Blog
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Published: 3/17/21
St. Patrick’s Day, 1863
On March 17, 1863, Irish Brigade commander Thomas Francis Meagher hosted elaborate festivities to mark St. Patrick’s Day. The celebration featured a number of races and prizes—and, as one Union soldier...
Published: 3/10/21
Thaddeus Stevens (2021)
Not long after the raid on Harper’s Ferry, Thaddeus Stevens lent his voice to the growing chorus of Republicans rushing to renounce John Brown. Stevens branded the radical abolitionist a...
Published: 3/3/21
On Rising Ground (2021)
It is hard to imagine any book where we learn so little about the central character. The thirty surviving letters of John M. Douthit (52nd Georgia Infantry) are remarkably unrevealing...
Published: 2/26/21
Letters Home: Correspondence from Men at War
Frank Leslie’s illustrated Newspaper Union soldiers take a moment to write home on the hurricane deck of the U.S. transport North Star while on campaign in the Gulf of Mexico...
Published: 2/24/21
Robert E. Lee and Me (2021)
All but one of the barracks at the United States Military Academy are named for high-ranking generals who distinguished themselves on the battlefield. That building is named for a U.S....
Published: 2/17/21
Ambitious Honor (2020)
Author James Mueller’s new book opens with an anecdote from 1880, capturing a conversation between portrait artist James E. Kelly and General Winfield Scott Hancock. As Kelly painted a stiff...
Published: 2/10/21
Bonds of Salvation (2020)
Bonds of Salvation is the result of Ben Wright’s deeply personal “attempts to reconcile the inspiring piety and moral blind spots of the evangelical Christian community in which I was...
Published: 2/3/21
The Last Lincoln Republican (2020)
No period in U.S. history has invited more counterfactual thinking than Reconstruction. As Brook Thomas observed, the field’s reigning synthesis, which frames Reconstruction as an “unfinished revolution,” conjures “a world...
Published: 1/27/21
Patriots Twice (2020)
In Patriots Twice: Former Confederates and the Building of America after the Civil War, author Stephen M. Hood seeks to highlight the postwar lives and accomplishments of 220 Confederate veterans....
Published: 1/20/21
Tullahoma (2020)
The diligent, robust scholarship found on the pages of Tullahoma: The Forgotten Campaign that Challenged the Course of the Civil War, June 23 – July 4, 1863 has not only expanded the...
Published: 1/13/21
The Thin Gray Line (2019)
Civil War fiction often focuses on battlefield scenarios or romantic tales. The Thin Gray Line offers a new look at the darker side of the war, tracing a Confederate soldier’s adventures...
Published: 1/6/21
Women Making War (2020)
In Women Making War: Female Confederate Prisoners and Union Military Justice, Thomas F. Curran examines partisan Confederate women in St. Louis during the Civil War and how the federal government—specifically...
Published: 12/30/20
Absalom Hazlett (2020)
Of all the violent incidents foreshadowing the Civil War, few compare to John Brown’s calamitous and controversial raid on Harpers Ferry. In the 160-plus years since, Brown’s story has been...
Published: 12/28/20
Goodbye to All That
Library of Congress Lieutenant Robert Pryor James, Co. E, 20th North Carolina Infantry This will be my final column for the “American Iliad” series, a project I undertook five years...
Published: 12/23/20
Defending the Arteries of Rebellion (2020)
In April 1861, artillery batteries of the newly proclaimed Confederate States of America opened fire on a small United States fort in Charleston Harbor. Since the very founding of the...
Published: 12/21/20
Extra Voices: Coffee
USAHEC A coffee cup used during the Civil War In the Voices section of the Winter 2020 issue of The Civil War Monitor we highlighted quotes by Union and Confederate...
Published: 12/16/20
William Tecumseh Sherman (2016)
Can anything new be written of William Tecumseh Sherman? Commonly regarded as the second-greatest soldier to fight for the Federal armies in the War of the Rebellion, and one of...
Published: 12/9/20
Jefferson Davis, Napoleonic France, and the Nature of Confederate Ideology (2020)
Jeffrey Zvengrowski, a professor at the University of Virginia and assistant editor of the Papers of George Washington, has produced a truly fresh interpretation of the Confederate States of America....