The era of the American Civil War coincided with the Industrial Revolution, which, for better or for worse, meant that weapons could be produced on a mass market scale, arming both the Union and Confederate troops with larger numbers of more sophisticated weapons than any war in U.S. History. Despite the fact that innovations in [...]

When a country goes to civil war, at least one new flag emerges. When a country is still in its infancy, as the United States was during the Civil War era, many new flags can emerge.
During the Civil War, Union soldiers hoisted many flags above the battlefields where they fought. [...]

Edwin Forbes’ “The Army Forge”
The beginning of the American Civil War coincided with the advent of the illustrated press, which began to see wide use in the American publishing trade at the outset of the War. The illustrated press, while still not sophisticated enough to print photographs, gave newspapers and magazines the ability to [...]

Soldiers trudge across the battlefield, their dark blue uniforms wavering in a haze of cannon smoke, battle flag heisted above them. Across the battlefield, soldiers in ragged butternut and gray charge, their horses whinnying and nickering beneath them. Bloodied casualties pile up until a victor finally emerges, just as the smoke clears.
It’s not [...]

Shelby Foote’s The Civil War: A Narrative is an epic three volume work, years in the making, that decades after its first printing remains the definitive narrative history of the Civil War.
Begun in 1958 as a 200,000 word book on the battle of Shiloh, Foote soon discovered that his material was much too expansive [...]

Horse Artillery Soldier
The faded photographs and illustrations in textbooks often picture the Civil War soldier, Federal or Rebel, sword in hand, posing for a portrait, or on his horse or on foot, charging into battle.
That sword in hand, however, is not a sword at all - rather, it’s a saber, a weapon with [...]

Vicksburg Battlefield
Eighteen years after it first aired to an estimated audience of 40 million people, Ken Burns’ “The Civil War” remains one of the most popular documentaries of all time, and the most-watched show to ever air on PBS.
What made Burns’ nine-part documentary about events that took place over 100 years ago so compelling? [...]

Battlefield at Gettysburg, PA; 1907
The American Civil War raged for five long years, turning cities and countrysides, North, South, and even the frontier West into battlefields.
It is estimated that somewhere around 10,000 battles were fought during the Civil War, battles that engaged anywhere from a handful of men to hundreds of thousands. Documentation [...]

Portrait of Pvt. William T. Carter (2nd from right in white collar) and group of 3rd Maryland Infantry
When the American Civil War began in 1861, photography was a relatively new art. In 1827, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce had developed the first fixed image photograph; by the 1850s, the daguerreotype, a photography method invented by Louis-Jacques-Mandé [...]