Civil War
The Civil War was America's bloodiest and most divisive conflict, pitting the Union Army against the Confederate States of America. The war resulted in the deaths of more than 620,000 people, with millions more injured and the South left in ruins.
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The Civil War was a conflict many years in the making.
These battles were among the most pivotal in America's bloodiest conflict.
Images of the bloodiest battle in U.S. history shocked the public and revealed the war’s gruesome reality.
Abraham Lincoln's 1863 Gettysburg Address contains fewer than 275 words. How did such a short speech carry such a long-lasting impact?
Emancipation Proclamation
Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation
Abraham Lincoln issues the Emancipation Proclamation in this scene from "The March to War."
3 Key Civil War Battles
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Nineteenth-century congressmen went to work carrying pistols and bowie knives—and sometimes used them on colleagues.
Mary Surratt was an American boarding house owner who was convicted of taking part in the conspiracy to assassinate President Abraham Lincoln. Sentenced to death, she was hanged, becoming the first woman executed by the United States federal government.
Lincoln was so taken with the new technology—which he called 'lightning messages'—that he sometimes slept on a cot in the telegraph office during major battles.
Reconstruction was an effort to integrate Black Americans into society after the Civil War.
Mary Boykin Miller Chesnut, (1823-1886) was the author of A Diary from Dixie, an insightful view of Southern life and leadership during the American Civil War. In 1840 she married James Chesnut, Jr., who later served as a U.S. senator from South Carolin...
The Alabama claims were brought by the United States against Great Britain for damages caused by Confederate warships built in Liverpool during the Civil War.
Daniel Sickles was a politician known for losing a leg in the Civil War and for being the first person to successfully use temporary insanity as legal defense.
The Battle of Fort Henry drove Confederate troops from the Tennessee River fortification in 1862 and marked the first significant Union win of the Civil War.
During the Civil War, Virginia's Shenandoah Valley saw a series of military clashes as Union and Confederate forces attempted to gain control of the area.
The Civil War's Second Battle of Bull Run, waged in northern Virginia in 1862, brought a decisive victory for the Confederates over the far larger Union forces.
They helped usher in a wave of important reforms.
