Blogs

"Rebel Correspondent" by Steve Procko offers glimpses into a Confederate cavalryman's experience in the Western Theater.

Looking to learn more about Civil War prisons and prisoners of war? We asked historian Brian Matthew Jordan to suggest a handful of books he thinks are essential reading in the category:

"The Summer of '63" is an informative, lively, and thought-provoking discussion of one of the Civil War's most pivotal seasons.

In "Passing Through the Fire," Brian Swartz reaches beyond the Chamberlain mythology.

"The Summer of '63" is an engaging and diverse set of works exploring the Battle of Gettysburg.

With the help of an Artificial Intelligence-based, computerized color identifier and cutting-edge software that created a 3D rendering of McPherson Ridge in 1868, a group of Civil War detectives have pinpointed the camera location of aniconic, and previously unidentified, Gettysburg battle image. Patrick Brennan, a longtime editorial advisor for The Civil War Monitor, has been working on a book...

The contents of the Cornerstone Speech are well known, but in "Cornerstone of the Confederacy," they take on new life and meaning.

Guy R. Hasegawa's "Matchless Organization" offers a clear, detailed, and thorough history of the Confederacy's military medical organization.

A historian offers his picks for the best novels about the Civil War ...

Michael J. Gerhardt's "Lincoln's Mentors" is an original and satisfying biography for readers who think there is nothing new to say about the sixteenth president.

How a word used to describe subpar cloth saw its meaning expanded during the Civil War

Published in 1890, "The Mountain Campaigns in Georgia"--a slim volume devoted to telling the story of the battles fought along the Western & Atlantic Railroad--boasted a number of detailed illustrations by leading artists of the day, including Alfred R. Waud and Thure de Thulstrup. Waud, boasted the book's author, had "personally visited all of the battlefields depicted," and all of the sketches...

William Barksdale's life is often reduced to a single episode...the charge his brigade made at Gettysburg on July 2, 1863.

"Buying & Selling Civil War Memory in Gilded Age America" reveals how the war, in ways big and small, continued to annex ordinary lives at century's end.

A dual biography of George Custer and Wesley Merritt, Adolfo Ovies' "The Boy Generals" is based on an extensive array of primary sources.

"This Mr. Wales is a cold-blooded killer. He’s from Missouri where they’re all known to be killers of innocent men, women, and children.” That line from Clint Eastwood’s iconic 1976 film, The Outlaw Josey Wales, reflected—and in some cases still reflects—the three most enduring misconceptions about Civil War guerrillas. First was that irregular combatants were all bloodthirsty psychos....

In the January 21, 1865, issue of Harper's Weekly, the editors published a small story about a man from Nevada who had lost an election for city office—but gained national renown in the wake of his defeat:

Vanessa M. Holden's "Surviving Southampton" moves our attention from Nat Turner to his community at a time when the appeal for uncovering societies of resistance has never been more apparent.

The Battle of Chickamauga, fought on September 18–20, 1863, pitted the William Rosecrans Army of the Cumberland against Braxton Bragg's Army of Tennessee in the war's first major land battle in Georgia. The bloody fighting, a resounding Confederate victory that produced some 34,000 total causalties, was marked by a series of Rebel attacks: on the 18th, James Longstreet's corps exploited a gap...