2025 Year in Review: Blog Series
During 2025, Emerging Civil War published the series Stacking Arms (spring), Ethics and Issues (late summer), and Artillery: Battle’s Thunderous Roar (autumn). We also wrapped up the popular series, A Thousand Words A Battle. We look forward to introducing new series in 2026!
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Spring 2025 marked the 160th anniversary of the Confederate army surrenders that marked the official end of the Civil War, and Emerging Civil Civil War launched the Stacking Arms series on March 31 to commemorate this anniversary.
Featuring 19 posts, Stacking Arms reported on Confederate surrenders at Arkansas Post, New Orleans, the Trans-Mississippi, Harpers Ferry (1862), and elsewhere. Readers also learned how William T. Sherman botched the initial surrender offer made to Joe Johnston in spring 1865. Neil Chatelain examined how captured Black merchant sailors were treated.
And ECW’s Kevin Donovan presented six “What Ifs?,” each post examining what might have happened at certain key moments during the Appomattox Campaign and elsewhere. Patrick Kelly-Fischer of ECW asked, “What If Capturing the Enemy Isn’t the Objective,” which looked at Col. Edward R. S. Canby’s pursuit of the retreating Confederate army commanded by Brig. Gen. Henry H. Sibley in the Southwest.
Check out this blog series’ collection at Stacking Arms.
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Emerging Civil War finished the A Thousand Words A Battle series, which debuted on September 13, 2024. The series combined the superb battlefield photography of Chris Heisey with outstanding commentary of ECW members.
Each Friday’s post featured a particular battlefield and a 1,000-word essay written about that battle. Beginning with Malvern Hill on January 3, this year’s 33 posts covered such disparate sites as Andersonville Prison, Franklin and Nashville, Bentonville, Fisher’s Hill, Kennesaw Mountain, Chickamauga, Morris Island, and the Petersburg Breakthrough.
A Thousand Words A Battle concluded on August 15, 2025. Click here for full access to this series.
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For our Ethics and Issues series, which launched on September 1, Chris Mackowski asked the series’ contributors, “So how do ethics play into what we do as historians?” He explained to ECW readers that “my hope is that you’ll get a sense of the wide array of ethical challenges we face as we practice the craft of history.”
The series’ 17 posts covered ethics and issues involving diverse situations, such as “Teaching Uncomfortable History,” “Studying the Naval Civil War,” and “The Risk of Self-Censorship.” Evan Portman examined the “Challenges Faced by a Young Historian,” and in “Coming to Terms with my Civil War Era Family History,” Neil Chatelain discussed an unexpected story he learned about his family, a story that he shared with students taking his early U.S. history course. Madeline Feierstein wrote about “Ethical Issues at Haunted Civil War sites.”
Readers can find this blog series’ onsite collection here.
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Kicking off on November 10, Artillery: Battle’s Thunderous Roar saw ECW members sharing posts about their favorite artillery batteries or artillerists. The cannons roared from Antietam and Gettysburg in the East to Iuka and Wilson’s Creek in the West. Readers found links to the 2018 ECW artillery series and learned about the New York Rocket Battalion, which test-fired its unusual artillery near Washington, D.C.
This series, which featured 17 posts, also examined XX-inch Rodman and Dahlgren cannons and looked at just who was shooting back at John Pelham at Fredericksburg.
Check out this series’ collection at Artillery: Battle’s Thunderous Roar.
