Blogs

During the Civil War, Confederate brigadier general J.E.B. Stuart gave a leather album to Laura Ratcliffe, a twenty-five year old resident of Fairfax County, Virginia. This deceptively simple album is the topic of Charles V. Mauro's most recent book, A Southern Spy in Northern Virginia: The Civil War Album of Laura Ratcliffe...

Happy Holidays! Today's Voice from the Past is Wilder Dwight of the 2nd Massachusetts Infantry. The following passage is an excerpt from a 15 December 1861 letter to his mother:

Confederate garrison troops in Texas demonstrate against the issue of inedible rations in a distinctive way.

Happy Holidays! Today's Voice from the Past is from the December 1861 diary of Eliza Newton Woolsey Howland.  

Built on an impressive foundation of quantitative research, Financial Fraud makes major contributions to the fields of memory and guerrilla warfare in the Civil War. Though Geiger's documentation of the fraudulent lending used to arm Confederate forces is quite the accomplishment, his work is truly dynamic, powerful, and contentious in his analysis of the unintended consequences and fallout from...

Quantrill at Lawrence: The Untold Story is a well-written and provocative book... many will disagree with his conclusion that the Lawrence attack should be seen as a legitimate and successful cavalry raid...but readers will appreciate his storytelling and historians should give the contentions he makes in telling his untold story further consideration...

Today marks the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Dranesville, Virginia. While a small encounter by modern standards, at the time—December 1861—the battle made headlines and captured civilian attention. The two-hour encounter, which consisted of clumsy infantry attacks and haphazard artillery fire, pitted a few thousand Pennsylvania soldiers against a smaller contingent of Confederate...

Happy Holidays! Today's Voice from the Past is David Day who wrote the following on December 26, 1861:  

Good morning! Today's Voice from the Past comes from a December 22, 1861 letter from Elisha Franklin Paxton to his wife.  

Whitman's reluctance to reveal to his readers the totality of the "seething hell" of "the real war" he saw in the hospitals is at the heart of Cynthia Wachtell's War No More. Challenging modern authors such as Paul Fussell who view World War I as the watershed moment in the emergence of an antiwar tradition in American letters, Wachtell goes back to Whitman's "Secession war" to find its uncertain...

Good Morning! Today's Voice from the Past is Julia Ellen LeGrand Waitz of New Orleans, Louisiana. The following excerpt is from a December 1861 diary entry.  

Among the calamities of war, the hardest to bear, perhaps, is the separation of families and friends. Yet all must be endured to accomplish our independence and maintain our self-government. In my absence from you I have thought of you very often, and regretted I could do nothing for your comfort.  

Historians consistently underestimate the ethnic diversity of the Confederacy. Regimental muster rolls from Texas, Louisiana, and other western states abound in German, Irish, French, and Spanish surnames. Until recently, these individuals and the groups they represent have remained largely under the radar...

A Union volunteer strikes a (potentially tragic?) pose with a group of comrades. We hope those guys were friends!

Good morning! To celebrate the holidays, all of the quotables this month will reference Christmas 1861. Our first voice from the past is Raphael Semmes, who wrote the following statement in his diary on Christmas Day, 1861:

ARM'D year! year of the struggle! No dainty rhymes or sentimental love verses for you, terrible year!

But the Supreme Court played a more significant role in the Civil War than many historians have acknowledged; a state of affairs that Brian McGinty has been trying to rectify. He has followed his study of Lincoln and the Court with this superb book that assesses the many angles of Ex Parte Merryman, perhaps the most important case that reached any member of that tribunal during the war...

Civil War Citizens: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity in America’s Bloodiest Conflict is the first effort to examine in one book the wartime experiences of Jewish, Irish, African, Native, and German Americans...

We hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving, ate lots of turkey/tofurkey, and survived the chaos of Black Friday and Cyber Monday shopping. Since, we did not post our regular week in review last Friday, we thought we would give you a second helping of all the great Civil War Thanksgiving  inspired blog posts from last week. After all, the best part of Thanksgiving is going back for seconds!

Upon hearing the news of General George McClellan's appointment as chief commander of the Union Army, Washingtonians embarked upon a grand torch-light procession, set off a display of fire-works, and serenaded the General McClellan. The "compliment" proceeded from the soldiers of Blenker's Brigade, but numbered about 2000 infantry, two companies of cavalry, and a great number of citizens.They...