
Blog


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 the Past to help you learn...
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...
Published: 9/21/11
These Sacred Fields: Union Commemorations at Gettysburg
For Union veterans of the Civil War, the battlefield at Gettysburg served as the epicenter for war remembrance. The modern landscape certainly attests to this. A forest of marble, granite,...
Published: 9/21/11
We Cannot Know Their Minds
Undoubtedly one of the reasons for the tremendous, abiding interest Americans have with the Civil War is that a great many of us have a personal connection to it. We...
Published: 9/21/11
Welcome to The Front Line!
The goal of The Front Line is to provide a vibrant and active space for both our readers and our contributors. Just as printed editions of The Civil War Monitor...
Published: 9/16/11
A few words on The Bookshelf
Greetings and welcome to the official digital headquarters of book reviews for The Civil War Monitor. In much the same way that printed editions of the Monitor will attempt to bridge the...
Published: 9/16/11
The 4th Michigan Infantry in the Civil War (2010)
Since the turn toward social and cultural history in the 1960s and 1970s, many academic institutions have relegated military history to the virtual back burner of “serious” scholarly endeavors. Military...
Published: 9/16/11
Connecticut in the American Civil War (2011)
The Civil War Centennial saw the publication of histories of state participation in the Civil War. Now, with the approach of the sesquicentennial, it appears as if a new batch...
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