Fully illustrated, including with battle maps, this account of the Battle of Chancellorsville features detailed coverage from experienced military writer Carl Smith. Following the debacle of the battle of Fredericksburg in December 1862, Burnside was replaced as commander of the Army of the Potomac by General Joseph Hooker. Having reorganised the army and improved morale, he planned an attack that would take his army to Richmond and end the war. Although faced by an army twice his size, the Confederate commander Robert E. Lee split his forces: Jubal Early was left to hold off Sedgwick's Fredericksburg attack, and 'Stonewall' Jackson was sent with 26,000 men in a wide envelopment around Hooker's right flank. This title details how at dusk on May 2, Jackson's men crashed into the Federal right flank, and how stiffening Federal resistance slowed the Confederate advance the next day.
Murder Pure and Simple is set in a Midlands mining town during the 30s and 40s. Big John Oakley, a miner and well-respected chapel-goer, lives in a colliery house with his wife and family. However, a series of events leave Big John powerless to prevent his family’s traditional lifestyle from falling apart through lust, greed and drink, resulting in revenge, murder and retribution. Constable Rod Jarvis watched, unable to help as his friend spun out of control, outwards to the ragged fringes of society, where he wrapped himself in a cloak of drunken despair and violence. He pondered on where destiny’s helterskelter would deposit his friend. Moving forward to the 80s, in a mining and agricultural town just a few miles from the Oakley home, the body of an elderly man is found on the railway lines close to a bridge. Detective Inspector Jim Stirling, an experienced investigator, is satisfied that the man was murdered. The body is identified as Tommy Oakley, an alcoholic and former boxer dossing in the railway carriages nearby. The ensuing investigation is full of twists and turns, taking DI Stirling and his partner DS Johnson back to the 1940s to re-examine a murder which saw two men convicted and hanged for their crimes. Can Stirling and Johnson unravel the secrets of the past concealed for nearly four decades within a conspiracy of silence? Murder Pure and Simple is an intricate crime novel that will also appeal to fans of historical fiction.
This important book fills a gap in our knowledge.... Highly recommended."Â -- Library Journal "... highly recommended... " -- Choice "With admirable clarity and remarkable brevity, Jackson surveys the history of the movement and raises... important issues... " -- The Journal of American History An important history of the Ramakrishna movement, the very first and in many ways the most important Asian religious group to appear in the United States.
The Only Time America Was Free of Debt--and How It Led to the Two-Party Political System "An engaging treatment of a topic of perennial concern and frequent misunderstanding, this lucid tale of the brief moment when the United States was debt-free should be on every Congress member's bedside table."--Peter J.Woolley, Professor of Comparative Politics, Fairleigh Dickinson University When President James Monroe announced in his 1824 message to Congress that, barring an emergency, the large public debt inherited from the War for Independence, the Louisiana Purchase, and the War of 1812 would be extinguished on January 1, 1835, Congress responded by crafting legislation to transform that prediction into reality. Yet John Quincy Adams, Monroe's successor, seemed not to share the commitment to debt freedom, resulting in the rise of opposition to his administration and his defeat for reelection in the bitter presidential campaign of 1828. The new president, Andrew Jackson, was thoroughly committed to debt freedom, and when it was achieved, it became the only time in American history when the country carried no national debt. In A Nation Wholly Free: The Elimination of the National Debt in the Age of Jackson, award-winning economic historian Carl Lane shows that the great and disparate issues that confronted Jackson, such as internal improvements, the "war" against the Second Bank of the United States, and the crisis surrounding South Carolina's refusal to pay federal tariffs, become unified when debt freedom is understood as a core element of Jacksonian Democracy. The era of debt freedom lasted only two years and ten months. As the government accumulated a surplus, a fully developed opposition party emerged--the beginning of our familiar two-party system--over rancor about how to allocate the newfound money. Not only did government move into an oppositional party system at this time, the debate about the size and role of government distinguished the parties in a pattern that has become familiar to Americans. The partisan debate over national debt and expenditures led to poorly thought out legislation, forcing the government to resume borrowing. As a result, after Jackson left office in 1837, the country fell into a major depression. Today we confront a debt that exceeds $17 trillion. Indeed, we have been borrowing ever since that brief time we freed ourselves from an oversized debt. A thoughtful, engaging account with strong relevance to today, A Nation Wholly Free is the fascinating story of an achievement that now seems fanciful.
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