Grade 8A four-year cataclysm that left in its wake more than six hundred thousand dead and two million refugees—and destroyed legal slavery in the United States—the Civil War sparked some of the most heroic and achingly dark moments in American history. Join Gilder Lehrman and Allen C. Guelzo of Gettysburg College in a study of the war’s strategy, tactics, and memory, and consider the legacy of the Civil War 150 years after its end.Select Course Here
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 disagreement gave way to war in April 1861, as Confederates insisted on their right to leave the Union and the loyal states refused to allow them to go. Four years of fighting claimed almost 1.5 million casualties (killed, dead from disease, wounded, or taken prisoner, and of whom at least 620,000 died) directly affected untold civilians, and freed four million…
In October 1862, Mathew Brady opened a photography exhibition at his studio in New York City. Entitled The Dead of Antietam, the exhibition attracted large crowds and brought the war home in a way that news articles and casualty listings could not. On October 20, 1862, an editorial in the New York Times explained that "the dead of the battle-field come up to us very rarely, even in dreams. We see the list in the morning paper at breakfast, but dismiss its recollection with the coffee. There is a confused mass of names, but they are all strangers; we forget the horrible significance that dwells…
The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, in partnership with the Council of Independent Colleges (CIC), is pleased to announce a multidisciplinary seminar, “The Civil War in American Memory,” for full-time faculty members in history and related fields at CIC member institutions. Led by David W. Blight, Class of 1954 Professor of American History and director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University, this seminar will assess the historical memory of the most divisive event in American history—the Civil War. Seminar participants…
The American Civil War is remembered as being the bloodiest and most devastating of all the wars this country has faced. Brother, it is often said, fought brother. Families and friends were divided. The country nearly split in two, while enslaved people suffered inhuman degradation, and soldiers, some of whom had been enslaved, fought brutal battles and endured sickness, famine, and the elements as they clashed. In previous generations, our collective memory of the war was shaped by books and articles, artwork, and even photography. Today, we relive the years 1861–1865 most commonly and…
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