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LOS ANGELES TIMES “TOP TEN BOOKS TO READ IN 2025” Join us on May 29, 2025, 7:00 pm -8:00 pm for a ZOOM Civil Conversation with the author, Michael Vorenberg. Click here to register: Civil Conversation with Dr. Michael Vorenberg - Lincoln's Peace About the book: One historian’s journey to find the end of the Civil War—and, along the way, to expand our understanding of the nature of war itself and how societies struggle to draw the line between war and peace. We set out on the James River, March 25, 1865, aboard the paddle steamboat River Queen. President Lincoln is on his way to General Grant’s headquarters at City Point, Virginia, and he’s decided he won’t return to Washington until he’s witnessed, or perhaps even orchestrated, the end of the Civil War. Now, it turns out, more than a century and a half later, historians are still searching for that end. About the author: MICHAEL VORENBERG is a professor of history at Brown University, in Providence, Rhode Island. He is the author of Final Freedom: The Civil War, the Abolition of Slavery, and the Thirteenth Amendment, which was a finalist for the Lincoln Prize and a key source for Steven Spielberg’s […]

Rebels at the Gates - The Confederacy's Final Gamble and the Battle to Save Washington by Robert P. Watson Join us on Friday, June 13, 2025, 6:00 pm - 7:00 pm for an In-person presentation by author Robert P. Watson, followed by a book-sigining. About the book: Rebels at the Gate chronicles an intriguing series of events that nearly changed American history. In the last full year of the Civil War, Washington, DC came within hours of being invaded and Lincoln within inches of being shot. During the summer of 1864, General Ulysses Grant was laying siege to Petersburg (near Richmond), deploying every available Union soldier in an effort to end the bloody war once and for all. His counterpart, General Robert E. Lee and his famed Army of Northern Virginia, were trapped inside Richmond, and recognized that the Confederate capital would fall. Lee knew Grant, and understood that he would never stop attacking until he had Richmond. It was then that the southern commander hatched a desperate and bold plan to save the Confederacy and perhaps bring the war to an end… but on the Confederacy’s terms. Historian Robert Watson provides the definitive account of this largely forgotten attack on […]