Looking for good books on Civil War photography? We asked Ronald S. Coddington, author and publiser of Military Images magazine, for three books on the subject that he considers essential reads. Here are his picks:
I suppose you could say that I started researching my recently published book, Marching Home: Union Veterans and Their Unending Civil War, when I was 12 years old. In 1998, I met a man from my hometown of Akron, Ohio, who spent much of his late teens and early twenties crisscrossing the Midwest in search of the last survivors of Abraham Lincoln’s armies. Nearly 70 years old and the son of a ...
A case study in the negative impact of dysfunctional command relationships ...
Several European journalists and military officers wrote about their experiences with the Army of Northern Virginia. Almost all of them, it is important to acknowledge, adopted a very favorable stance toward Robert E. Lee and his soldiers. The most quoted by far is Arthur James Lyon Fremantle,
In the Voices section of the Spring 2022 issue of The Civil War Monitor we highlighted quotes by and about famous Civil War nurse Mary "Mother" Bickerdyke. Unfortunately, we didn't have room to include all that we found. Below are those that just missed the cut.
In his 1948 novel Intruder in the Dust, William Faulkner famously describes a Mississippi boy playing soldier—pretending to be the entire Rebel army, as it were—in the minutes preceding the disastrous Pickett-Pettigrew assault at the Battle of Gettysburg. For a fleeting moment, before James Longstreet has given the word and “it’s all still in the balance,” the boy reimagines the battle...
In the spring and early summer of 1862, Union general George B. McClellan’s attempt to capture the Confederate capital by advancing up the Virginia Peninsula involved the largest amphibious operation of the war, saw perhaps Robert E. Lee’s best chance to destroy the Army of the Potomac, and included frontal assaults that dwarfed the size of Pickett’s Charge. Its results led to President ...
On January 1, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation—which declared "that all persons held as slaves" within the rebellious states "are, and henceforward shall be free"—went into effect. Below are the words Lincoln used in his declaration. The more frequently he used a word, the larger it appears.
J. Matthew Gallman's "The Cacophony of Politics" reports that most Northern Democrats were not traitorous Copperheads.
How Civil War soldiers came to embrace a popular idiom with prewar origins in circus show business.