America's Civil War

DURING THE CIVIL WAR, innovations already under way in technology, business organization, professional practice, government relations, and even reader interest led to great advances in American journalism. The legacy of the Civil War includes the mod

BY 6 A.M., on May 12, 1864, news began to arrive in quick succession, some by telegraph and some by courier—the plan had worked. Major General Winfield S. Hancock’s 2nd Corps, Army of the Potomac, had smashed into the protrusion jutting out from the

“Pure Chaos” by Edwin L. Kennedy Jr. and Jerry Morelock in the March issue, on how General Braxton Bragg’s subordinates sabotaged Confederate victory at Chickamauga, was a well-researched and clearly written and mapped article, as was Jack Trammell’s

AS DAWN BROKE OVER the Sharpsburg battlefield on September 17, 1862, the Georgians and North Carolinians of Brig. Gen. Roswell Ripley’s Brigade lay in a meadow belonging to local farmer Samuel Mumma Jr. Mumma’s farm stood only about 100 yards to the

POPULAR LORE AND LEGEND about the Battle of Gettysburg are peppered with heroic figures immortalized in countless books and articles, and, of course, movies. While the glory for those three days in July 1863 most often goes to well-known generals or

July 1863 was an extraordinarily bloody and decisive month, beginning with a three-day confrontation between General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia and Maj. Gen. George G. Meade’s Army of the Potomac around the Pennsylvania town of Gettysb

» The green-clad soldiers waited patiently in the shadows of the Pennsylvania woods. Their uniforms blended into the summer foliage, and the deep shade prevented the bright sun from reflecting on the barrels of their deadly rifles. It was a warm day

» First designed by Christian Sharps in 1848, and slightly updated in 1863, the Model 1859 Sharps rifle was rugged, accurate, and capable of firing 8–10 rounds per minute. The breechloading, single-shot rifle (converted post–Civil War to fire self-co

On a winter day in 1876, former Confederate Brig. Gen. Thomas Benton Smith armed himself with a bow and arrows, mounted a horse, and rode near Nashville “attacking everyone he met.” Among the 37-year-old veteran’s victims was his cousin, struck in th

After the fall of Savannah, Ga., in December 1864, Union Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman outlined plans to march his army of nearly 60,000 men northward through the Carolinas to Virginia to help Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant defeat General Robert E. Lee’s A

In her book Armies of Deliverance: A New History of the Civil War, Elizabeth R. Varon offers a unique look at Northern rhetoric during the conflict. Varon, the University of Virginia’s Langbourne M. Williams professor of American history, argues Nort

Edited by Gary W. Gallagher and J. Matthew Gallman University of North Carolina Press, 2019, $32 Editors Gary Gallagher and J. Matthew Gallman have recruited nearly two dozen of their friends—prominent Civil War historians all—and sent them out acros

By James Lee Conrad Stackpole Books 2019, $18.95 First published in 1997, James Lee Conrad’s The Young Lions offers a well-written, solidly researched, and informative account of the early history of the Virginia Military Institute, Georgia Military

This 7-inch tall brass powder flask, recovered after the war in what had been a Union-controlled section of Georgia’s heavily wooded Pickett’s Mill battlefield, likely was carried by a Federal officer during the May 27, 1864, battle. Known as a “peac