The American Civil War coincided with the Victorian era, one of the most morally repressive eras in history for women. Everything from a woman’s dress to her education were tightly constricted by societal mores that governed her every action.
These Victorian values that women of the Civil [...]

A failed farmer, businessman, and bill collector. A president roundly criticized as a supporter of corruption. Ulysses S. Grant was not an astute businessman, or even an inspired president; however, as a soldier, he was a success. Grant’s leadership of the U.S. Army during the Civil [...]

On August 8, 2000, a crowd gathered at Charleston Harbor in South Carolina. They were there to watch the recovery of a vessel that had been underwater for 136 years, a vessel that had been touted as the most important underwater archaeological find of the 20th [...]

Aside from Robert E. Lee, no figure from the Confederacy was more beloved during the Civil War, or glorified afterward than General Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson. Revered by his compatriots, respected by his foes, studied by military students even today, Jackson was an intriguing man whose [...]

How does one free slaves in another country? How does one free slaves over which one has no control?
President Abraham Lincoln attempted to do just that, when he issued the two-part Emancipation Proclamation in 1862 and 1863. Criticized by Northerners, sneered at by Southerners, the Emancipation [...]

On Independence Day, 1863, the last thing on the minds of most Americans was celebrating freedom. Just outside a small town called Gettysburg, in Adams County, Pennsylvania, almost 50,000 men were casualties of the bloodiest battle of the Civil War, the battle that was soon recognized [...]

While many of the figures associated with the Confederacy have become controversial in the years since the war, few have been the subject of more controversy than Nathan Bedford Forrest.
A man of contradictions himself, it’s no wonder that Forrest stirs such strong feelings - either of [...]

I would make this war as severe as possible, and show no symptoms of tiring till the South begs for mercy. William Tecumseh Sherman
Rarely has an historical figure been both as revered and reviled as William Tecumseh Sherman. For Northerners, Sherman is the man who almost singlehandedly brought about the end of a civil war [...]

If the Confederacy fails, there should be written on its tombstone: Died of a Theory. Jefferson Davis
Of all the leaders associated with the Civil War few are as overlooked as Jefferson Davis. The president of the ill-fated Confederate States of America, Davis is largely dismissed in the pantheon of the “Lost Cause,” passed over in [...]

Although the southern states that seceded from the Union at the outset of the Civil War often claimed that “states rights” was the issue that resulted in secession, it was a thin argument; the truth was that the South, dependent since colonial times on slave labor, felt the North’s growing dissatisfaction with the slave situation [...]