Northerners, Southerners, generals, couriers, dreaming boys, and worried sisters describe the glory, the horror, the thrill, and the disillusionment of the first battle of the Civil War.

In the Civil War, battles raged in more than 20 states. The war between North and South remains the bloodiest in U.S. history. The casualties of the Battle of Gettysburg numbered more than 50,000 alone, and the day the Battle of Antietam was fought September 17, 1862 is recorded as the deadliest single day in U.S. military history. Find out what happened in the wars largest battles to cause the devastation that still scars the nation today.

The 1862 battle of Pea Ridge in northwestern Arkansas was one of the largest Civil War engagements fought on the western frontier, and it dramatically altered the balance of power in the Trans-Mississippi. This study of the battle is based on research in archives from Connecticut to California and includes a pioneering study of the terrain of the sprawling battlefield, as well as an examination of soldiers' personal experiences, the use of Native...

The termination of the war and the fate of the Union hung in the balance in May of 1864 as Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia and Ulysses S. Grant's Army of the Potomac clashed in the Virginia countryside--first in the battle of the Wilderness, where the Federal army sustained greater losses than at Chancellorsville, and then further south in the vicinity of Spotsylvania Courthouse, where Grant sought to cut Lee's troops off from the Confederate...

If the American Civil War was the first modern war, it was also the first war to be documented extensively with photographs. The old daguerrotype, ambro-type, and tintype processes, awkward and demanding though they were, produced remarkably sharp, beautifully modeled images that reach across the decades with undiminished emotional impact. My Brother's Face is a gallery of eighty unforgettable portraits, each introduced by an illuminating historical...