The Front Line

In the spring and early summer of 1862, Union general George B. McClellan’s attempt to capture the Confederate capital by advancing up the Virginia Peninsula involved the largest amphibious operation of the war, saw perhaps Robert E. Lee’s best chance to destroy the Army of the Potomac, and included frontal assaults that dwarfed the size of Pickett’s Charge. Its results led to President ...

On January 1, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation—which declared "that all persons held as slaves" within the rebellious states "are, and henceforward shall be free"—went into effect. Below are the words Lincoln used in his declaration. The more frequently he used a word, the larger it appears.

J. Matthew Gallman's "The Cacophony of Politics" reports that most Northern Democrats were not traitorous Copperheads.

How Civil War soldiers came to embrace a popular idiom with prewar origins in circus show business.

The unintended, and unexpected, consequences of a confiscation order.

In the Voices section of the Winter 2021 issue of The Civil War Monitor we highlighted quotes by Union and Confederate soldiers about the war's grisly toll. Unfortunately, we didn't have room to include all that we found. Below are those that just missed the cut.

With the help of a handful of Civil War historians, here is our list of the best Civil War books of 2021.

Looking to learn more about Civil War prisons and prisoners of war? We asked historian Brian Matthew Jordan to suggest a handful of books he thinks are essential reading in the category:

With the help of an Artificial Intelligence-based, computerized color identifier and cutting-edge software that created a 3D rendering of McPherson Ridge in 1868, a group of Civil War detectives have pinpointed the camera location of aniconic, and previously unidentified, Gettysburg battle image. Patrick Brennan, a longtime editorial advisor for The Civil War Monitor, has been working on a book...

A historian offers his picks for the best novels about the Civil War ...