America's Civil War

With a planned trip to Martinsburg, W.Va., for a Civil War symposium, we had decided that a side trip to Antietam was in order. Our plan was to cover the ground of Joe Hooker’s assault, especially the East Woods area. Days before the trip, my January

THE SOLDIERS OF MAJ. GEN. JOHN B. HOOD’S Division waited in the West Woods on September 17, 1862. Union shrapnel, shell, and solid shot rained down upon the woods, at times sending tree limbs crashing down upon the soldiers below. Captain William McK

The Civil War, which cost roughly 750,000 lives, including more than 200,000 battlefield deaths, remains America’s deadliest conflict and is considered history’s first “total war.” In The Calculus of Violence: How Americans Fought the Civil War (Harv

LOUISA WAS 15 when the “revolution” began and her enthusiasm was undimmed when she wrote her memoirs 60 years later. She recalled the spectacle: houses illuminated with candles, bells ringing, tar barrels burning, flags waving. Most of all, she remem

AMERICA’S HISTORY HAS BEEN frequently marked by contentious relations between the government and the press. Nothing, however, compares with the saga of the Memphis Daily Appeal, initially a local Tennessee newspaper that so strongly supported the Con

Confederate General Braxton Bragg was arguably the Civil War’s most hated commander. Long afflicted by painful rheumatism, chronic stomach ailments, and severe migraines that helped fuel his unpleasant disposition, Bragg was short-tempered, aggressiv

Historians and medical researchers usually hesitate to diagnose historical figures with disabilities and disorders post hoc, but contemporary understanding of human behavior can actually inform our analysis of various Civil War successes and failures

MARTIN ROBISON DELANY was an extraordinary man—author, educator, poet, abolitionist, newspaper editor, explorer, inventor, physician, judge, and champion of African-American rights. And though he was also the first black field officer in the history

The Gatling gun, precursor to the fearsome modern machine guns that have wrought gruesome havoc on global battlefields since World War I, was invented by Richard Gatling in 1861. The introduction of a rapid-firing marvel like the Gatling early in the

Celebrated today as the birthplace of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, two names synonymous with the pursuit of personal freedoms for African Americans, the Eastern Shore of Maryland at the outset of the Civil War was vastly more divided in its

John Gibbon’s utter disdain for fellow brigadier general Joshua T. Owen radiated from the pages of his report on the May–June 1864 Overland Campaign. Owen and Gibbon had wrangled once before; Gibbon placed the Philadelphia Brigade’s commander under a

Meade: The Price of Command, 1863-1865 By John G. Selby The Kent State University Press, 2018, $49.95 Less than a week after Maj. Gen. George Gordon Meade assumed command of the Army of the Potomac, he defeated Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern