Blog
Published: 11/2/11
General Braxton Bragg, C.S.A. (2011)
A consensus among many Civil War historians is that the Confederacy lost the conflict in the West, the vast region between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River. Union armies...
Published: 10/31/11
Mrs. (“Beast”) Butler’s Scary Dream
Happy Halloween! To celebrate, we found a spooktacular letter from the archives… On April 4, 1862, Sarah Hildreth Butler, wife of Union general Benjamin F. (“Beast”) Butler, wrote a friend...
Published: 10/31/11
“They See a Ghost or Something.”
On May 25, 1863, Union soldier David L. Day, of the 25th Massachusetts Volunteers, recorded a strange incident that occurred while his regiment was on a recent nighttime march: Sometime...
Published: 10/31/11
Voices From the Past: “I am truly thankful for the institution of ghosts…”
“You perceive that my idea of ghosts is not limited to graveyards and tombs, or the tenants thereof; indeed, so far from it, the most troublesome I have ever known...
Published: 10/31/11
Voices from the Past – Out of That Silence Rose New Sounds More Appalling Still
The Battle of Fredericksburg (December 11-15, 1862) was a decisive loss for the Union army, crippling northern morale. The chilling quote below derives from Lieutenant Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain’s description...
Published: 10/28/11
Are You Ready for Some (Civil War) Football?
Winslow Homer’s depiction of Union soldiers playing “Foot-Ball” in camp. Looks harmless enough… Image credit: Library of Congress.
Published: 10/27/11
Teaching Slavery as the Cause of the Civil War
“What caused the Civil War?” Historians have killed forests trying to answer this deceptively simple question. In a recent essay in The Journal of the Civil War Era, Frank Towers...
Published: 10/26/11
Soldiering in the Army of Northern Virginia (2011)
As Joseph Glatthaar argues in his new study, “scholarship that focuses on soldiers is stuck” (xiii). Over the last few years, historians have engaged in a roaring debate about the...
Published: 10/26/11
The Iron Way (2011)
William G. Thomas’s The Iron Way is a tour-de-force, and offers a series of bracing insights about the origins, shape and outcome of the Civil War. Thomas argues that the railroads...
Published: 10/25/11
Respect My Heritage; You Can Stick Yours
Several news stories appeared in the media recently updating recent developments in a neighborhood dispute in South Carolina that’s been brewing for about year now. The brief recap is that...
Published: 10/24/11
Voices From the Past: “An Inferior Force”
“Well, so far we seem to have applied a new maxim of war, always to meet the enemy with an inferior force at the point of attack.” —General George B....
Published: 10/21/11
Ball’s Bluff Remembered
One hundred fifty years ago today, on October 21, 1861, Union troops suffered a humiliating defeat in what would come to be known as the Battle of Ball’s Bluff. After...
Published: 10/20/11
Progress and Change and Preservation
A few Fridays ago I took a short tour of the Chantilly, or Ox Hill, Battlefield. Short, of course, because aside from a five-acre section preserved within a county park,...
Published: 10/19/11
Near Andersonville (2010)
Americans tend to imagine their Civil War through a montage of images. For most, this visual archive is littered by the sepia-toned portraits and Ken-Burns-styled landscapes. Color photos of tranquil...
Published: 10/19/11
The Long Shadow of the Civil War (2010)
“Few histories,” Victoria Bynum laments, “are buried faster or deeper than those of political or social dissenters” (148). By resurrecting the histories of three anti-secessionist communities in the South, Bynum’s...
Published: 10/18/11
“Coal for the Furnaces is as important as Gunpowder for the Guns”
“The Saltpeter is the Soule, the Sulphur is the Life, and the Coales the Body of it.” — John Bate, The Mysteryes of Nature and Art (1634) If cannon and...
Published: 10/17/11
Southward Bound
One hundred fifty years ago today—October 17, 1861—25-year-old Lieutenant W. H. Timberlake of the 8th Maine Volunteers wrote the following letter from his regiment’s camp in Annapolis, Maryland. The men...
Published: 10/13/11
Bolting On the Civil War Navy
Several months back, my friend Matthew Eng, coordinator at the Hampton Roads Navy Museum, asked me why the naval aspects of the Civil War tend to stand off from the...