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Civil War

SPECIAL ADVERTISING SECTION: The Home Front Map—Guide to Appalachia

By Louis Segesvary, Ph.DPublic Affairs Director • Appalachian Regional Commission
Northern SourceAnaconda Plan

After Fort Sumter fell, a secessionist mob in Baltimore rioted and blocked the passage of Federal troops to Washington, D.C

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Northern SourceAbner Doubleday Journal

America's leading authority on the conflict explains why the Civil War still fascinates us.

One hundred and fifty years after the guns began shelling Fort Sumter this April, Americans remain fascinated with the Civil War. Why do we care about a war that ended so long ago?

By the end of the Civil War, nearly 200,000 African-Americans had fought for the Union cause and freedom.

The American Civil War had cost more than 620,000 lives and had nearly torn the nation apart, but by May 1865, it was finally over. To celebrate, thousands of people gathered in Washington, D.C., to express their gratitude to the military forces that had made the Union victory possible.

The Emancipation Proclamation opened the door for Pennsylvania's African-American soldiers.

The scene was wild and grand.

The highly lucrative cotton crop of 1860 emboldened the South to challenge the economic powerhouse of the North

In the mid- to late summer of 1860, billions of soft pink and white Gossypium hirsutum blooms broke out across South Carolina, Georgia, western Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas, soon to morph into puffy white bolls.

In one momentous decision, Robert E. Lee spared the United States years of divisive violence.

As April 1865 neared, an exhausted Abraham Lincoln met with his two top generals, Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman, to discuss the end of the Civil War, which finally seemed to be within reach.

Archaeologists in Georgia have found the location of the prison that served as an overflow facility for Andersonville.

"November 17, 1864—Three of our men were frozen to death last night in the stockade!

South Carolina severed ties with the Union not out of concern for states' rights but because of slavery

At 7 p.m. on Thursday, December 20, 1860, some 170 men marched through the streets of Charleston, South Carolina, walking from St. Andrews Hall to a new meetinghouse amid the cheers of onlookers. Half of them were more than 50 years old, most well-known.

The memoirs of Civil War correspondent SYLVANUS CADWALLADER were recently discovered and edited by Lincoln biographer Benjamin Thomas

The memoirs of Civil War correspondent SYLVANUS CADWALLADER were recently discovered and edited by Lincoln biographer Benjamin Thomas

Not until the Civil War was about over did the U.S. Navy manage to put a halt to the South’s imports

Lincoln painstakingly evolved a plan for harmonious reconstruction of the Union, which Radical Republicans moved to sabotage

Lincoln painstakingly evolved a plan for harmonious reconstruction of the Union, which Radical Republicans moved to sabotage

Would the disastrous Reconstruction era have taken a different course?

What would have happened had Abraham Lincoln not been assassinated? Every time I lecture on Lincoln, the Civil War, or Reconstruction, someone in the audience is sure to pose this question—one, of course, perfectly natural to ask, but equally impossible to answer. This has not, however, deterred historians from speculating about this “counterfactual” problem.

Trying to understand the Civil War’s ugliest incident

The New York Stock Exchange plans to modernize by merging with a new competitor, just as it did in 1869.

 
How Bruce Chadwick (“Actor Against Actor,” August/September 2004) could include movies whose plots are post-Civil War (The Searchers, The Ox-Bow Incident) and omit the excellent Ride With the Devil

Humvees with Humps

One of Lee’s greatest lieutenants is slowly winning his reputation back after losing it for daring to criticize his boss.

No one has ever come up with a satisfactory count of the books dealing with the Civil War. Estimates range from 50,000 to more than 70,000, with new titles added every day.

From "The General" to "Gettysburg," spanning 66 years, these movies have done the best to capture America's worst war.

A federal tariff in 1828 that favored northern industry infuriated southerners and played a role in eventual secession.

On December 19, 1828, South Carolina’s legislature issued a set of resolutions vigorously opposing a tariff that Congress had enacted earlier in the year.
 

A five-day uprising by Irish immigrants in New York was ostensibly against the draft, but was in fact a chance for Irish mobs to attack and murder as many black people as possible.

Kevin Baker, our “In The News” columnist, has just published a historical novel called Paradise Alley.

Richard Dobbins has made it his mission to gather every single record of every single soldier into one huge, organized, searchable internet database.

RESEARCHERS PREPARE TO LOOK INSIDE THE LONG-BURIED CONFEDERATE SUBMARINE

How two devotees of the American flag and one Supreme Court justice shaped the story of a border town and the nation

The Italianate building at 101 West Church Street in Frederick, Maryland, had by 1861 become a house divided. The patriarch of the Baers, the family who lived there, was staunchly pro-Union, while his son had married a Southerner and taken up her cause.

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