Showing results by narrator "Chris Abell" in All Categories

Two thrilling Western stories set in Arizona, in which strong and silent cowboys use their wits to overcome bullies while avoiding gunplay as much as possible. The first story, "Scalisi Claws Leather", is set in Arizona during the Prohibition era. The notorious Chicago gangster Pete Scalisi has come to the Bar BQ dude ranch to hide out for a while. In the title story, "Long Texan", Boone Sibley arrives in Tough Nut, Arizona, just in time to save a small child that wanders into the line of fire in a shootout, putting him on the wrong side of Whip Quinn and his gang.

Retired US Army sergeant Thaddeus McCallum joins the Pinkerton Detective Agency, where he makes enough money to purchase the ranch he's always wanted. But just as McCallum begins to settle in to his new life, he receives an urgent letter from a former comrade in arms, whose son Jeff has gone missing. The men soon learn that Columbus, New Mexico, was the site of an attack by Pancho Villa and his army of revolutionaries, and young Jeff has been taken prisoner.

It's the spring of 1864, and times are hard in Washington County, Arkansas, especially for 13-year-old Travis Ford. He hasn't heard from his father, a sergeant in the Second Arkansas Cavalry, in months. His mother is struggling to make ends meet on the family farm and abandoned sawmill near Poison Spring. All Travis really wants to do is to follow his passion - make up adventure stories in the style of Alexandre Dumas. But the Civil War keeps getting in his way.

William Clarke Quantrill was a hated name during the War Between the States by the Federals of the Union Army, as well as by many non-combatants. Even the high command of the Confederacy distrusted him. But there were others who were passionate sympathizers. He was both friend and mentor‚ but also manipulator and opportunist.

This book contains valuable information on leaders that changed our world and altered the course of humanity forever. Although each leader had an impact that was completely unique, certain parallels can be drawn about their effect on history. Anyone who is hoping to become a more effective leader or a stronger person in general can learn from the examples of these men.

From cats in trees to people dangling out windows of their three story homes, firefighter Rick Alderman has seen it all. He's been on the force for two decades now and is anxiously heading towards retirement. When a part-time hobby that was supposed to help break up the monotony takes a turn for the worst, Rick finds himself down a path he never wanted to be on.

Firefighter Micah Freeman is the pillar of faith at fire station #9. He's the one everyone turns to in their hour of need. A man of steel in every regard, but even steel has a breaking point. When a tragedy strikes close to home, Micah's faith is challenged far beyond anything he has ever encountered. Truly relying on God for strength, Micah must find a way to put the pieces back together and find the peace he once had.

I've loved Lily my whole life; she's all I've ever known. I didn't realize how deeply she was ingrained into the fabric of my soul until I felt her absence.

Joe Sullivan is framed by a biker gang and vows revenge when he is released from prison. Unable to wait, he breaks jail with the help of his girl, Pat. But the bikers kidnap Ann Martin, a stranger who sympathetically corresponded with Joe while he was in jail. As his plans to exact revenge are complicated by Ann's presence, Joe works to find a way to rescue her.

The bloodiest day in American history took place on the 75th anniversary of the signing of the Constitution. On September 17, 1862, Robert E. Lee's Confederate Army of Northern Virginia fought George McClellan's Union Army of the Potomac outside Sharpsburg, along Antietam Creek. That day, nearly 25,000 would become casualties, and Lee's army would barely survive fighting the much bigger Northern army. Although the battle was tactically a draw, it resulted in forcing Lee’s army out of Maryland and back into Virginia, making it a strategic victory for the North.

Americans have long been fascinated by the Civil War and its biggest battles, particularly Gettysburg, Antietam, and Shiloh, all of which involved Robert E. Lee or Ulysses S. Grant. But one of the six biggest battles of the war, and the one that took the heaviest toll by percent on both armies was fought at the end of 1862 in Tennessee, and it involved neither of those generals.

The second biggest battle of the entire war mostly gets overlooked among casual listeners, despite the fact it represented the last great chance for the Confederates to salvage the Western theater.

The Second Battle of Bull Run (August 28-30, 1862) was one of the most decisive battles fought during the Civil War, and it was also one of the most unlikely. Less than three months before the battle, Joseph E. Johnston's Army of Northern Virginia had been pushed back nearly all the way to Richmond by George B. McClellan's Army of the Potomac, so close that Union soldiers could see the church steeples of the Confederate capital.

After Union General Ulysses S. Grant captured Fort Henry and Fort Donelson in early 1862, Confederate General Albert Sidney Johnston, widely considered the Confederacy's best general, concentrated his forces in northern Georgia and prepared for a major offensive that culminated with the biggest battle of the war to that point, the Battle of Shiloh. On the morning of April 6, Johnston directed an all-out attack on Grant's army around Shiloh Church, and though Grant's men had been encamped there, they had failed to create defensive fortifications or earthworks.

Before the night of April 14, 1865, John Wilkes Booth was one of the most famous actors of his time; President Abraham Lincoln had even watched him perform. But his most significant performance at a theater did not take place on the stage. That night Booth became one of history's most infamous assassins when he shot President Lincoln at Ford's Theatre in Washington, DC.

Since Wilde's condemnation of modern biography, the genre would appear to have accelerated its descent into bad taste. As Carl Rollyson points out, writers as various as Rebecca West, Ted Hughes, and Joyce Carol Oates have deplored biographers' tendency to cut up lives and render the bloody data so as to make their subjects seem unhealthy, unwholesome, and unsound. Janet Malcolm has compared biographers to burglars; modern novels feature the biographer as grave robber and victimizer.

Thurgood Marshall was one of the original forces behind the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), one of the organizations that advocated the rights of African Americans in the 20th century. His pursuit of civil rights reached a highpoint when, as a lawyer, he helped the NAACP win Brown vs. Board of Education, the Supreme Court case that ended segregation in education in American public schools.

In the arms race against Russia, the United States has eked ahead with their superior advancements in computer technology. All that changes when Russia recruits some of Japan’s finest scientific minds to build their greatest weapon yet: a supercomputer capable of annihilating the US’s formidable Star Wars defense system. Destined for the land of the Samurai, the Black Berets know just how much is riding on this latest mission. If Russia succeeds in its quest for world domination, the future of the warriors’ countrymen—and their loved ones—is bleak indeed.

They were the most elite team of interservice fighters America’s government had ever formed. As war raged in Vietnam, the Black Berets took on the most secret—and most heinous—of covert operations. Now they’re back, and they have a new mission. Eight years after their bloody exploits across the battlefields of Asia, the five-man team is reunited at the behest of their scheming CIA handler, a man none of them trusts after a dirty war of lies and betrayals. However, word has it one of their own, thought long-dead, is alive and being held prisoner in Laos.

In Mesa County, Nevada, the tide of history was about to change. A tiny tribe of Indigenous Americans had just beaten the white man in his own court—and won title to some of the richest land in America. But some people were poor losers. And if they couldn’t hold on to the land … they’d simply eliminate its rightful owners. With a handful of poorly armed Native Americans facing a lynch mob led by the county sheriff and backed by corporate millions, Mesa County might be the setting for another Wounded Knee. Until the Black Berets get in on the action and show how professionals handle a massacre.