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Robert Barnwell Rhett; Richmond burning in April 1865.

Beware Today’s ‘Fire-Eaters’

There are echoes in our political rhetoric of the men who helped talk the United States into civil war.
by Mark Hertling via The Bulwark on September 22, 2025
Abraham Lincoln

Was the Civil War Inevitable?

Before Lincoln turned the idea of “the Union” into a cause worth dying for, he tried other means of ending slavery in America.
by Adam Gopnik via The New Yorker on April 21, 2025
A drawing of a bust of Abraham Lincoln sitting on philosophy books.

From Königsberg to Gettysburg

How German Enlightenment thought influenced Abraham Lincoln.
by Allen C. Guelzo via Claremont Review of Books on June 15, 2024
Nikki Haley, 2023.

Nikki Haley's Slavery Omission Typifies the GOP's Tragic Pact with White Supremacy

How the Southern Strategy of the late 20th century gave rise to the modern GOP.
by Annika Brockschmidt via Religion Dispatches on January 8, 2024
Ripped American flag flying next to the Texas flag.

In Texas, Even the Lies about the Confederacy Are Bigger

Republican House Speaker Joe Straus is calling for the removal of a Confederate plaque about the role of slavery in the Civil War.
by Kevin M. Levin via Civil War Memory on September 20, 2017

Why There Was a Civil War

Some issues aren’t amenable to deal making; some principles don’t lend themselves to compromise.
by Yoni Appelbaum via The Atlantic on May 1, 2017

Donald Trump Bullsh*ts His Way Through Civil War History

"Why could that one not have been worked out?"
via Funny Or Die on May 1, 2017

What This Cruel War Was Over

The meaning of the Confederate flag is best discerned in the words of those who bore it.
by Ta-Nehisi Coates via The Atlantic on June 22, 2015
“Furling the Flag” by Richard Norris Brooke (1872)

Alternative Fictions: The New Lost Cause in the Post-Civil Rights Era

Revisiting the Lost Cause through post–Civil Rights Movement alternative histories.
by Kris Plunkett via The Journal of the Civil War Era on October 31, 2025
Diagram of a cotton gin

How Eli Whitney Single-handedly Started the Civil War . . . and Why That’s Not True

The real Whitney story is less grand than the legend, but more interesting and, ultimately, more edifying.
by Ariel Ron via Commonplace on October 14, 2025
Federal encampment on Cumberland Landing, Virginia.
partner

How the Union Lost the Remembrance War

The victors of the American Civil War failed to write their story into the history books, leaving a gap for the mythologizing of the Confederacy.
by Matthew Wills, Robert J. Cook via JSTOR Daily on October 5, 2025
Ruins of Mrs. Henry’s House, Battlefield of Bull Run.
partner

Reactionary Revolutionaries

In the mid-19th century, governments on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border set out to recast North America’s political landscape.
by Erika Pani via HNN on September 23, 2025
A throng of Trump supporters, some in colonial garb, march through Washington D.C.

The 19th-Century Precursors to the Crises of Trump’s America

Revisiting history shows that violence and constitutional disputes are nothing new in US politics.
by Marcus Alexander Gadson via New Lines on July 4, 2025
John C. Calhoun

The Prelude to the Civil War

“Only two states wanted a civil war—Massachusetts and South Carolina.”
by Hunter DeRensis via The American Conservative on May 5, 2025
A political cartoon depicting Brighma Young walking in front of a group of his wives, the majority of whom are depicted as non-white.
partner

The Sovereignty of the Latter-day Saints

Less about morality than about rights, the Mormon War of 1858 hinged on the issue of polygamy, pitting a Utah community against federal authorities.
by Katie McBride Moench via JSTOR Daily on August 28, 2024
John Montgomery’s Notice to George W. Gray, November 26, 1855.

“Acts of Lawless Violence”: The Office of Indian Affairs, and the Coming of the Civil War in Kansas

The question should not be if settler colonialism factored into the history of the Civil War but how and to what extent.
by Paul Barba via Muster on July 17, 2024
A drawing of a Wide Awake march.

These Torchlit Young Marchers Helped to Save American Democracy

They called themselves the Wide Awakes. They are a lesson in building a political movement.
by Jon Grinspan via Washington Post on May 14, 2024
original

Where Kansas Bled

How can one place represent the complexity of the Civil War’s beginnings?
by Ed Ayers on November 30, 2023

Mildred Rutherford’s War

The “historian general” of the United Daughters of the Confederacy began the battle over the depiction of the South in history textbooks that continues today.
by Adam Hochschild via New York Review of Books on November 16, 2023

The Men Who Started the War

John Brown and the Secret Six—the abolitionists who funded the raid on Harpers Ferry—confronted a question as old as America: When is violence justified?
by Drew Gilpin Faust via The Atlantic on November 13, 2023
Black and white photograph of a man. The main has his hair styled to point upwards, and a tattoo of the word Mississippi on his back.

Where Does the South Begin?

A new history cuts against stereotypes, to show a region constantly changing—and whose future is up for grabs.
by Scott Wasserman Stern via The New Republic on June 26, 2023
John Brown, 1859

Paving the Way to Harpers Ferry: The Disunion Convention of 1857

Southern pro-slavery states weren't the only states calling for disunion before the Civil War erupted.
by David T. Dixon via Emerging Civil War on February 16, 2022

The Unreconstructed Radical

Thaddeus Stevens was a fierce opponent of the “odious” compromises in the Constitution, and of the North’s compromises after the Civil War.
by Richard Kreitner via The Baffler on May 13, 2021

Why Confederate Lies Live On

For some Americans, history isn’t the story of what actually happened; it’s the story they want to believe.
by Clint Smith via The Atlantic on May 10, 2021
The word slavery in a dictionary crossed out

We Found the Textbooks of Senators Who Oppose The 1619 Project and Suddenly Everything Makes Sense

To our surprise, most received a well-rounded education on the history of Black people in America. Just kidding.
by Michael Harriot via The Root on May 6, 2021

Republicans Rediscover the Dangers of Selling Bunk to Their Constituents

Cynical public speech aimed at winning political power has consequences.
by Rachel Shelden via The Atlantic on November 25, 2020
Drawing of Lincoln with his hand on a Bible during a swearing-in with two other people

The Presidential Transition That Shattered America

A Trump-Biden transition is sure to be scary. But it’d be hard to beat Buchanan-Lincoln.
by Rebecca Onion, Susan Schulten via Slate on October 28, 2020
Graffiti on a wall spelling "vote"
partner

Refusing to Accept the Results of a Presidential Election Triggered the Civil War

The danger of President Trump's rhetoric.
by Aaron Sheehan-Dean via Made By History on October 2, 2020

Re-watching ‘The Civil War’ During the Breonna Taylor and George Floyd Protests

The landmark Ken Burns documentary hasn’t aged well. But it continues to shape American perceptions about the Confederacy and slavery.
by Gillian Brockell via Retropolis on September 26, 2020

The Confederacy Was an Antidemocratic, Centralized State

The actual Confederate States of America was a repressive state devoted to white supremacy.
by Stephanie McCurry via The Atlantic on June 21, 2020
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