American Civil War Summary

Children and the Civil War The Civil War lent excitement to the lives of Northern children, imposed hardships and limitations on Southern white children, and changed the lives of African-American chil... Read more

Civil War and Industrial and Technological Advances The Civil War used the advances of the Industrial Revolution to foster great changes in industrial and technological development. Both the North and... Read more

Clothing Scholars debate how much influence the Civil War had on clothing and how much impact clothing had on the Civil War. One argument contends that women's participation in the war effort s... Read more

Men on the Homefront, Civil War Despite the modern image of the patriotic volunteer in the Civil War, not all men fought for the Union or the Confederacy. Between 1861 and 1865 thousands of eligible m... Read more

State's Rights, Theory Of War has affected American society and culture in many ways. In particular the Civil War (1861–1865) was a conflict over a theory of government as well as a war ... Read more

1861: the War Begins As both the Union and the Confederacy began to build their armies for the coming conflict, a strange mood of excitement rippled across the divided nation. People in the North and ... Read more

1863: the Tide Turns During the first half of 1863, doubts about the Federal army's ability to defeat the Confederate forces mounted across the North. And when Confederate general Robert E. Lee... Read more

Blacks in the Civil War Black people from both the North and the South participated in the Civil War in a variety of ways. Free blacks from the North tried to join the fight as soldiers from the earli... Read more

"The Surrender at Appomattox Court House"; by General Horace Porter "The Surrender at Appomattox Court House"; excerpt from Battles and Leaders of the Civil War Covering ev... Read more

Intellectual Markets. Science, technology, and medicine went through important changes between 1850 and 1877. New findings in these fields, especially in technology, helped to give shape to a moderni... Read more

The American Spirit at Midcentury. Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, Americans were among the most optimistic people on earth. Economic growth and territorial expansion all contrib... Read more

National Epic. The events of 1850-1877 form the central drama in the history of American politics, a sequence of riveting episodes enacted by a cast of colorful characters and featuring astonishing tw... Read more

The Wireless Age. At the time of the Civil War, the primary means of communication for most Americans was through personal contact. There were less than one-fifth as many people in the United States ... Read more

An American Renaissance. The 1850s were a watershed decade for American literature. Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850) and Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851) are widely acknowledged as t... Read more