Civil War memoir

Benjamin P. Thomas, Sylvanus Cadwallader | October 1955

The memoirs of Civil War correspondent SYLVANUS CADWALLADER were recently discovered and edited by Lincoln biographer Benjamin Thomas

Three Years with Grant

Benjamin P. Thomas, Sylvanus Cadwallader | October 1955

The memoirs of Civil War correspondent SYLVANUS CADWALLADER were recently discovered and edited by Lincoln biographer Benjamin Thomas

A Rebel Remembers

Geoffrey C. Ward | November 1995

William Fletcher went off to war with surprisingly few illusions, and nothing he saw there gave him new ones.

Ambrose Bierce was not a notably generous-minded man, and, as a Union veteran who had seen action at Shiloh and Chickamauga and had narrowly survived a Rebel ball that smashed into the left side of his skull at Kennesaw Mountain, he might have been expected to maintain a life-l

Looking Back Without Anger

Geoffrey C. Ward | March 1990

The recent publication of Fighting for the Confederacy: The Personal Recollections of General Edward Porter Alexander is, in at least two ways, an astonishment.

"So Ends The Great Rebel Army…”

Bruce Catton | October 1962

To Union Colonel Charles S. Wainwright, Lincoln was a weak President, Grant an uninspired commander, Lee a slippery foe. His outspoken diary, never published before, memorably describes the Civil War’s final year

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Featured Authors

Acheson, Dean

Dean Acheson (1893-1971) was an attorney and statesman who served as Secretary of State from 1949 to 1953 under President Harry Truman. A key architect of the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, Acheson stressed the importance of multilateral organizations in the fight against totalitarianism. Prior to his service in the Truman Administration, Acheson clerked for Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, worked at Washington law firm Covington & Burling, and served as Undersecretary of the Treasury for one year under President Franklin Roosevelt.

Ambrose, Stephen E.

Stephen E. Ambrose (1936-2002) was a historian and professor who wrote on military history, presidential history, and American expansion and foreign policy. Ambrose has been praised for his biographies of Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon, and for helping to galvanize interest in World War II.

Becker, Elizabeth

Elizabeth Becker is an award-winning journalist and the author of several books. Her history When The War Was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge won accolades from the Robert F. Kennedy book award, while her recent biography of female conflict journalists You Don’t Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War won the 2022 Sperber Book Prize and Harvard’s Goldsmith Book Prize. She is also the author of America’s Vietnam War: A Narrative History for young adults.

Bird, Kai

Kai Bird is a historian and Executive Director of Leon Levy Center for Biography at the City University of New York. He is best known for writing about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Vietnam War, US-Middle East relations and biographies of political figures. Bird is the author of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, and The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames, a New York Times bestseller. His most recent book is The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter.

Blight, David W.

David W. Blight is the Class of 1954 Professor of American History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance & Abolition at Yale University. Recently, Blight has written A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Narratives of Emancipation, and Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, which won the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize.