Emerging Civil War

Emerging Civil War Tour!

All of us at Emerging Civil war are proud to announce that we have finalized plans for our first ever bus tour! Our tour will take place May 5th, 2012. Join Emerging Civil War historians Daniel Davis, Phil Greenwalt, Chris Mackowski, and Kristopher White as we explore Culp’s Hill, East Cavalry Field, and South Cavalry […]

Death, Dying, and Murder?

In recent weeks, fellow ECW authors have posted about the death totals in the American Civil War and the Disease of two Regiments. Now a blog post about murder! Not to harp on a morbid theme, but the history Destiny of the Republic by Candice Millard chronicles the tragic assassination of James Garfield, the 20th […]

Custer Monument at Hunterstown

The George Custer monument at Hunterstown, Pennsylvania. Located just a few miles east of Gettysburg, it was here on July 2, 1863 that Custer would lead Company A, 6th Michigan Cavalry against the Cobb Legion. It was his first charge as a Brigadier General. The Legion was commanded by one of Custer’s former West Point […]

Resting in Peace

Going through some photos of a recent trip to Arlington National Cemetery, I came across the two above that I snapped of the obelisk that marks the grave of Joseph Wheeler. He served as a general in both the American Civil War (for the Confederacy) and in the Spanish American War (for the United States). […]

The Land of Lincoln and the Defense of the Icon

The Lincoln Memorial looked like frost tonight. The flurry that had blanketed the lawn white earlier in the day had been glazed with rain and then turned to ice, so the whole landscape shimmered under the Memorial’s lights.

Rethinking the Civil War Dead

It seems particularly topical as the United States commemorates the Civil War sesquicentennial that one of the most steady and recognizably tragic numbers in American history – 620,000 – has been called into question, and perhaps invalidated. Although historians have long called for a rethinking of the war’s casualties, with James M. McPherson and others […]

The Crux of It

I saw this inscription today at the Lincoln Memorial, on one of the displays in the exhibit space beneath the memorial. I think it pretty much gets to the crux of the matter:

Thomas’s Travels to Hallowed Ground a ho-hum travel partner

“Historian travels to battlefields and writes about his experiences.” Sounds right up my alley. After all, I do a lot of that for Emerging Civil War, and my dissertation is going to take me in that direction, so it’s always interesting to see how other people do it. That’s how a professional colleague of mine […]

The “Many Causes” of the Civil War: Slavery

“How many of you think the war was about slavery?” I asked. Not a hand went up. There were twenty-ish high school juniors in the class, a college-level survey course on American history offered by a local community college. They’d just wrapped up their unit on the Civil War, and their teacher had asked me […]