McPherson brilliantly illuminates the genius of Abraham Lincoln as both a wartime commander and the political leader of the Union, and he crisply sketches portraits of the main participants, from Jackson and Lee to Grant and Sherman. 

Since its first publication, Battle Cry of Freedom has helped shape our understanding of such matters as the origins of the war; the formation of the Republican Party; internal dissent and antiwar opposition in North and South; and the fateful contingencies that determined the course of the conflict. It offers a coherent understanding of the vast and confusing "second American Revolution" we call the Civil War, an era that transformed a nation and expanded our heritage of liberty. Both readers who already admire it as a classic, and those who have not encountered it before, will treasure this magnificent new edition.

Author
James M. McPherson is the George Henry Davis '86 Professor of History at Princeton University and 2003 president of the American Historical Association. Widely acclaimed as the leading historian of the Civil War, he is the author of Crossroads of Freedom: Antietam (a New York Times bestseller), For Cause and Comrades (Winner of the Lincoln Prize), and many other books on Lincoln and the Civil War era. 

For more information, please visit the author's Web site at: 

Reviews
"The best one-volume treatment of its subject I have ever come across. It may actually be the best ever published . . . I was swept away, feeling as if I had never heard the saga before . . . Omitting nothing important, whether military, political, or economic, McPherson yet manages to make everything he touches drive the narrative forward. This is historical writing of the highest order."
--New York Times Review

"The Finest single volume on the war and its background."
--The Washington Post Book World

"Immediately takes its place as the best one-volume history of the coming of the American Civil War and the war itself. It is a superb narrative history, elegantly written."
--The Philadelphia Inquirer

"Deftly coordinated, gracefully composed, charitably argued and suspensefully paid out, McPherson's book is just the compass of the tumultuous middle years of the 19th century it was intended to be, and as narrative history it is surpassing. Bright with details and fresh quotations, solid with carefully-arrived-at conclusions, it must surely be, of the 50,000 books written on the Civil War, the finest compression of that national paroxysm ever fitted between two covers."
--Los Angeles Times Book Review

Excerpt
The following is an excerpt from the book Battle Cry of Freedom
by James M. McPherson
Published by Oxford University Press; October 2003; $65.00US until 12/31/03;$75.00 thereafter; 0-19-516828-3
Copyright © 1998, 2003 James M. McPherson

In 1850, Zachary Taylor -- the last president born before the Constitution -- could look back on vast changes during his adult life. The population of the United States had doubled and then doubled again. Pushing relentlessly westward and southward, Americans had similarly quadrupled the size of their country by settling, conquering, annexing, or purchasing territory that had been occupied for millennia by Indians and claimed by France, Spain, Britain, and Mexico. During the same half-century the gross national product increased sevenfold. No other nation in that era could match even a single component of this explosive growth. The combination of all three made America the Wunderkind nation of the nineteenth century.

Regarded as "progress" by most Americans, this unparalleled and unrestrained growth had negative as well as positive consequences. For Indians it was a story of contraction rather than expansion, of decline from a vital culture toward dependence and apathy. The one-seventh of the population that was black also bore much of the burden of progress while reaping few of its benefits. Slave-grown crops sustained part of the era's economic growth and much of its territorial expansion. The cascade of cotton from the American South dominated the world market, paced the industrial revolution in England and New England, and fastened the shackles of slavery more securely than ever on Afro-Americans.

Even for white Americans, economic growth did not necessarily mean unalloyed progress. Although per capita income doubled during the half-century, not all sectors of society shared equally in this abundance. While both rich and poor enjoyed rising incomes, their inequality of wealth widened significantly. More dangerous was the specter of ethnic conflict. After 1830 waves of immigrants, most of them Roman Catholic, alarmed some Protestant Americans, sparking nativist organizations that resisted cultural pluralism.

The greatest danger to American survival at midcentury, however, was neither class tension nor ethnic division. Rather it was sectional conflict between North and South over the future of slavery. To many Americans, human bondage seemed incompatible with the founding ideals of the republic. If all men were created equal and endowed by the creator with certain inalienable rights including liberty and the pursuit of happiness, what could justify the enslavement of several millions of these men (and women)? The generation that fought the Revolution abolished slavery in states north of the Mason-Dixon line; the new states north of the Ohio River came into the Union without bondage. South of those boundaries, however, slavery became essential to the region's economy and culture.

Meanwhile, a wave of Protestant revivals known as the Second Great Awakening swept the country during the first third of the nineteenth century. In New England, upstate New York, and those portions of the Old North west above the 41st parallel populated by the descendants of New England Yankees, this evangelical enthusiasm generated a host of moral and cultural reforms. The most dynamic and divisive of them was abolitionism.

By midcentury this antislavery movement had gone into politics and had begun to polarize the country. Slaveholders did not consider themselves egregious sinners. And they managed to convince most nonslaveholding whites in the South (two-thirds of the white population there) that emancipation would produce economic ruin, social chaos, and racial war. The slavery issue would probably have caused an eventual showdown between North and South in any circumstances. But it was the country's sprawling growth that made the issue so explosive. Was the manifest destiny of those two million square miles west of the Mississippi River to be free or slave? Like King Solomon, Congress had tried in 1820 to solve that problem for the Louisiana Purchase by splitting it at the latitude of 36" 30' (with slavery allowed in Missouri as an exception north of that line). But this only postponed the crisis. In 1850 Congress postponed it again with another compromise. By 1860 it could no longer be deferred. The country's territorial growth might have created a danger of dismemberment by centrifugal force in any event. But slavery brought this danger to a head at midcentury. 

At the time of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 the United States was an insignificant nation on the European periphery. Its population was about the same as Ireland's. Thomas Jefferson thought that the Empire for Liberty he had bought from Napoleon was sufficient to absorb a hundred generations of America's population growth. By 1850, two generations later, Americans were not only filling up this empire but were spilling over into a new one on the Pacific coast. A few years after 1850 the United States surpassed Britain to become the most populous nation in the Western world save Russia and France. By 1860 the country contained nearly thirty-two million people, four million of them slaves. During the previous half-century the American population had grown four times faster than Europe's and six times the world average. 

Three factors explained this phenomenon: a birth rate half again as high as Europe's; a death rate slightly lower; and immigration. All three were linked to the relative abundance of the American economy. The ratio of land to people was much greater than in Europe, making food supply more plentiful and enabling couples to marry earlier and to have more children. Though epidemics frequently ravaged North America, they took a lesser toll in its largely rural environment than among Europe's denser population. The land/people ratio in the United States raised wages and offered opportunities that attracted five million immigrants during that half-century. 

Although the United States remained predominantly rural in this period, the urban population (defined as those living in towns or cities with 2,500 or more people) grew three times faster than the rural population from 1810 to 1860, going from 6 percent to 20 percent of the total. This was the highest rate of urbanization in American history. During those same decades the percentage of the labor force engaged in nonagricultural pursuits grew from 21 to 45 percent. Meanwhile the rate of natural increase of the American population, while remaining higher than Europe's, began to slow as parents, desiring to provide their children with more nurture and education, decided to have fewer of them. From 1800 to 1850 the American birth rate declined by 23 percent. The death rate also decreased slightly-but probably no more than 5 percent. Yet the population continued to grow at the same pace through the whole period -- about 35 percent each decade -- because rising immigration offset the decline of the birth rate. For the half-century as a whole, the margin of births over deaths caused three-quarters of the population increase while immigration accounted for the rest. 

Economic growth fueled these demographic changes. The population doubled every twenty-three years; the gross national product doubled every fifteen. At some point after the War of 1812 -- probably following recovery from the depression of 1819-23 -- the economy began to grow faster than the population. Although most Americans benefited from this rise of income, those at the top benefited more than those at the bottom. While average income rose 102 percent, real wages for workers increased by somewhere between 40 and 65 percent. This widening disparity between rich and poor appears to have characterized most capitalist economies during their early decades of intensive growth and industrialization. 

Copyright © 1988, 2003 James M. McPherson

For more information, please visit the author's Web site at: www.battlecryoffreedom.com

Patriots
by Christian G. Appy ISBN:  067003214X / Viking / hardcover / Available May 27, 2003 / 608 pages / $34.95

REVIEW QUOTES:

"Of all the works on the Vietnam War-fiction and non-fiction-this is the big one. Witness is borne from all sides: theirs and ours; the soldiers, the resisters, and the armchair warriors. Christian Appy has come through with the book that was waiting to be written." --Studs Terkel, Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Good War

"'Pain' is the operative force throughout this astounding collection of voices, a rich cast of characters that dominated the  landscape of the Vietnam War. He has given us a history of that war from the views of prominent and anonymous participants -- generals and  politicians, as well as the 'ordinary' grunts and peace activists. Their  nuggets of memories still scar and haunt us -- and the Vietnamese. Appy deserves a wide audience for those who appreciate the lingering  importance of the past."--Stanley Kutler -- Editor, Encyclopedia Of The Vietnam War; Editor, Abuse of Powers: The Nixon White House Tapes

"No one has even attempted what Christian Appy has achieved in Patriots. The subtitle is accurate: not both sides, note, but all sides: south, north, military, civilian, protestor, soldier, commander, observer, journalist, photographer, poet, novelist, exile, refugee, survivor--even the dead, remembered by the living. Brilliant and painful, this is the most vivid account of the Vietnam War I have ever read. If I were asked to recommend a single book on the war it would be this one."--Marilyn Young, Professor of History, New York University, author of The Vietnam Wars

"In the vast literature on Vietnam, Christian Appy's Patriots is unique. Breathtaking in its scope, this is a fascinating and moving oral history. It's hard to believe one man did it all. The voices come from Vietnam and America, from men and women, from the Establishment and the protest movement, from soldiers and journalists-moving personal stories which take us back to that tumultuous time, but also make us think hard about today."--Howard Zinn, author of A People's History of the United States

"As a Vietnam combat veteran who participated in most of the major historical battles of 1968, I'm understandably ambivalent about reading Vietnam books, fiction and non-fiction. Christian G. Appy's Patriots is a different and even-handed approach to a still controversial and divisive subject. The overall effect of listening to different voices on the same sore subject is eye-opening and revealing. Each voice sounds fresh, as if the storyteller had been waiting for decades-and most of them had-to tell their story, to relieve themselves of something that had been bothering them for along time, or just to set the record straight in their own minds. At the end, I for one felt more than satisfied because I had reached a greater understanding of the event that changed my life and the life of the nation."--Nelson De Mille, author of The General's Daughter, Word of Honor, and Plum Island

"I thought the war in Vietnam would never end, and after it did I never wanted to hear or think of it again. But someone I trust told me to read Christian Appy's book and I cracked it at random -- Morton Halperin on the agony of trying to find a way out of the war Nixon and Kissinger could live with. I cracked it again -- Truong My Hoa, jailed by Saigon for eleven years, one of them in a tiger cage. Perhaps you have forgotten what a tiger cage is, or never knew. Appy talked to 135 people who have never stopped trying to find words for the war, and there is no end to what you can learn from his book, if you will open it. --Thomas Powers, author of Intelligence Wars: American Secret History from Hitler to Al Qaeda

The Peloponnesian War
by Donald Kagan

ISBN: 0670032115 / Available May 12, 2003 / Viking / Hardcover / 512 pages / $29.95

For almost three decades at the end of the fifth century B.C., Athens and Sparta fought a war that changed the Greek world and its civilization forever. A conflict unprecedented in its brutality, the Peloponnesian War brought a collapse in the institutions, beliefs, and customs that were the foundations of society. Today, scholars in fields ranging from international relations and political and military history to political philosophy continue to study the war for its timeless relevance to the history of our own time.

Now Donald Kagan, classical scholar and historian of international relations, ancient and modern, presents a sweeping new narrative of this epic contest that captures all its drama, action, and tragedy. In describing the rise and fall of a great empire he examines the clash between two disparate societies, the interplay of intelligence and chance in human affairs, the role of great human beings in determining the course of events, and the challenge of leadership and the limits in which it must operate. The result is an engrossing, fresh perspective on a key historical event that will be welcomed by general readers and history buffs alike-and anyone seeking a better understanding of the pivotal events that shaped the world as we know it.

About the Author
Donald Kagan, Sterling Professor of Classics and History at Yale University, is a recipient of a National Humanities Medal for 2002. His four-volume History of the Peloponnesian War is the leading scholarly work on the subject. He is also the author of many books on ancient and modern topics.

"Donald Kagan has condensed his exhaustive knowledge of classical history into a fascinating, heroic and readable tale of the 'Greatest War' of the ancient world, a clash of cultures that pitted democracy against oligarchy and devastated both." -- Henry A. Kissinger

The Sands of Pride
by William R. Trotter

Plume Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA), is proud to bring you an extraordinary epic novel by renowned Civil War expert William R. Trotter. The Sands of Pride is the first of a two-part saga that brings forth America's most tragic conflict set in a rarely featured battlefield in North Carolina.

From secession to Gettysburg, William Trotter intertwines the lives of soldiers and citizens. The Sands of Pride is an epic re-creation of the first three years of the War Between the States. From the bitter feud between North Carolina Governor Zebulon Vance and Confederate President Jefferson Davis, to the yellow fever plague that devastated the local population, and the secret voyages of the blockade-runner, Banshee, Trotter tells the story of the Civil War through the eyes, the ears, the sounds experienced by the people of Fort Fisher in Wilmington, North Carolina.

"This masterful epic ...will appeal to the countless fans of Cold Mountain as well as to the Civil War buffs who normally buy nonfiction." -- Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Monumental, bombs-bursting-in-air epic of nearly 50 characters who fight, steal, seduce, scheme and have the time of their lives in ... Civil War-era North Carolina." -- Kirkus Reviews

"An enthralling novel of the Civil War..." -- Fred Chapell, Poet Laureate of North Carolina

"Definitely a page-turner...an abundance of adventure, romance [and] tragedy." -- Booklist

"A spellbinding historical novel and a compelling work of serious literary fiction." -- Howard Frank Mosher, author of Stranger in the Kingdom.

The Sands of Pride by William R. Trotter goes on-sale in trade paperback on May 27, 2003.