Blogs

Recently Mark Vogl, Lieutenant Commander of the Texas Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, called for a shift strategy in that organization's approach to "heritage defense," away from throwing up legal challenges to perceived slights and instead focusing on a more proactive, less-confrontational approach.

For Union veterans of the Civil War, the battlefield at Gettysburg served as the epicenter for war remembrance. The modern landscape certainly attests to this. A forest of marble, granite, and bronze—monuments to the Union cause—cover the rolling farmland and rocky hills of the area immediately surrounding the small Pennsylvania town where in the summer of 1863, two armies clashed in one of...

Undoubtedly one of the reasons for the tremendous, abiding interest Americans have with the Civil War is that a great many of us have a personal connection to it. We have uncles who fought in it, cousins who were widowed by it, or grandparents who were liberated by it. We live in towns that changed hands during the war, went to high schools named for famous generals, or help put out flags on...

The goal of The Front Line is to provide a vibrant and active space for both our readers and our contributors.  Just as printed editions of The Civil War Monitor attempt to bridge the chasm that divides many professional scholars from broader historical audiences, this space utilizes the infinite reach and timeliness of the Internet to achieve the same goal. As such, The Front Line will...

Greetings and welcome to the official digital headquarters of book reviews for The Civil War Monitor. In much the same way that printed editions of the Monitor will attempt to bridge the unfortunate chasm that still divides many professional scholars from broader historical audiences, this space, harnessing the infinite reach of the Internet, will attempt to charge that goal head on...

Since the turn towards social and cultural history in the 1960s and 1970s, many academic institutions have relegated military history to the virtual back burner of serious scholarly endeavors. Military histories have, however, remained popular with general readers, and have recently regained scholarly credibility within academia. One reason for this has been a shift of focus from strategies...

The Civil War Centennial saw the publication of histories of state participation in the Civil War. Now, with the approach of the sesquicentennial, it appears as if a new batch of histories building upon the last 50 years of scholarship is on the way. Matthew Warshauer's Connecticut in the American Civil War: Slavery, Sacrifice, and Survival serves as a model of what a state-level survey of the ...

In a nineteenth-century world free from blogs, social networking sites, television, and cell phones, Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper thrived. Part picture, part story, Leslie's publications combined visually stimulating engravings with journalistic articles to create one of the most popular illustrated newspapers of the 1860s. Leslie's Illustrated invited its audience not just to read,...