Audiobooks by Wayne Wei-Siang Hsieh

A Savage War: Military History of the Civil War

The Civil War represented a momentous change in the character of war. It combined the projection of military might across a continent on a scale never before seen with an unprecedented mass mobilization of peoples. Yet despite the revolutionizing aspects of the Civil War, its leaders faced the same uncertainties that have vexed combatants since the days of Thucydides and the Peloponnesian War. In a masterful narrative that propels listeners from the first shots fired at Fort Sumter to the surrender of Robert E. Lee's army at Appomattox, Williamson Murray and Wayne Wei-siang Hsieh bring every aspect of the battlefield vividly to life. They show how this new way of waging war was made possible by the powerful historical forces unleashed by the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution, yet how the war was far from being simply a story of the triumph of superior machines. Murray and Hsieh paint indelible portraits of Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, William Tecumseh Sherman, and other major figures whose leadership, judgment, and personal character played such decisive roles in the fate of a nation. They also examine how the Army of the Potomac, the Army of Northern Virginia, and the other major armies developed entirely different cultures that influenced the war's outcome.

Wayne Wei-Siang Hsieh, Williamson Murray (Author), Mike Chamberlain (Narrator)

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West Pointers and the Civil War: The Old Army in War and Peace

The task for those in charge of professionalizing the military in the first half of the nineteenth century and transforming it from a militia-led army to a highly disciplined standing army was a difficult job. Americans had long supported a tradition of militia and distrusted professional soldiers. However, by the time of the Civil War, the high command positions in the Union army and the nascent army of the Confederacy were filled with graduates of West Point, who had served in the Mexican War and who had been taught in the European military tradition. The sorts of campaigns the armies would wage, the rules of those engagements, the understandings of victory, all were in a sense predetermined by the military training and experience of the professionals called in to organize and lead the opposing sides. In examining the role of the institutional military in the Civil War, Hsieh makes use of manuals, reports, letters housed at West Point, newspapers, diaries, and numerous secondary sources. "Hsieh challenges studies that have argued that field fortifications and rifles gave the advantage to defenders, insisting instead that other factors, such as leadership, morale, and troop strength were more influential in success or failure. Smart and genuinely stimulating, West Pointers and the Civil War will be controversial in the best sense of the word."—Joseph T. Glatthaar, author of General Lee's Army: From Victory to Collapse

Wayne Wei-Siang Hsieh (Author), Stephen Hoye (Narrator)

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