Blogs

Our Black History Month celebration continues with this 1865 drawing of a wounded Union soldier by Thomas Nast.

Roanoke Island showing the position of Confederate Batteries

Long before Americans, North and South, commenced to shooting each other over slavery and the state of the nation, a related battle raged over the definition of humanitarianism; one that increasingly involved the burgeoning sectional crisis and its debate over slavery. Margaret Abruzzo centers this battle in her cross hairs as she outlines the origins, evolution, and disparate impacts of American...

Nowhere is the cliche that the North won the Civil War while the South won the peace more true than in Kentucky. Historian Anne E. Marshall's elegantly crafted Creating a Confederate Kentucky tells us exactly how that happened...

February 7th and 8th mark the sesquicentennial of the Battle of Roanoke Island. A lesser known battle, Roanoke Island was part of Brigadier General Ambrose E. Burnside’s North Carolina Expedition and its successful outcome allowed the Union to...

Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letter, U.S., let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pocket, there is no power on earth that can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship.

Army of the Potomac-Scene in camp of Negro regiments-Method of punishment of Negro soldiers for various offences.

On the 4th of february the Federal fleet of gun-boats, followed by countless transports, appeared below the fort. Far as eye could see, the course of the river could be traced by the dense volumes of smoke issuing from the flotilla-indicating that the long-threatened attempt to break our lines was to be made in earnest. The gunboats took up a position about three miles below and opened a brisk...

Gun-Deck of one of the Mississippi Gun-Boats Engaged in the Attack on Fort Henry

The following is Rear Admiral Henry Walke's recollection of the Battle of Fort Henry.   

Today marks the sesquicentennial of the Battle of Fort Henry, a Confederate earthern fort on the Tennessee River.

Our Black History Month Celebration continues...107th U.S. Colored Infantry Band at Fort Corcoran in Arlington, Virginia, November 1865

The following letter is from Samuel Cabble, a private in the Fifty-fifth Massachusetts Infantry, to his wife. Cabble was a slave before he joined the army at twenty-one years of age.

Preparing the Negro Soldiers to Use the Minie Rifle - Our Black History Month Celebration Continues.

Happy Black History Month! Today and throughout the month of February, we honor those African Americans who fought in the Civil War.

Readers will find Wilson's deeply-researched account well worth the investment as a study of wartime political economy. It explores areas hitherto mostly neglected and rarely explored...

The above image is the USS Monitor's general plan featuring an inboard profile of the ironclad. First published in in 1862, the plan features hull cross section views, as well as views of the engine, boiler spaces, and areas below the upper deck.

150 years ago today, the Union Navy launched the USS Monitor, its first ironclad, from the Continental Iron Works, at Greenpoint in Long Island, New York. Construction of the Monitor began in the fall of 1861 and Swedish engineer John Ericsson was responsible for her conception and design

General View of the Mississipii River from Cairo, Illinois to the mouth of the river.

In recent months, Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich has sprinkled the campaign trail with promotional events for the books he published last year, including the Civil War novel The Battle of the Crater. Politics and marketing aside, how does the new book stand up within the genre of Civil War fiction? And what vision of the war emerges from its pages?