The Washingtons' War

Abraham Lincoln must have been pained by the number of Washingtons on the other side during the Civil War. He idolized George Washington. One of the first books he read as a boy was Parson Weems’s apocryphal biography of the first president, and it made a lasting...

How Irish was Phil Sheridan?

I have had the good fortune to speak about the Irish in the American Civil War in many different parts of Ireland. When it comes to question-time, there is one topic that is almost always guaranteed to come up- General Phil Sheridan. This is unsurprising given his...

A Name Under Siege

MEMPHIS, Tenn. — On the fourth floor of the Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library, on a top shelf just to the left of the map collection, lie more than a dozen books that profile one famous Memphian: Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest. There are the old ones,...

A Strange Cargo

Major General William Rosecrans, leader of the Union’s Army of the Cumberland, had a problem. “Old Rosy,” as he’d been nicknamed at West Point, was a handsome Ohio-born history buff and hobbyist inventor with a reputation for getting nearer to combat than any other...

News from Around the South 11/18-11/25

Tennessee: Confederate Soldier Receives Posthumous Medal of Honor James Breathed, a doctor who served as a soldier in the Confederate Army during the Civil War, has been posthumously awarded the Confederate Medal of Honor by the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Only 48...