Today in military history: Siege of Knoxville begins
On Nov. 17, 1863, Confederate General James Longstreet laid siege to the city of Knoxville, Tennessee. In the fall of 1863, Union Major General Ambrose Burnside occupied Knoxville where a…
The northernmost Confederate attack was a raid on Vermont
We hear a lot about how Gettysburg was as far north as the Confederate Army could get, while that may be true for the Army of Northern Virginia, it wasn’t true for the entire Confederate armed forces. The actual northernmost fighting took place in …
This Civil War battle literally saw brother against brother
On an early June morning in 1862, two brothers from Scotland were fighting for their lives and their adopted homeland on a South Carolina battlefield. They had come to America less than two decades prior, and each had come to love his new homeland. …
5 reasons why the US Civil War was more brutal than other wars of the time
War is never clean, but measures can be taken to minimize the suffering of those who fight the wars and those most affected by them. Casualty counts in wars of…
Two future presidents fought in the same obscure Civil War battle
While the Battle of South Mountain itself won’t be written about in history textbooks, the overall effort to expel Confederate forces from Maryland is, and the Union victory there was…
Why the US attacked Japan in the middle of the Civil War
While the United States was fighting for its existence, the world kept turning and other countries continued acting in their own self-interest. Just because the United States military was preoccupied…
This Union Medal of Honor recipient was the most wounded soldier of the Civil War
John Chase was 19 years old when President Abraham Lincoln sent out a call for volunteers to fight for the Union cause. He signed on for a 90-day enlistment but…
6 standard missions of the Confederate Secret Service
Popular history remembers the Confederate States of America for a lot of things, but having a developed government capable of almost anything the United States could do is seldom one of those things. But it did have all the trappings of a democratic…
11 rarely seen photos from the Civil War
Photography’s growing influence in the world during the Civil War allowed the conflict to be documented in a whole new way. There are hundreds of images that have become a lasting and well-known part of the historical record, but there are thousand…
The Confederate sub that killed its own sailors and namesake
Silently gliding through frigid February water, the Confederate submarine H.L. Hunley stayed just under the surface as it approached its prey. As it breached the surface, sailors aboard the Housatonic, a Union…