Beginning with a searing indictment of slavery, this first episode dramatically evokes the causes of the war, from the Cotton Kingdom of the South to the northern abolitionists who opposed it. Here are the burning questions of Union and States’ rights, John Brown at Harper’s Ferry, the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, the firing on Fort Sumter and the jubilant rush to arms on both sides. Along the way the series’ major figures are introduced:...

Challenges opinions about the Civil War general's presidency, explaining how Grant enabled the country to achieve a sense of post-war calm and applied constructive political strategies in favor of less effective occupation tactics.

Desperate to complete his memoirs before his death so his family has financial security and he some salvation, Ulysses S. Grant, riddled with cancer, journeys back in time to the crucial moments of his life as a general and twice-elected president as he reckons with his complicated legacy.

"A stunning history of the first national anti-terrorist campaign waged on American soil-when Ulysses S. Grant wielded the power of the federal government in an attempt to dismantle the Ku Klux Klan. The Ku Klux Klan, which celebrated historian Fergus Bordewich defines as "the first organized terrorist movement in American history," rose from the ashes of the Civil War. At its peak in the early 1870s, the Klan boasted many tens of thousands of members,...

President Ulysses S. Grant (1822-1885) was one of the most esteemed individuals of the nineteenth century. His two-volume memoirs, sold door-to-door by former Union soldiers, have never gone out of print and were once as ubiquitous in American households as the Bible. Mark Twain, Gertrude Stein, Matthew Arnold, Henry James, and Edmund Wilson hailed these works as great literature, and presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush both credit Grant with...