The American Civil War Museum The American Civil War Museum in Richmond, Virginia   On April 27, 2024, the American Civil War Museum (ACWM) is launching a major new exhibition at its Tredegar location in Richmond, Virginia. Entitled The Impending Crisis: How Slavery Caused the Civil War, the exhibition will guide visitors through the lead-up to the Civil War with a focus on slavery’s role in growing chasm between North and South. We sat down with Ron Havers, president and CEO at ACWM, to learn more. Your new exhibit, The Impending Crisis: How Slavery Caused the Civil War, will examine how ..read more

A Man of Bad Reputation: The Murder of John Stephens and the Contested Landscape of North Carolina Reconstruction by Drew A. Swanson. University of North Carolina Press, 2023. Paper, ISBN: 9781469674711. $24.95. Reconstruction proved one of America’s most tumultuous periods. The post-Civil War South featured chaos and lawlessness as ex-Confederates refused to accept the new political order. In North Carolina, the political atmosphere proved especially charged as old and new social orders clashed to control the political and economic resources of the state. Historian Drew A. Swanson’s A Man of ..read more

Battles and Leaders of the Civil War A Confederate sharpshooter What do Union generals John Reynolds, William Sanders, Stephen Weed, and John Sedgwick have in common? According to traditional historiography, each man was killed by a sharpshooter who targeted him, often firing from more than a half-mile away. This column, the first in a series dedicated to using science and critical reasoning to explore Civil War history, will dissect that legend. The investigation involves the use of basic physics and external ballistics—the science of what happens to a bullet between muzzle and impact—to undo ..read more

The Boy Generals: George Custer, Wesley Merritt, and the Cavalry of the Army of the Potomac, from the Gettysburg Retreat Through the Shenandoah Valley by Adolfo Ovies. Savas Beatie, 2023. Cloth, IBSN: 978-1611216172.  $34.95. Four decades after the Civil War’s end, Major Weidner H. Spera, a veteran of the 17th Pennsylvania Cavalry, fondly recalled a scene that unfolded before him in the aftermath of Union victory at the Battle of Cedar Creek. As the sun began to set on October 19, 1864, Spera witnessed four Union officers—Generals Philip H. Sheridan, Wesley Merritt, George Custer, and Col ..read more

The Aftermath of the Battle of Little Bighorn by Wendy Ann Wallace. Pen & Sword, 2024. Cloth, ISBN: 978-1399046763. $34.95. This is the second installment of author Wendy Ann Wallace’s multivolume, “iconoclast” history of George Armstrong Custer and the Battle of the Little Bighorn. In the first volume, Wallace claimed that Custer’s death was, in fact, a conspiracy executed by Generals Sheridan and Sherman, among others, to lead the publicly popular cavalry commander to his death. In evaluating that study, this reviewer questioned the incredulous claims of a conspiracy, especially since th ..read more

Yale University Libraries A ceremony marks the completion of the transcontinental railway in 1869   In the midst of World War II, T.S. Eliot finished a series of poems that were collected in 1943 as Four Quartets. A prominent theme in the last poem, “Little Gidding,” is time and the place of humanity in history. In the penultimate stanza Eliot attests that “to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.”[1] In considering where to begin a series of essays on the Civil War and the American West, it seemed wise to follow Eliot’s sentiment—to begin at the end—and pond ..read more

Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom during the Civil War by Edda L. Fields-Black. Oxford University Press, 2024. Cloth, ISBN: 978-0-19-755279-7. $39.99 Combee is a transcendent, once-in-a-generation historical exploration of a world mostly veiled in the river damp that rises from the lower Combahee—the long submerged rice plantations of the South Carolina Lowcountry.  It tells the story of backbreaking toil under a relentless summer sun; of personal courage and fortitude by numberless, heretofore nameless enslaved men, women, and children.  Read closely ..read more

Klan War: Ulysses S. Grant and the Battle to Save Reconstruction by Fergus M. Bordewich. Alfred A. Knopf, 2023. Cloth, ISBN: 9780593317815. $35.00.   During Reconstruction, northerners, southerners, and the formerly enslaved struggled to make sense of the Civil War. Clearly, the late conflict had resulted in the abolition of slavery, but what would the transition to freedom look like? Would the formerly enslaved be afforded equal treatment before the law? Would they have the right to vote? Would they be able to secure economic independence? In a larger sense, was multiracial democracy pos ..read more

Unforgettables: Winners, Losers, Strong Women, and Eccentric Men of the Civil War Era by John C. Waugh. Savas Beatie, 2024. Paper, ISBN: 978-1611216653. $22.95. John C. Waugh is a seasoned Civil War historian and the author of twelve previous volumes about the war, including The Class of 1846: From West Point to Appomattox. In his latest book, Unforgettables, Waugh draws short biographical sketches of the characters who have stood out to him personally during his many decades of study, including the “Great Triumvirate” of Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun and Daniel Webster (whose conflicts and com ..read more

Calamity at Frederick: Robert E. Lee, Special Orders No. 191, and Confederate Misfortune on the Road to Antietam by Alexander B. Rossino. Savas Beatie LLC, 2023. Paper, ISBN: 978-1-61121-690-5. $18.95.   Few episodes during the Civil War better illustrate the raw power of contingency than the Hoosier corporal Barton W. Mitchell’s discovery of an errant copy of Robert E. Lee’s Special Orders No. 191 outside of Frederick, Maryland, on September 13, 1862. The discovery of the “Lost Order” has become standard fare in most popular Civil War narratives. Even so, the sequence of events that resu ..read more