Bøker av Benjamin Franklin Cooling

During the summer of 1862, a Confederate resurgence threatened to turn the tide of the Civil War. When the Union's earlier multi-theatre thrust into the South proved to be a strategic overreach, the Confederacy saw its chance to reverse the loss of the Upper South through counteroffensives. Benjamin Franklin Cooling tells this story in Counter-Thrust.

In Jubal Early: Robert E. Lee's Bad Old Man, a new critical biography of Confederate Lieutenant General Jubal Anderson Early, Civil War historian B.F. Cooling III takes a fresh look at one of the most fascinating, idiosyncratic characters in the pantheon of Confederate heroes and villains.

In two preceding volumes, Benjamin Franklin Cooling offered a sweeping portrayal of war and society in the upper southern heartland of Kentucky and Tennessee during the first two and a half years of the Civil War. This continues that saga as Cooling probes the profound turmoil - on the battlefield, on the home front, within the shadow areas where lawlessness reigned - that defined the war in the region as it ground to its close.

Fort Donelsons Legacy portrays the tapestry of war and society in the upper southern heartland of Tennessee and Kentucky after the key Union victories at Forts Henry and Donelson in February 1862. Those victories, notes Benjamin Franklin Cooling, could have delivered the decisive blow to the Confederacy in the West and ended the war in that theater. Instead, what followed was terrible devastation and bloodshed that embroiled soldier and civilian alike. Cooling compellingly describes a struggle that was marked not only by the movement of armies and the strategies of generals but also by the rise of guerrilla bands and civil resistance. It was, in part, a war fought for geographyfor rivers and railroads and for strategic cities such as Nashville, Louisville, and Chattanooga. But it was also a war for the hearts and minds of the populace. Stubborn civilian opposition to Union invaders, Cooling writes, prompted oppressive military occupation, subversion of civil liberties, and confiscation of personal property in the name of allegiance to the United Statesor to the Confederacy, for that matter, since some Unionist southerners resented Confederate intrusion fully as much as their secessionist neighbors opposed Yankee government. In exploring the complex terrain of total war that steadily engulfed Tennessee and Kentucky, Cooling draws on a huge array of sources, including official military records and countless diaries and memoirs. He makes considerable use of the words of participants to capture the attitudes and concerns of those on both sides. The result is a masterful addition to Civil War literature that integrates the military, social, political, and economic aspects of the conflict into a large and endlessly fascinating picture.

In The Day Lincoln Was Almost Shot: The Fort Stevens Story, historian B.F. Cooling documents the story of President Abraham Lincoln and the Battle of Fort Stevens in July 1864.