Tipping Points of History

by Gordon Corrigan 3 books in this series

Tipping Points of History examines battles whose outcomes altered the political possibilities of their age. Gordon Corrigan moves from the destruction of Athenian naval power at Aegospotami to the fall of Atlanta during the American Civil War and the German catastrophe at Stalingrad, asking why each engagement mattered beyond the immediate battlefield.

Each volume combines a compact campaign history with an assessment of command decisions, strategic alternatives and consequences. The series is deliberately interested in contingency: not simply who won, but which errors, opportunities and wider political pressures made the result decisive and how a different outcome might have changed the course of the war around it.

Reading order

Books in this series (3 books)

1. The Battle of Aegospotami

Gordon Corrigan

3.8(21)

By 405 BCE Athens and Sparta had been fighting the Peloponnesian War for more than two decades, and Athens still depended on its fleet and the grain routes through the Hellespont. At Aegospotami the Spartan commander Lysander caught the Athenian navy in a vulnerable position and…

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2. The Battle of Atlanta

Gordon Corrigan

3.4(14)

In 1864 Union armies under William Tecumseh Sherman pressed toward Atlanta while the American Civil War entered a politically dangerous phase for Abraham Lincoln’s government. Confederate forces under John Bell Hood launched aggressive attacks in an effort to stop the advance, but the campaign ended with…

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3. The Battle of Stalingrad

Gordon Corrigan

3.9(35)

The German summer offensive of 1942 carried the Wehrmacht toward the Volga and the oil regions of the Caucasus, but Hitler’s determination to seize Stalingrad drew the Sixth Army into a prolonged urban battle. Corrigan follows the struggle through street fighting, Soviet reinforcement across the Volga…

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