Blogs

One weekend last October, my husband and I drove several hours to Portland, Maine, to see a play about lawyer and Civil War general Benjamin Franklin Butler. The stage was stacked with moving boxes, a rolled-up rug, several pieces of unhung artwork, and a large desk piled with papers. Brickwork archways soared overhead, bolstering the stage roof. Ben Butler, by playwright Richard Strand and staged...

Editor Timothy Roberts deserves high marks...makes for good reading, and researchers will find it equally rewarding.

With the help of a handful of Civil War historians and enthusiasts, here is our compilation of their favorite Civil War books published in 2018.

Vicksburg ... is a book for popular audiences ... particularly those seeking a perspective more sympathetic to the Confederates.

As proud sponsors of American Civil War Museum’s upcoming Emerging Scholars program—set to occur next May during the grand opening of the museum’s new facility in Richmond—we thought we would sit down with Madeline Wood, ACWM’s digital engagement manager, and Stephanie Arduini, director of education & programs, to learn more about their plans for the big day.

...a welcome introduction to the work of a distinguished historian.

With selections ranging from revolutionary-era South Carolina to mid-century Liberia to 1880s Brazil, the assembled essays provide a rich pastiche of the nineteenth century Atlantic.

Wert's skill in weaving together historical argument and satisfying narrative are on full display...

Nearly twenty years after the end of the Civil War, Union army veteran Melvin Grigsby traveled south in hopes of locating the local woman who had aided him and other northern soldiers held at Castle Morgan prison in Cahaba, Alabama. As the following account, gleaned from Grigsby's postwar memoir, The Smoked Yank, explains, the old soldier found the woman, Amanda Gardner, living with her daughter...

...a notable effort to raise the eponymous Union officer from [the] realm of 'folklore and myth.'

Lang's deeply researched account...is relevant for understanding not just the Civil War, but war in our own time.

The Union occupation of New Bern began in early 1862, when Major General Ambrose Burnside captured the river port.

During the Civil War, the prominent lithography firm Currier and Ives produced inexpensive prints of the conflict and its participants based on original drawings by some of the country’s leading artists.

This biography is an essential text that will shape academic scholarship...and perhaps even inspire a Broadway musical.

Understanding the myth surrounding the man known as "Stonewall" ...

LeRoy's diary charts both his own painful physical disintegration and death and the Confederacy's equally tortuous path to destruction and defeat.

“Reflections of the Face of Lincoln,” a new exhibit that features an impressive animatronic bust of the 16th president, recently opened at the Lincoln Memorial Shrine in Redlands, California.

The publication of the letters and diaries of Civil War officers and men appears to continue unabated.

...a look at Confederate unit that has commanded precious little attention from historians and scholars.

A young woman in an unhappy marriage whose rise to first lady makes her both exhilarated and uncomfortable. Her much older husband, loyal only to himself and the power that the presidency will bring him. A past so riddled with lies they tell themselves that nothing is certain.           Charles Frazier’s new Civil War novel, Varina, feels strangely relevant in 2018.           The novel...