Blog
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...
Published: 10/12/11
Confederate Reckoning (2010)
Stephanie McCurry’s latest work offers a welcomed examination of the “Confederate Project” as it existed from 1860 to 1865. Throughout her analysis, she clearly illustrates that the fundamental pro-slavery ideologies...
Published: 10/12/11
Sing Not War (2011)
Civil War veterans were everywhere in late-nineteenth century America. Virtually everyone had a relative or knew someone who once donned Union blue or Confederate gray. Union veterans paraded on Memorial...
Published: 10/11/11
D. W. Griffith’s Other Civil War Movie
The infamous director’s 1930 biography of Lincoln was one of only two “talkies” made by Griffith, and stars Walter Huston in the title role. The screenplay is by Stephen...
Published: 10/10/11
Voices from the Past: A “Plucky” Young Soldier
Good morning! The Civil War Monitor has added a new section to The Front Line: Quotables. Each Monday, we will share a Voice from Past to help you learn more...
Published: 10/5/11
Weirding the War (2011)
What we have here is an excellent collection with a terrible title. (I confess I am a curmudgeon about titles. It is time to stop torturing nouns by turning them...
Published: 10/4/11
“It made us an ‘is’.”
It's one of the great quotes, from one of the great documentaries, that sums up the legacy of the American Civil War: Before the war, it was said 'the United States are'– grammatically it was spoken that way and thought of as a collection of independent states. And after the war it was always 'the [...]
Published: 9/29/11
A War of Words
There’s a lot that remains unsettled about the Civil War: “Manassas” or “Bull Run”? “Civil War” or “War Between the States”? Forget the big questions about what the war was...
Published: 9/28/11
The Union War (2011)
Ken Burns’ Civil War series made famous Rhode Island soldier Elisha Hunt Rhodes’s phrase, “All for the Union.” Gary W. Gallagher agrees with Rhodes and emphasizes that, for northerners, the...
Published: 9/28/11
1861: The Civil War Awakening (2011)
Adam Goodheart’s much heralded 1861: The Civil War Awakening is an eloquent, innovative, and deeply researched collection of chapter-length vignettes that surveys a variety of events at the outset of our...
Published: 9/27/11
Texas SCV Calls for a New Strategy
Recently Mark Vogl, Lieutenant Commander of the Texas Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, called for a shift strategy in that organization’s approach to “heritage defense,” away from throwing...