136 items
Living and Dying in the Civil War
West Virginia University historian Aaron Sheehan-Dean offers thoughts on the Library of America series The Civil War Told by Those Who Lived It at a Gilder Lehrman webinar on the Civil War 150 traveling exhibition. The exhibition is...
Emancipation and the Question of Agency: The Power of the Enslaved, the Power of Policy
Historian James Oakes (The Graduate Center, City University of New York) addresses the timeless question of agency in emancipation—who freed the slaves?—by suggesting that the query demands greater nuance. The agency of slaves and...
War Letters: Extraordinary Correspondence from American Wars
Andrew Carroll, founder of the Legacy Project, recounts his search for letters from America’s wars and reads excerpts from several.
A Teacher’s Tour of the Battle of Gettysburg
Historian Matthew Pinsker leads a virtual teacher’s tour of the Battle of Gettysburg, highlighting key moments and individuals to illustrate the broad story of the battle, its implications for the Civil War, and its legacy in...
Civil War and Reconstruction, 1861-1877
In 1877, soon after retiring as president of the United States, Ulysses S. Grant, embarked with his wife on a two-year tour of the world. At almost every location, he was greeted as a hero. In England, the son of the Duke of...
Reconstruction
In the twelve years after the Civil War—the era of Reconstruction—there were massive changes in American culture, economy, and politics. These were the years of the "Old West," of cowboys, Indians, and buffalo hunts, of cattle drives,...
The Failure of Compromise
In the spring of 1861, the United States of America split into two hostile countries—the United States and the new Confederate States of America. The two opposing heads of state agreed about what was causing the rupture—the long...
The American Civil War
The Civil War marked a defining moment in United States history. Long simmering sectional tensions reached a critical stage in 1860–1861 when eleven slaveholding states seceded and formed the Confederate States of America. Political...
The Civil War and Reconstruction in the American West
The histories of the Civil War and of the emerging West were tangled together from their beginnings. Although the war was fought mostly in the East, the events that set it off were born of the expansion of the 1840s, and in turn the...
African Americans and Emancipation
Historians increasingly understand emancipation was not a singular event that simply involved the issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation by President Abraham Lincoln on January 1, 1863. Instead, emancipation is better understood as...
"The Merits of This Fearful Conflict": Douglass on the Causes of the Civil War
In the spring of 1871, Frederick Douglass was worried. Six years after Robert E. Lee had surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox, Grant was now President of the United States, the Union of northern and southern states was...
Lincoln and Emancipation: Black Enfranchisement in 1863 Louisiana
As the president of a fractured nation, Abraham Lincoln faced no issue more perplexing than that of restoring the rebel states to the Union. Reconstruction during wartime was, he judged, "the greatest question ever presented to...
"I begin to see it": Lincoln the War President
In the spring of 1864, three years into the Civil War, it seemed that the Union was finally in a position to defeat the Confederacy, taking advantage of the significant losses the Confederacy had suffered in 1863. For three years,...
The Gettysburg Address, 1863
On November 19, 1863, four months after the Battle of Gettysburg, a ceremony was held at the site in Pennsylvania to dedicate a cemetery for the Union dead. The battle had been a Union victory, but at great cost—about 23,000 Union...
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