A stunning biography of Clara Barton—a woman who determined to serve her country during the Civil War—from acclaimed author Stephen B. Oates. When the Civil War broke out, Clara Barton wanted more than anything to be a Union soldier, an impossible dream for a thirty-nine-year-old woman, who stood a slender five feet tall. Determined to serve, she became a veritable soldier, a nurse, and a one-woman relief agency operating in the heart of the conflict. Now, award-winning author Stephen B. Oates, drawing on archival materials not used by her previous biographers, has written the first complete account of Clara Barton’s active engagement in the Civil War. By the summer of 1862, with no institutional affiliation or official government appointment, but impelled by a sense of duty and a need to heal, she made her way to the front lines and the heat of battle. Oates tells the dramatic story of this woman who gave the world a new definition of courage, supplying medical relief to the wounded at some of the most famous battles of the war—including Second Bull Run, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Battery Wagner, the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, and Petersburg. Under fire with only her will as a shield, she worked while ankle deep in gore, in hellish makeshift battlefield hospitals—a bullet-riddled farmhouse, a crumbling mansion, a windblown tent. Committed to healing soldiers’ spirits as well as their bodies, she served not only as nurse and relief worker, but as surrogate mother, sister, wife, or sweetheart to thousands of sick, wounded, and dying men. Her contribution to the Union was incalculable and unique. It also became the defining event in Barton’s life, giving her the opportunity as a woman to reach out for a new role and to define a new profession. Nursing, regarded as a menial service before the war, became a trained, paid occupation after the conflict. Although Barton went on to become the founder and first president of the Red Cross, the accomplishment for which she is best known, A Woman of Valor convinces us that her experience on the killing fields of the Civil War was her most extraordinary achievement.

Woman of Valor: Clara Barton and the Civil War

Biographies & Memoirs

Oates, Stephen B.

Community & Culture

Free Press

A portrait of Clara Barton profiles the life of the Red Cross founder who, during the Civil War, dreamed of becoming a Union soldier, but instead became a one-woman front-line relief agency. By the author of Let the Trumpets Sound.

Woman of Valor

Professionals & Academics

To Purge This Land with Blood: A Biography of John Brown

To Purge This Land with Blood: A Biography of John Brown by Oates, Stephen B.. 8vo. 1st ed.

To Purge This Land With Blood: A Biography of John Brown

Historical

Harpercollins

The Los Angeles Times hails this biography as the finest ever written. With an outstanding blend of brilliant scholarship and entertaining style, Professor Stephen B. Oates brings us closer than ever before to knowing the real Abraham Lincoln. Here is Lincoln as he really was-a gentle, determined man obsessed with death yet filled with life, troubled with bouts of melancholy yet blessed with a witty nature, and gifted with a talent for literary expression. With Malice Toward None reads like an enthralling novel while piecing together the richest, fullest portrait of Lincoln in existence.

With Malice Toward None: A Life of Abraham Lincoln

Harper&Row

A candid, sympathetic portrait of Martin Luther King, Jr. explores the complex life and dedicated career of the noted civil rights leader

Let the Trumpet Sound

Leaders & Notable People

An essential book for any student of Lincoln and American history, Abraham Lincoln: The Man Behind the Myths is acclaimed Lincoln biographer Stephen B. Oates's unique exploration of America's sixteenth president in reality and memory. In this multifaceted portrait, Oates, "the most popular historical interpreter of Lincoln" (Gabor S. Boritt, New York Times Book Review), exposes the human side of the great and tragic president—including his depression, his difficulties with love, and his troubled and troubling attitudes about slavery—while also confronting the many legends that have arisen around "Honest Abe." Oates throughout raises timely questions about what the Lincoln mythos reveals about the American people.

Abraham Lincoln, the man behind the myths

Based on Faulkner collections at two universities, a previously unexamined private collection, and interviews with Faulkner's associates, this biography profiles the often contradictory personality of the famed Southern author

William Faulkner: The Man and the Artist : A Biography

The Whirlwind of War: Voices of the Storm, 1861-1865

The second book in the historian-author's trilogy continues his exhaustive, revisionist account of the Civil War years from a first person perspective, as he takes on the personas of eleven major players from the time period.

History

Americas

William Faulkner: The Man and the Artist

The Fires of Jubilee: Nat Turner's Fierce Rebellion

The bloody slave rebellion led by Nat Turner in Virginia in 1831 and the savage reprisals that followed shattered beyond repair the myth of the contented slave and the benign master, and intensified the forces of change that would plunge America into the bloodbath of the Civil War.
Stephen B. Oates, the acclaimed biographer of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr., presents a gripping and insightful account of the rebellion—the complex, gifted, and driven man who led it, the social conditions that produced it, and the legacy it left. A classic now newly reissued for the first time in more than twenty years, here is the dramatic re-creation of the turbulent period that marked a crucial turning point in America's history.

Perennial

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Books by Oates, Stephen B.