What It’s All About

I was in Gettysburg this past weekend to take an all-day tour of the Union lines from Culp’s Hill down to Little Round Top. In total, the group walked about ten miles over the course of the day, and I got to see a lot of little nooks and crannies on the battlefield that I […]

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The Fourteen Medals of Honor at the Battle of New Market Heights

Today is the 150th Anniversary of the Battle of New Market Heights, an action in a larger series of battles that made up Ulysses S. Grant’s Fifth Offensive during the joint Siege of Petersburg and Richmond. New Market Heights is north of the James River, and thus, on the operational level, the responsibility for attacking […]

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Sketches from the Shenandoah: James Taylor’s Scrapbook

In the collections of the Western Reserve Historical Society in Cleveland, Ohio rests With Sheridan Up the Shenandoah Valley. Leaves from a Special Artist’s Sketch Book and Diary. As the title implies, it is a book of incredibly realistic sketches and the diary of an artist named James Taylor. Today, Taylor is not one of the more […]

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ECW Weekender – Front Royal, VA

The City of Front Royal saw a lot of activity during the Civil War, and these stories are told in various ways through museums, monuments, and several Virginia Civil War Trails markers. When visiting Front Royal, one should start at the Visitor Center located at 414 E Main St, Front Royal, VA. Maps and brochures are […]

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Happy Anniversary, America’s Wars

In my various jobs over the past few years, I’ve been involved directly or indirectly in planning and observing several of the major anniversaries of America’s military conflicts. This decade (2010-2020) seems to have quite a bumper crop, more than I can recall occurring at any one time before. A partial list of this decade’s […]

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Coffee in the Civil War

Today, we are pleased to welcome guest author Ashley Webb. If you’re like me, every morning, I wake up and have a cup of coffee (or two or three). Coffee was also an essential part of a Civil War soldier’s routine. They drank their coffee whenever they could, refueling themselves for the long days and […]

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Coming Up This Weekend

This weekend C-SPAN 3 will be airing another Emerging Civil War Symposium lecture from this past August. On Saturday, at 7 PM & 11 PM, Meg Thompson’s lecture “A Bad Month for the President: Campaigning the Election of ’64” will air.

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“Mosby will hang ten of you for every one of us!” The Black Flag in the Shenandoah Valley

part one of two The execution of six Mosby’s Rangers on September 23, 1864 was not the first or last in a bloody back and forth between the famed Confederate partisan and the aggressive Union cavalryman. When Maj. Gen. Philip Sheridan was sent to the Shenandoah Valley in the summer of 1864, it was with […]

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The Other War

Today, we are pleased to welcome guest author Michael C. Hardy. You may visit his website at http://www.michaelchardy.com/ At times we get caught up in the bigger War, epitomized by places like Chancellorsville or the Atlanta Campaign. There was, however, another war being fought while this bigger War was taking place. It was a much […]

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