June 15, 2010 Recruits from Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois went off to fight in 1861 to put down a rebellion promoted by radical secessionists. Few of these soldiers thought of abolition as an issue. As the war continued and intensified after 1863, however, their own practical experiences with freed slaves, led them to reconsider. In The Good Men Who Won the War, Robert Hunt traces the infinite variations in how the veterans came to think of the Civil War.

May 18, 2010 In the nineteenth century, America’s Manifest Destiny to occupy and exploit the West was an irresistible force. The ‘savages’ already living there were an inconvenience; they would have to yield. In most instances, the U.S. had its way, either by negotiation or in armed conflict. But not always. Nathaniel Philbrick’s The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn, updates the often-told story of how Sitting Bull’s remarkable alliance crushed Custer’s Seventh Cavalry. Philbrick appears at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Memphis on May 20 at 6 p.m.

No one with any sense of history can doubt the human capacity for violence, hate, destruction, and killing. In The Pacific, Hugh Ambrose (son of the late historian Stephen Ambrose) provides an intimate picture of that capacity. The book chronicles the war experiences of four Marines and a Navy pilot in the Pacific war against Japan. Ambrose appears at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Nashville on April 12 at 7 p.m.