Blog
Published: 7/24/13
Copperhead (2013)
What is the worst sin a movie can commit? Excessive, gratuitous violence? Flagrant disregard for universal truths? A meandering plot? Terrible acting? To my mind, the worst sin a movie...
Published: 7/17/13
Battle of Stones River (2012)
On the first day of the Battle of Stones River, Federal troops struggled to push back a fierce Confederate assault. The bugler for an Ohio regiment was fleeing from the...
Published: 7/17/13
The Fall of the House of Dixie (2013)
In The Fall of the House of Dixie, Bruce Levine sets out to reintroduce the Civil War to the American public not as a series of battles but as a...
Published: 7/15/13
The Pursuit
On July 7 Major General George Gordon Meade left Gettysburg and traveled to Frederick, Maryland. He found the streets crowded with people eager to get a glimpse of him. The...
Published: 7/10/13
A Surgeon’s Tale (2011)
The American Civil War was a veritable bloodbath for the men who waged it. More than 400,000 Billy Yanks were wounded throughout the conflict—245,000 of those casualties were gunshot wounds....
Published: 7/10/13
River of Dark Dreams (2013)
Walter Johnson opens River of Dark Dreams with a bang and a dream: the 1850 explosion of the steam boat Anglo-Norman at New Orleans and Thomas Jefferson’s “empire of liberty” dream....
Published: 7/8/13
The Day Holt Collier Killed Hogzilla
Holt Collier (c. 1845-1936) was a Mississippi slave who went off to the Civil War as a servant to his master, Howell Hinds, and Hinds’ son Tom. Although he was...
Published: 7/5/13
An Interview with Timothy Wesley
Our conversation with Timothy Wesley, a lecturer in history and religious studies at Penn State University and affiliate of the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center. In...
Published: 7/3/13
A Field Guide to Gettysburg (2013)
This is the second collaboration between Carol Reardon, a professor of military history at Penn State University, and Tom Vossler, a retired Army colonel and licensed Gettysburg battlefield guide since...
Published: 7/3/13
The Gettysburg Campaign in Numbers and Losses (2013)
Civil War veterans were obsessed with numbers and losses. Regimental historians corresponded with their former comrades for decades, hoping to render an “accurate” depiction of their wartime travails. Grand Army...
Published: 7/1/13
The Battle in Public: Newspaper Reports from Gettysburg
Undoubtedly, over the next few days newspapers and blogs will provide enthralling details about the Battle of Gettysburg on the 150th anniversaries of each of its three days. In our...
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Published: 6/30/13
Gettysburg in Color
Edwin Forbes is best known today for his work during the Civil War as a special correspondent for Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, to which he supplied a multitude of illustrations...Published: 6/28/13
An Interview with Caroline Janney
Our conversation with Caroline Janney, an associate professor of history at Purdue University and author of Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation published by the...
Published: 6/26/13
The Election of 1860 Reconsidered (2013)
This series of essays on the election of 1860 had its origins in the third annual symposium of the Civil War Study Group, hosted by the University of Indianapolis, in...
Published: 6/24/13
Oh Lord, Where Art Thou? Civil War Guards, Prisoners, and Punishments
A prison register was a seemingly strange place to write the Our Father. Nonetheless, one guard from the 128th Ohio Volunteer Infantry, charged with guarding Johnson’s Island Prison, scribbled the...Published: 6/21/13
An Interview with J.P. Terry
Our conversation with J.P. Terry, CEO of Smartdoc Technologies and the developer of the Gettysburg150 app. In this interview, Terry discusses the features of the Gettysburg150 app as well as...Published: 6/14/13
An Interview with Allen Guelzo
Our conversation with Allen Guelzo, the Henry R. Luce Professor of the Civil War Era at Gettysburg College and author most recently of Gettysburg: The Last Invasion, published by...
Published: 6/12/13
What the Yankees Did to Us (2012)
General William Tecumseh Sherman was a very bad man. This is the main point of Stephen Davis’ exhaustive history of the Union capture of Atlanta in 1864. Davis makes his...