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When Lincoln spoke about 'binding up the nation's wounds,' he almost certainly counted the landscape among them.

After the outbreak of the Civil War, 25-year-old artist Winslow Homer traveled to the front to sketch scenes of the conflict's participants and engagements for Harper's Weekly, the country's premier illustrated newspaper. Though young, Homer, who had sketched for Harper's for years before the start of hostilities, had already established himself as a skilled illustrator with a keen eye for...

On August 14, 1861, the sense of anger and disgruntlement that had been building among the men of the largely Scottish-American 79th New York Infantry "Highlanders" boiled over. The rank and file of the regiment, which had suffered one of the highest number of casualties among Union units engaged in the recent Battle of Bull Run (including the death of their colonel, James Cameron, brother to the...

If surrender never quite 'defined' the war, this book makes clear that it unquestionably suffused it.

In his latest book, "Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth" (to be published this fall by the University of North Carolina Press), Boston-based historian and educator Kevin M. Levin tackles the enduring

Bierle never loses sight of the fact that the battle did not occur in some remote hinterland, but rather in a larger community.

Chickamauga was a grim first outing for the Alabamians.

Anyone who has spent considerable time in research libraries or logging onto digital archives knows what it feels like to come to the end of an evidentiary road. A promising file of letters reveals huge gaps in the writers’ correspondence. A tantalizing detail in a census record leads nowhere. A diary entry ends with a page torn out. Historians must make what they can of such incomplete evidence...