Some Confederates called him a "Bluebelly", "Mudsill", and even a "Lincolnite" (for President Abraham Lincoln), but the name that has carried down through the decades is simply "Billy Yank". Author Lance Herdegen tells his fascinating multi-faceted s...

Robert E. Lee is well known as a Confederate general and as an educator later in life, but most people are exposed to the same handful of images of one of America's most famous sons. It has been almost seven decades since anyone has attempted a serio...

From First Manassas in 1861 to Third Winchester in 1864, Robert Rodes served in all the great battles and campaigns of the legendary Army of Northern Virginia. Jedediah Hotchkiss, Stonewall Jackson's renowned mapmaker, expressed the feelings of many...

On June 25, 1876, Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer led the 7th U.S. Cavalry into the valley of the Little Bighorn. By sunset, Custer and five of his companies lay dead – killed in battle against Sioux and Cheyenne warriors. Through the passage of ti...

"The present seems to be the most propitious time since the commencement of the war for the Confederate Army to enter Maryland," wrote Robert E. Lee following his army's stunning success at Second Manassas. Confederate armies advanced across a thous...

In early May 1864, William T. Sherman led his large army group of 98,000 men into Georgia against Joe Johnston's significantly smaller Confederate Army of Tennessee. Sherman's goal was the capture of Atlanta 100 miles to the south. After a series of...

A brilliant American combat officer and this country's most famous traitor, Benedict Arnold is one of the most fascinating and complicated people to emerge from American history. His contemporaries called him "the American Hannibal" after he successf...

With the publication of Under the Crescent Moon with the XI Corps in the Civil War: Volume. 2: From Gettysburg to Victory, 1863-1865, James S. Pula completes his magisterial work on this important Union command. The XI Corps served in the Army of th...

"Character is destiny" wrote Greek Philosopher Heraclitus more than twenty-five centuries ago. Douglas Southall Freeman, the Army of Northern Virginia's preeminent historian, echoed that view when he wrote, "Further study... may prove both more profi...

December 1776: Just six months after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, George Washington and the new American Army sit on the verge of utter destruction by the banks of the Delaware River. The despondent and demoralized group of men had...