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Historical person
1839–1876
George Armstrong Custer was a United States Army officer who rose rapidly during the American Civil War and became one of the best-known cavalry commanders of his generation. Born in Ohio in 1839, he graduated last in his class at West Point in 1861 but quickly gained field experience. His aggressive style and willingness to take risks brought promotion to brigadier general of volunteers at the age of twenty-three.
After the Civil War Custer reverted to his regular-army rank and served with the 7th Cavalry on the Great Plains during the violent expansion of United States control over Indigenous lands. His 1868 attack on Black Kettle’s Cheyenne village on the Washita remains heavily contested. In June 1876 Custer divided his regiment while attacking a large Lakota, Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho encampment at the Little Bighorn; he and the five companies with him were destroyed.
George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman and the Redskins sends Flashman towards Custer’s 1876 expedition, viewing the celebrated cavalryman through a narrator deeply suspicious of heroic legend. M. J. Trow’s The Black Hills makes Custer part of a murder mystery around the Seventh Cavalry and asks whether the famous commander himself may be the intended target. Hourly History’s George Armstrong Custer follows the historical career from Civil War promotion to the Little Bighorn. John Jakes’ Heaven and Hell places Custer within the post-war western army and the conflicts produced by expansion onto Indigenous lands. In the alternate-history Never Call Retreat, Custer belongs instead to a Civil War whose changed strategic course gives familiar commanders different opportunities and consequences.
Series
The Gettysburg Trilogy is an alternate-history Civil War sequence that begins by changing the outcome of the Battle of Gettysburg. A Confederate victory gives Robert E. Lee the initiative, opening a campaign against Washington while Abraham Lincoln turns to Ulysses S. Grant to rebuild the Union war effort.…
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The Flashman Papers present the supposed memoirs of Sir Harry Paget Flashman, the bully expelled from Rugby School in Tom Brown’s School Days who becomes a decorated Victorian soldier despite being a coward, liar, opportunist and sexual predator. George MacDonald Fraser places this fictional witness inside documented nineteenth-century…
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The North and South Trilogy follows the Mains of South Carolina and the Hazards of Pennsylvania, two families joined when Orry Main and George Hazard become friends at West Point. Their bond survives the Mexican–American War and years of sectional conflict, but slavery, secession and family pressure place…
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The Grand and Batchelor mysteries pair Matthew Grand, a former Union cavalry officer, with English journalist James Batchelor as private enquiry agents in the years after the American Civil War. Their cases move between London and the United States, beginning in the aftermath of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination and…
All books in this series
Non Fiction
Biographies, histories and other non-fiction are listed separately from the historical novels above.
