Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Civil War
The nation'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! Large fires are going, but many are so reduced in vitality that they easily froze notwithstanding,” wrote Union Pvt.
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
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
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.
What are the 10 greatest movies ever about the Civil War?
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
“The Cold War is over,” said Paul Tsongas, campaigning for the Presidency in 1992. “Japan won.”
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.
A LEADING CIVIL WAR HISTORIAN CHANGES ONE SMALL HAPPENSTANCE—WHICH IN TURN CHANGES EVERYTHING
COMING TO TERMS WITH THE MOST COMPELLING AND MYSTERIOUS OF CIVIL WAR HEROES
TWENTY YEARS AGO I WAS WORKING in the American Heritage book division side by side with our (now) senior editor Jane Colihan, the two of us younger, of course, and darker-haired, and glummer.
MOTHERS OF INVENTION
Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War
by Drew Gilpin Faust , University of North Carolina Press, 326 pages, $29.95. CODE: UNC-7
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