Days of Defiance: Sumter, Secession, and the Coming of the Civil War

Maury Klein's knack for words shows up on the first page of this book: "How could the oldest, deadliest, most divisive conflict of a proud nation come down, after decades of bitter strife, to a dispute over an insignificant fort squatting on a hunk of rock in the harbor of the South's oldest and most defiant city?" Klein, a history professor at the University of Rhode Island, goes on to answer this question in lively prose. The Fort Sumter saga, of course, has been told well by others, but Klein makes the tale worth reading again.

• Allegiance: Fort Sumter, Charleston, And The Beginning Of The Civil War
• Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War (A Nation Divided: Studies in the Civil War Era)
• Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era
• The Early Morning of War: Bull Run, 1861 (Campaigns and Commanders Series)
• A. Lincoln: A Biography
• Year of Meteors: Stephen Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, and the Election that Brought on the Civil War
• Madness Rules the Hour: Charleston, 1860 and the Mania for War
• The Confederate Nation: 1861-1865
• No Better Place to Die: The Battle of Stones River (Civil War Trilogy)
• Shenandoah Valley 1862: Stonewall Jackson outmaneuvers the Union (Campaign)