Here are 100 books that Widow of Gettysburg fans have personally recommended if you like
Widow of Gettysburg.
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I’ve found that the most tumultuous time in our nation’s history provides a poignant backdrop for fiction. As a firm believer that all people are God’s masterpiece and are created in his image, this time period can be difficult to read. However, I also believe there is a lot of potential to see how good can overcome evil, how faith can lead to healing, and how we can be overcomers. I’ve chosen books for this list that handle history with nuance and sensitivity, showcase fierce characters, provide embedded layers of faith, and leave you thinking long after the final page. I hope you enjoy them as much as I did!
A heartfelt and poignant tale of faith and perseverance with authentic details sure to resonate with historical fiction fans, this tale of grace and forgiveness is both tender and endearing. In many ways, reading this book was like going home. I was delighted to see the historical details during the search for Booth (something I spent months researching as I dug through the trial records for my own series). It's a beautiful story of grace and forgiveness.
The War brought them together ~ Would it also tear them apart?
While en route to aid Confederate soldiers injured in battle near her home, Southerner Caroline Dunbar stumbles across a wounded Union sergeant. Unable to ignore his plea for help, she tends his injuries and hides him away, only to find her attachment to him deepen with each passing day. But when her secret is discovered, Caroline incurs her father’s wrath and, in turn, unlocks a dark secret from the past which she is determined to unravel.
After being forced to flee his place of refuge, Sergeant Andrew Gallagher…
I’ve found that the most tumultuous time in our nation’s history provides a poignant backdrop for fiction. As a firm believer that all people are God’s masterpiece and are created in his image, this time period can be difficult to read. However, I also believe there is a lot of potential to see how good can overcome evil, how faith can lead to healing, and how we can be overcomers. I’ve chosen books for this list that handle history with nuance and sensitivity, showcase fierce characters, provide embedded layers of faith, and leave you thinking long after the final page. I hope you enjoy them as much as I did!
This book is set just after the war and deals with the aftermath of a devastated land. Rich in detail with characters that tug at the heartstrings, it is a story of complex loyalties and dealing with betrayal. A beautiful and powerful story of tender hearts left wounded by a very difficult time. I listened to the audio version of this story and found it to be one I wanted to stop everything I was doing to savor.
From bestselling author Tamera Alexander comes an exquisite historical novel set against the real history of Belle Meade Plantation in Nashville, Tennessee, that explores the struggles of real people of the post-war South and the journeys of a man and a woman scarred by betrayal.
Olivia Aberdeen, destitute widow of a man shot as a traitor to the South, is shunned by proper society and gratefully accepts an invitation from Elizabeth Harding, mistress of Belle Meade Plantation. Expecting to be the Hardings' head housekeeper, Olivia is disillusioned when she learns the real reason Elizabeth's husband, Confederate General William Giles Harding,…
I’ve found that the most tumultuous time in our nation’s history provides a poignant backdrop for fiction. As a firm believer that all people are God’s masterpiece and are created in his image, this time period can be difficult to read. However, I also believe there is a lot of potential to see how good can overcome evil, how faith can lead to healing, and how we can be overcomers. I’ve chosen books for this list that handle history with nuance and sensitivity, showcase fierce characters, provide embedded layers of faith, and leave you thinking long after the final page. I hope you enjoy them as much as I did!
Lynn Austin does a beautiful job of showing people who lived in the South yet hated slavery. As women, they often had no say at all in the situation. This book highlights the horror of people you care about enduring enslavement, while also detailing the complexities of the situations these people faced. The characters are both true to the time yet identifiable across generations. Faith plays a major role, and Austin deals with the questions of how belief and hardships can intertwine.
"A gripping tale told by a gifted writer."--Beverly Lewis
Caroline Fletcher is caught in a nation split apart and torn between the ones she loves and a truth she can't deny
The daughter of a wealthy slave-holding family from Richmond, Virginia, Caroline Fletcher is raised to believe slavery is God-ordained and acceptable. But on awakening to its cruelty and injustice, her eyes are opened to the men and women who have cared tirelessly for her. At the same time, her father and her fiance, Charles St. John, are fighting for the Confederacy and their beloved way of life and traditions.…
Truth told, folks still ask if Saul Crabtree sold his soul for the perfect voice. If he sold it to angels or devils. A Bristol newspaper once asked: “Are his love songs closer to heaven than dying?” Others wonder how he wrote a song so sad, everyone who heard it…
I’ve found that the most tumultuous time in our nation’s history provides a poignant backdrop for fiction. As a firm believer that all people are God’s masterpiece and are created in his image, this time period can be difficult to read. However, I also believe there is a lot of potential to see how good can overcome evil, how faith can lead to healing, and how we can be overcomers. I’ve chosen books for this list that handle history with nuance and sensitivity, showcase fierce characters, provide embedded layers of faith, and leave you thinking long after the final page. I hope you enjoy them as much as I did!
When you’re taught to believe the other side is full of evil people, what do you do when you come face-to-face with a gallant enemy? This story was fascinating because the heroine disguises herself as a soldier, only to become a prisoner of war. When her foe becomes her ally, her loyalties are put to the test. I love how this book deals with the “us versus them” mentality and breaks down the walls we try to erect between us.
Nineteen-year-old Carrie Ann Bell is independent and spirited. The only thing she really fears are the Union soldiers fighting against her Confederate friends. When her youngest sister runs away from home, brave Carrie Ann is determined to find her and bring her back. Disguised as a soldier, she sets off--only to find she's fallen into the hands of the enemy.
Her childhood friend Confederate Major Joshua Blevins has warned her against these Yankees: they're all devils, ready to inflict evil on unsuspecting young women. When Colonel Peyton Collier arrests her for her impersonation of an officer, it seems to confirm…
When I was a boy, my mother told me every day, “Be a leader.” By that, she meant to remember who you are, stand up for what you believe, do good, and be good. I was only five years old. That daily lesson on the doorstep sunk deep in my heart. For over forty years, I have had a passion for learning, teaching, and practicing small “L” leadership. I have done that as dean of Harvard Business School, president of BYU-Idaho, and Commissioner of Education for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I have learned deeply from the books on this list, and I hope you will, too.
I love this historical novel (set in the battle of Gettysburg during the Civil War) so much that I have read it several times. Each time, it is a sleep robber; it is really hard for me to put it down. It is beautifully written, but it is hard to put down because I find beautiful nuggets of gold about leadership with a small “L” every time I read it.
My favorite character is Joshua Chamberlain, an obscure colonel who led a regiment of Maine volunteers. He has power, but he does not use it to coerce or dominate his troops. He uses it to activate the power that is in them! And they do incredible things at a critical point in the battle.
“My favorite historical novel . . . a superb re-creation of the Battle of Gettysburg, but its real importance is its insight into what the war was about, and what it meant.”—James M. McPherson
In the four most bloody and courageous days of our nation’s history, two armies fought for two conflicting dreams. One dreamed of freedom, the other of a way of life. Far more than rifles and bullets were carried into battle. There were memories. There were promises. There was love. And far more than men fell on those Pennsylvania fields. Bright futures, untested innocence, and pristine beauty…
I came to Civil War studies fairly late in life but still relatively callow, by a route too roundabout to explain. But after reading James McPherson’s, Battle Cry of Freedom(there’s a bonus book!), I found I had a love of every facet of the era. The only thing I’d ever wanted to be was a writer and, as I delved deeper into the vast body of literature on the American Civil War, I finally felt as if I’d found thesubject I could pour all my passion into (that and my enduring love of dogs). My novel Wilderness, along with a few novels published in French, was the result.
Part of the enduring popularity of the Battle of Gettysburg studies, is that the battle offers a true microcosm of the American Civil War—from politics to personalities. A meeting engagement, a desperate struggle, a turning point, and human tragedy on a scale the continent had never seen before, the events of those three days in July still resonant down the years. Guelzo’s book, besides being one of the most recent, offers wonderful descriptions of every facet of the battle with finely-crafted prose and a pacing that will keep readers invested from start to finish.
Winner of the Guggenheim-Lehrman Prize in Military History
An Economist Best Book of the Year
A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the Year
The Battle of Gettysburg has been written about at length and thoroughly dissected in terms of strategic importance, but never before has a book taken readers so close to the experience of the individual soldier.
Two-time Lincoln Prize winner Allen C. Guelzo shows us the face, the sights and the sounds of nineteenth-century combat: the stone walls and gunpowder clouds of Pickett’s Charge; the reason that the Army of Northern Virginia could be smelled before it…
Ilsa Krause and her siblings are stunned to discover their father left massive debt behind upon his death. To help pay off their creditors, she takes a job at Beck’s Chocolates, the company her father despised. To make matters worse, her boss is Ernst Webber, her high school love who…
DeAnne Blanton retired from the National Archives in Washington, DC after 31 years of service as a reference archivist specializing in 18th and 19th century U.S. Army records. She was recognized within the National Archives as well as in the historical and genealogical communities as a leading authority on the American Civil War; 19th century women’s history; and the history of American women in the military.
This pamphlet, although only 24 pages, is one of the best first-hand depictions of Civil War nursing. Miss Woolsey and her mother travelled to Gettysburg in the aftermath of the battle and immediately launched into the nursing ranks of the U.S. Sanitary Commission. She published her account shortly after returning home, when her services were no longer needed.
I grew up near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and was fascinated by American history. My initial fascination with the history of the Civil War in the Harrisburg area turned into my first book and the start of my career as a historian of the Underground Railroad and the Civil War. This list reflects my early interest in the lesser-known aspects of the famous Gettysburg Campaign by recommending books that expand our scope beyond the three-day battle.
A lot has been written about the Battle of Gettysburg’s decisive third day, but I find myself returning again and again to Jeffry Wert’s book.
Wert is a brilliant writer and story-teller, providing readers with enough tactical military history to understand the movements of both armies, but not too much that readers get lost in the shuffle. The result is a great, lucid read about the battle’s dramatic finale.
A distinguished Civil War historian offers a close-up analysis of the final day of the decisive battle of Gettysburg, drawing on letters and diaries from men on both sides to illuminate the events and personalities responsible for the ultimate Union victory and to discuss Pickett's Charge, the combat at Culp's Hill, and a key cavalry engagement between Stuart and Custer. 25,000 first printing.
As a child my grandmother shared that we had ancestors who had served during the Civil War, a momentary conversation that set me on a lifetime quest to connect with those men and their experiences. My professional work as a historian and military analyst for the US Government helped build the skills that enabled this quest and each of my books, articles, and videos seek to understand and share both the “what” of those experiences and the “why” of the war’s many battles and conflicts.
I found Major Rufus Dawes' first-hand account of Antietam to be perhaps the best, most readable of the many soldier accounts available. Not only does Dawes write clear narrative accounts of what he experienced at Antietam, but he offers his own feelings and thoughts on the fighting that take the reader beyond the movements and action. Another thing that I appreciated about Dawes' account is that he frequently offers wider context for the fighting and movements that gives the reader a deeper understanding of why he was experiencing these events (and unlike many other postwar accounts, Dawes avoids using this hindsight to cast blame). Although it naturally only gives the Union side and a small portion of the battle, Dawes' experiences probably generally reflect what it was like to “be there.”
"I have been so wholly engrossed with my work for the last week or I should have responded sooner to your question: 'Are you going?' If a kind Providence and President Lincoln will permit, I am. I am Captain of as good, and true a band of patriots as ever rallied under the star spangled banner."-Rufus R. Dawes. A Full Blown Yankee of the Iron Brigade combines the personal experiences of Rufus R. Dawes with a history of the regiment in which he served. The Iron Brigade was the only all-Western brigade that fought in the eastern armies of the…
Arizona Territory, 1871. Valeria Obregón and her ambitious husband, Raúl, arrive in the raw frontier town of Tucson hoping to find prosperity. Changing Woman, an Apache spirit who represents the natural order of the world and its cycle of birth, death, and rebirth, welcomes Nest Feather, a twelve-year-old Apache girl,…
I am a life-long admirer of Abe Lincoln, and never more so than today when American democracy is again under severe threat. Yet, like so many other admirers of Lincoln, I am puzzled why it took him so long to end slavery: it was not until January 1, 1963, nearly two years after he became president, that Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed only those slaves within the Confederacy. Moreover, it wasn’t until the end of the Civil War that Lincoln was able to enforce emancipation in the South, and it wasn’t until the passage of the 13th Amendment at the end of 1865 that all slavery was ended.
I loved this book because it is the most original, detailed, elegantly written, and argued examination of Lincoln’s famous Gettysburg address, by common acclamation, one of the greatest and most powerful political speeches in world history.
In this Pulitzer Prize book, Wills argues that at Gettysburg, Lincoln “came to change the world, to effect an intellectual revolution”—and succeeded in doing so. “No other words,” Wills writes, could have successfully brought about both “a revolution in thought” and “a revolution in style.” Wills concludes that the address “wove a spell that has not, yet, been broken,” as Lincoln “called up a new nation out of the blood and trauma.”
The power of words has rarely been given a more compelling demonstration than in the Gettysburg Address. Lincoln was asked to memorialize the gruesome battle. Instead, he gave the whole nation "a new birth of freedom" in the space of a mere 272 words. His entire life and previous training, and his deep political experience went into this, his revolutionary masterpiece.
By examining both the address and Lincoln in their historical moment and cultural frame, Wills breathes new life into words we thought we knew, and reveals much about a president so mythologized but often misunderstood. Wills shows how Lincoln…
