Published: 2/26/21Letters Home: Correspondence from Men at WarBy: Peter S. CarmichaelCategory: The Front Line Frank Leslie’s illustrated Newspaper Union soldiers take a moment to write home on the hurricane deck of the U.S. transport North Star while on campaign in the Gulf of Mexico...
Published: 2/24/21Robert E. Lee and Me (2021)By: Brian Matthew JordanCategory: Book Reviews All but one of the barracks at the United States Military Academy are named for high-ranking generals who distinguished themselves on the battlefield. That building is named for a U.S....
Published: 2/17/21Ambitious Honor (2020)By: Aaron David HyamsCategory: Book Reviews Author James Mueller’s new book opens with an anecdote from 1880, capturing a conversation between portrait artist James E. Kelly and General Winfield Scott Hancock. As Kelly painted a stiff...
Published: 2/10/21Bonds of Salvation (2020)By: Caleb W. SouthernCategory: Book Reviews Bonds of Salvation is the result of Ben Wright’s deeply personal “attempts to reconcile the inspiring piety and moral blind spots of the evangelical Christian community in which I was...
Published: 2/3/21The Last Lincoln Republican (2020)By: Brian Matthew JordanCategory: Book Reviews No period in U.S. history has invited more counterfactual thinking than Reconstruction. As Brook Thomas observed, the field’s reigning synthesis, which frames Reconstruction as an “unfinished revolution,” conjures “a world...
Published: 1/27/21Patriots Twice (2020)By: Ryan BixbyCategory: Book Reviews In Patriots Twice: Former Confederates and the Building of America after the Civil War, author Stephen M. Hood seeks to highlight the postwar lives and accomplishments of 220 Confederate veterans....
Published: 1/20/21Tullahoma (2020)By: Fred L. Johnson IIICategory: Book Reviews The diligent, robust scholarship found on the pages of Tullahoma: The Forgotten Campaign that Challenged the Course of the Civil War, June 23 – July 4, 1863 has not only expanded the...
Published: 1/13/21The Thin Gray Line (2019)By: Sarah Kay BierleCategory: Book Reviews Civil War fiction often focuses on battlefield scenarios or romantic tales. The Thin Gray Line offers a new look at the darker side of the war, tracing a Confederate soldier’s adventures...
Published: 1/6/21Women Making War (2020)By: Heather Carlquist WalserCategory: Book Reviews In Women Making War: Female Confederate Prisoners and Union Military Justice, Thomas F. Curran examines partisan Confederate women in St. Louis during the Civil War and how the federal government—specifically...
Published: 12/30/20Absalom Hazlett (2020)By: Codie EashCategory: Book Reviews Of all the violent incidents foreshadowing the Civil War, few compare to John Brown’s calamitous and controversial raid on Harpers Ferry. In the 160-plus years since, Brown’s story has been...
Published: 12/28/20Goodbye to All ThatBy: Mark GrimsleyCategory: The Front Line Library of Congress Lieutenant Robert Pryor James, Co. E, 20th North Carolina Infantry This will be my final column for the “American Iliad” series, a project I undertook five years...
Published: 12/23/20Defending the Arteries of Rebellion (2020)By: J. Ross DancyCategory: Book Reviews In April 1861, artillery batteries of the newly proclaimed Confederate States of America opened fire on a small United States fort in Charleston Harbor. Since the very founding of the...
Published: 12/21/20Extra Voices: CoffeeBy: The Civil War MonitorCategory: The Front Line USAHEC A coffee cup used during the Civil War In the Voices section of the Winter 2020 issue of The Civil War Monitor we highlighted quotes by Union and Confederate...
Published: 12/16/20William Tecumseh Sherman (2016)By: Mitchell G. KlingenbergCategory: Book Reviews Can anything new be written of William Tecumseh Sherman? Commonly regarded as the second-greatest soldier to fight for the Federal armies in the War of the Rebellion, and one of...
Published: 12/9/20Jefferson Davis, Napoleonic France, and the Nature of Confederate Ideology (2020)By: Caleb W. SouthernCategory: Book Reviews Jeffrey Zvengrowski, a professor at the University of Virginia and assistant editor of the Papers of George Washington, has produced a truly fresh interpretation of the Confederate States of America....
Published: 12/7/20The Best Civil War Books of 2020By: The Civil War MonitorCategory: The Front Line The Books & Authors section of our Winter 2020 issue contains our annual roundup of the year’s best Civil War titles. As usual, we enlisted the help of a handful...
Published: 12/2/20Storming Vicksburg (2020)By: Robert GlazeCategory: Book Reviews Vicksburg has fared well in recent Civil War historiography. Works by Bradley R. Clampitt (2016), Steven E. Woodworth and Charles D. Grear (2019), and Timothy B. Smith (2019 and 2020)...
Published: 11/25/20The Maps of the Cavalry in the Gettysburg Campaign (2020)By: Jonathan NoyalasCategory: Book Reviews Gary Gallagher, one of our nation’s most distinguished Civil War era historians, contends (and I happen to concur with him on this point) that “Civil War battlefields bring the past...
Published: 11/18/20Soldiers National Cemetery at Gettysburg (2020)By: Rory CornishCategory: Book Reviews In June 1863, the Army of Northern Virginia launched its summer campaign, which culminated in the Battle of Gettysburg. Most Americans today are aware of the importance of the battle...
Published: 11/17/20“The Good Lord Bird”: Episode 7By: Megan Kate NelsonCategory: The Front Line On October 4, 2020, The Good Lord Bird, a 7-part miniseries about the life of abolitionist John Brown—based on the award-winning novel of the same name by James McBride—premiered on...