Abner Doubleday began the Civil War as a Union officer and aimed the first cannon shot in response to the bombardment opened on Ft. Sumter in 1861. Two years later, after a series of battles (including Antietam, where he was wounded), Doubleday took over a division in the Army of the Potomac's 1st Corps.These are his memoirs of service in two of the War's great campaigns. At Chancellorsville, a very promising start made by General Hooker against Lee's Confederate forces fell to a defeat when, in...

On 27 February 1860, Abraham Lincoln gave this address at the Cooper Union in New York City. When he gave the speech, Lincoln was considered by many to be just a country lawyer. After he gave the speech, he soon became his party’s nominee for president.

“Perceiving that much of the intrinsic value of these Journals would consist in a proper understanding of the historical facts to which allusions are made in them, I prevailed upon Mr. Lossing, the well-known author of the “Pictorial Field-Book of the Revolution” to illustrate and elucidate these diaries by explanatory notes. His name is a sufficient guaranty for their accuracy and general usefulness”

The Counter-Reformation, also called the Catholic Reformation, and remembered for its infamous Inquisition, was the period of Catholic resurgence which was initiated in response to the Protestant Reformation. Adolphus Ward writes, that it was "a movement pursuing two objects...the regeneration of the Church of Rome, and the recovery of the losses inflicted upon her by the early successes of Protestantism...The onset of the combat is marked by the formal establishment of the Jesuit Order as a militant...

Eminent British botanist Agnes Arber provides an authoritative history of printed Herbals -- books widely used in early modern Europe to catalogue the uses of different kinds of plants. While Herbals often reflected pre-scientific and magical beliefs about the properties of plants, Arber's work reveals that they were also critical to the early development of botany and medicine as empirical sciences. A classic in the history of science. - Summary by Josh Leach

This, volume 22 of the Chronicles of Canada series, describes the exploration of the Canadian Pacific coast, British Columbia, and Alaska. It includes accounts of Bering, Cook, Vancouver, Mackenzie, Fraser, and Thompson.

Between the California and Yukon/Klondike gold rushes was the Cariboo Gold Rush in what would become northern British Columbia. The first discovery was made in 1859, but the rush didn't get underway in earnest until 1861. This short work documents the story of this lesser-known era and how it directly affected the development of British Columbia.

CANADA, THE EMPIRE OF THE NORTHBy Agnes C. LautPREFACETo re-create the shadowy figures of the heroic past, to clothe the dead once more in flesh and blood, to set the puppets of the play in life's great dramas again upon the stage of action,--frankly, this may not be formal history, but it is what makes the past most real to the present day. Pictures of men and women, of moving throngs and heroic episodes, stick faster in the mind than lists of governors and arguments on treaties. Such pictures may not be history, but they breathe life into the skeletons of the past...