The Front Line

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...

Understanding the myth surrounding the man known as "Stonewall" ...

“Reflections of the Face of Lincoln,” a new exhibit that features an impressive animatronic bust of the 16th president, recently opened at the Lincoln Memorial Shrine in Redlands, California.

A young woman in an unhappy marriage whose rise to first lady makes her both exhilarated and uncomfortable. Her much older husband, loyal only to himself and the power that the presidency will bring him. A past so riddled with lies they tell themselves that nothing is certain.           Charles Frazier’s new Civil War novel, Varina, feels strangely relevant in 2018.           The novel...

Long before the tumult and rage in Charlottesville last year over the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee from a city park, and a fear that white supremacists and antifa militants would turn any future confrontation into a bloodier event there, Virginia was braced for an even deadlier showdown in the fall of 1859. Thousands of troops had poured into Jefferson County, on orders to repel with force...

What are the five best books about the Battle of Gettysburg (nonfiction or fiction)? We asked six Civil War historians for their answers.

Public history is presented in museums and historical societies; at monuments or national, state, and local parks. John Coski writes about how this public history message, particularly that of the Civil War, is changing.

In the aftermath of his army’s defeat at Gettysburg, General Robert E. Lee welcomed a brother of Secretary of War James Seddon to Army of Northern Virginia headquarters. Curious

The Books & Authors section of our Winter 2017 issue contained our annual roundup of the year's best Civil War titles. As usual, we enlisted the help of a handful of Civil War historians and enthusiasts, avid readers all, and asked them to pick their two favorite books published in 2017. Below are their picks.

The Confederate monument controversy that has exploded in recent months raises fundamental questions about the American Iliad. The removal of Robert E. Lee’s statue in Charlottesville, Virginia, is only the best known of several examples that place these questions before us.