Blog
Published: 3/6/23
“When the Boys Come Home”
Harper’s Weekly Lincoln’s secretary John Hay In June 1864, Harper’s Weekly published the following poem by John Hay, one of two personal secretaries to President Abraham Lincoln. Hay, 25 at...
Published: 3/2/23
Mourning the Presidents (2023)
In this accessible and engaging volume, noted presidential historians Lindsay M. Chervinsky and Matthew R. Costello assemble a dozen essays that treat how our nation’s commanders in chief have been...
Published: 2/24/23
The Books That Built Me: Joan Waugh
DIANA LUNDIN Joan Waugh “There is properly no history; only biography.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson Narrowing down a list of “books that built me” was surprisingly difficult. The books finally selected,...
Published: 2/23/23
Their Maryland (2021)
By late September 1862, the soldiers in the Army of Northern Virginia were frustrated. One Virginia private cursed the “infernal” Potomac River, and a Georgia sergeant told his fiancée he...
Published: 2/22/23
Administering Freedom (2022)
Administering Freedom opens by recalling William Baltimore’s interview with a member of the Federals Writers’ Project in the late 1930s. Baltimore fled to the Union Army in 1863, enlisted in the...
Published: 2/20/23
The Union Forever (2012)
We are currently in the midst of a U.S. Grant renaissance. Recent studies by Brooks Simpson, Jean Smith, Joan Waugh and H.W. Brands have sought to rehabilitate the reputation of...
Published: 2/15/23
Lady Rebels of Civil War Missouri (2022)
In Lady Rebels of Civil War Missouri, Larry Wood takes readers into the most complex and contentious period of Missouri’s history to detail the lives of seventeen female Confederate sympathizers....
Published: 2/10/23
Civil War Emojis
The May 23, 1863, issue of Harper’s Weekly ran the following ad by E.P. Gleason, a New York-based manufacturer. The ad, which promoted Gleason’s “Kerosine Crater,” an attachment to be...
Published: 2/8/23
Gettysburg’s Southern Front (2022)
Thousands of books have been written about the Gettysburg Campaign, yet talented scholars with fresh insights continue to prove the last has not been said about our most studied military...
Published: 2/1/23
I Saw Death Coming (2023)
The process of Reconstruction after the Civil War is one of the most critical, yet ambiguous periods of US history. One of the key reasons why Reconstruction has remained so...
Published: 1/28/23
The Books That Built Me: George Rable
BRYAN HESTER Historian George C. Rable I was not one of those precocious Civil War enthusiasts who started reading Bruce Catton at the age of 10. Even when I was...
Published: 1/25/23
The Tale Untwisted (2023)
On Saturday, September 13, 1862, a Hoosier private stumbled upon a stray copy of Robert E. Lee’s Special Orders No. 191 near Frederick, Maryland. The discovery of the “Lost Orders”...
Published: 1/18/23
Ways and Means (2022)
Some have characterized economics as the dismal science. Roger Lowenstein didn’t get that memo. The author of critically acclaimed books on Wall Street and modern financial arrangements, Lowenstein has turned...
Published: 1/11/23
Six Miles from Charleston, Five Minutes to Hell (2022)
James A. Morgan takes readers on a trip around South Carolina’s early Civil War battlefields in the Emerging Civil War Series’ latest offering, Six Miles from Charleston, Five Minutes to...
Published: 1/9/23
Josephine Miller and Her Stove
Marching To Victory (1888) Josephine Miller Slyder New Hampshire-born journalist Charles Carleton Coffin accompanied Winfield Scott Hancock and his II Corps of the Army of the Potomac during the Gettysburg...
Published: 1/4/23
Contemners and Serpents (2022)
Contemners and Serpents presents the correspondence of a family who had lived in Pennsylvania and Ohio, served as Presbyterian missionaries in India, but ended up in Georgia, Tennessee, and South...
Published: 12/28/22
“If We are Striking for Pennsylvania” (2022)
Most entries in the Gettysburg Campaign’s extensive bibliography treat the events of July 1, 2, and 3, 1863. Historians have supplied readers with operational studies; accounts that focus on particular...
Published: 12/21/22
C. Vann Woodward (2022)
For anyone who teaches, writes, or reads Southern History, C. Vann Woodward (1908-1999) stands out as a figure of singular importance. Born to humble origins in the woods of Arkansas,...
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