Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Civil War
How two devotees of the American flag and one Supreme Court justice shaped the story of a border town and the nation
The Italianate building at 101 West Church Street in Frederick, Maryland, had by 1861 become a house divided. The patriarch of the Baers, the family who lived there, was staunchly pro-Union, while his son had married a Southerner and taken up her cause.
Is it a symbol of a brave past or a banner of treason? And is there perhaps another Southern standard to be raised?
“My ancestors fought for the question of who was supreme, the federal or the state government. They felt that South Carolina freely went into the Union and had the right to opt out, like an independent country.”
A LEADING CIVIL WAR HISTORIAN CHANGES ONE SMALL HAPPENSTANCE—WHICH IN TURN CHANGES EVERYTHING
When mudslinging in Congress led to actual bloodshed
Our recent politics have brought the editorial handwringers out in force, decrying a new outbreak of “partisanship,” as when, at the end of the impeachment process, The New York Times declared that “Americans yearn for a Congress that ca
The Old South has survived along Georgia’s Antebellum Trail, where the Civil War seems to have happened only yesterday.
It turns out that my great-grandfather fought to free my daughter.
Finding African-American history in the cradle of the Confederacy
Since 1861, Richmond, Virginia has been the cradle of the Confederacy—the city the Rebels held so dear that they preferred to burn it rather than have it fall into Yankee hands.
A shot fired in the last days of the Civil War has kept its power to wound.
I don’t believe in God the Father, but I grant that the sequences of misery "He" visits upon sinners “unto the third and fourth generation” are as common as grass. They often are associated with wars.
COMING TO TERMS WITH THE MOST COMPELLING AND MYSTERIOUS OF CIVIL WAR HEROES
TWENTY YEARS AGO, I WAS WORKING in the American Heritage book division side by side with our (now) senior editor Jane Colihan, the two of us younger, of course, and darker-haired, and glummer.
DRAWN WITH THE SWORD
by James M. McPherson , Oxford University Press, 272 pages, $25.00. CODE: OUP-13
MOTHERS OF INVENTION
Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War
by Drew Gilpin Faust , University of North Carolina Press, 326 pages, $29.95. CODE: UNC-7
While fully and freely admitting that my knowledge of the field is not much greater than George M. Cohan’s, I will say that a great many CD-ROMs look pretty feeble to me.
American Heritage’s debut on CD-ROM mentioned in “Letter From the Editor,” American Heritage: The Civil War—The Complete Multimedia Experience , is available from Byron Preiss Multimedia and Simon & Schuster Interactive (two CD-ROMs, for Wind
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
The Union Army’s siege ended in 1865, but it still has a grip on Petersburg, Virginia.
A few years ago, I served as one of the historical advisers for the movie Glory, which told the story of the 54th Massachusetts Colored Infantry and its brave and calamitous attack on Fort Wagner in the summer of 1863.
This isn’t the first time a Virginia governor has found himself embroiled in controversy about the commercialization of a Civil War site.
WHEN THE CIVIL War ended, a second fierce and divisive conflict began, fought on the same battlefields but over a different issue: not political secession but the commercial development of the battlefields themselves.
A scholar searches across two centuries to discover the main engine of our government’s growth, and reaches a controversial conclusion.
Alexis de Tocqueville observed in 1835 that America had no neighbors and hence no enemies.
After every war in the nation’s history, the military has faced not only calls for demobilization, but new challenges and new opportunities. It is happening again.
Not many people appreciate a military base closing. Like the shutting of a factory, it can devastate nearby towns, throwing thousands of people out of work. Merchants face losses and even bankruptcy as sales fall off.
He wrote down everything he saw in a career that stretched from the Civil War well into this century.
Sometimes, if you wait long enough, things just work out.
There is something irresistible about Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, the soft-spoken, be-spectacled Bowdoin College professor who somehow transformed himself into one of the Union Army’s ablest commanders.
Abraham Lincoln himself once said that he did not understand the terrible war it fell on him to wage. The best explanation he could offer in his second inaugural for the carnage he seemed powerless to end was that “the Almighty has His own purposes.”
At mid-day on July 12, 1864, as the steamer Peril nosed into the Sixteenth Street wharf in Washington, D.C., and the men of the 2d Rhode Island and 37th Massachusetts Volunteers began to step ashore, they heard the sound of distant fighting.
Arising spontaneously from the people, folktales are little windows into the collective human psyche. Most people think of them as stories concerning the long ago and the faraway. In fact, all times and places have produced them, and modern times are no exception.
Lee. Grant. Jackson. Sherman. Thomas. Yes, George Henry Thomas belongs in that company. The trouble is that he and Grant never really got along.
Of all the great commanders in the Civil War, the most consistently underrated and overlooked is General George H. Thomas, the big Virginia cavalryman who fought for the Union.
During three days in May 1863, the Confederate leader took astonishing risks to win one of the most skillfully conducted battles in history. But the cost turned out to be too steep.
The ability of Robert E. Lee and Thomas J. (“Stonewall”) Jackson never showed itself more vividly than during three days of battle in May 1863 around a rustic crossroads called Chancellorsville.
Featured Authors
