The Front Line

We recently asked a panel of Civil War historians a series of questions about Major General James Ewell Brown "J.E.B." Stuart—a way of assessing the flamboyant cavalier's record and legacy today. And while the results were published in our Summer 2019 issue (“Dossier: J.E.B. Stuart,” Vol. 9, No. 2), space prevented us from providing all of our panelists’ answers in full detail. Below are...

For our recent newsstand-only special issue The Civil War Almanac, we asked a number of Civil War historians for their opinions on a variety of popular topics, including the war’s most overrated and underrated commanders, top turning points, and most influential women. Space constraints prevented us from including the full answers to one of the questions: What are the 10 best Civil War movies? ...

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.