The Front Line

The American Civil War Museum's Emerging Scholars speakers describe their topic and why it is relevant to contemporary Civil War studies.

It was a sight that stopped traffic: a 10,000-pound chunk of plaster-on-steel, 27 feet long and seven feet wide, dangling in the air as a crane operator wormed it through the second-story window of a historic building in downtown Hanover, Pennsylvania. Over the course of 12 hours, three more equally sized blocks would follow. On the street below, a scrum of news crews and locals surveyed the...

In the Voices section of the Spring 2019 issue of The Civil War Monitor we highlighted first-person quotes about the quest for reading materials among Union and Confederate troops. Unfortunately, we didn't have room to include all that we found. Below are those that didn't make the cut.

The Civil War Monitor is proud to sponsor The American Civil War Museum’s upcoming Emerging Scholars Program. As part of the museum’s grand opening events on May 4, a series of pop-up talks will highlight the work of the next generation of Civil War-era thinkers. Each talk will be short and informal and include time for questions.

On March 6, 1865, two days after he delivered his second inaugural address to a massive crowd gathered on the grounds of the U.S. Capitol, Abraham Lincoln hosted a "Presidential Inaugural Ball" in Washington, D.C. As evidenced by the event's "Bill of Fare," shown below, diners had quite a variety of options to choose from.

On New Year's Eve 1862, 24-year-old William Thompson Lusk, a captain in the 79th New York Infantry—a regiment known as the "Highlanders" for its predominently Scottish-American makeup—penned the following letter to his sister Lillie at the family home in Connecticut. In his ambivalence about the year gone by and the one to come, Lusk was not unlike countless thousands of other Civil War...

One weekend last October, my husband and I drove several hours to Portland, Maine, to see a play about lawyer and Civil War general Benjamin Franklin Butler. The stage was stacked with moving boxes, a rolled-up rug, several pieces of unhung artwork, and a large desk piled with papers. Brickwork archways soared overhead, bolstering the stage roof. Ben Butler, by playwright Richard Strand and staged...

With the help of a handful of Civil War historians and enthusiasts, here is our compilation of their favorite Civil War books published in 2018.

As proud sponsors of American Civil War Museum’s upcoming Emerging Scholars program—set to occur next May during the grand opening of the museum’s new facility in Richmond—we thought we would sit down with Madeline Wood, ACWM’s digital engagement manager, and Stephanie Arduini, director of education & programs, to learn more about their plans for the big day.

Nearly twenty years after the end of the Civil War, Union army veteran Melvin Grigsby traveled south in hopes of locating the local woman who had aided him and other northern soldiers held at Castle Morgan prison in Cahaba, Alabama. As the following account, gleaned from Grigsby's postwar memoir, The Smoked Yank, explains, the old soldier found the woman, Amanda Gardner, living with her daughter...