Newsroom

A Q&A with Cody Marrs, author of Not Even Past: The Stories We Keep Telling About the Civil War. What led you to write Not Even Past? A lot of it was just living and teaching in the South. The Civil War shades into almost everything here. It’s in the places...

How did American colonists transform British law into their own? What were the colonies' first legal institutions, and who served in them? And why did the early Americans develop a passion for litigation that continues to this day? These questions and more are...

I never set out to write a book reinterpreting the financial, social, and political relationship between the American railroad and telegraph industries in the nineteenth century. I have always had an interest in the history of communication and, to a lesser...

The Maryland Campaign of 1862 was one of the pivotal moments of our Civil War. It resulted in the bloodiest single day of the war, with the Battle of Antietam on September 17, the largest surrender of U.S. soldiers until World War II, at Harpers Ferry...

I wrote this book because I wanted to teach how slavery infected every part of the national government. The term, the "slave power," was not just anti-southern rhetoric; it was the description of something very real. The most surprising thing I learned during...

A few blocks away from Baltimore’s lively Inner Harbor stands one of railroading’s most iconic buildings: the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Roundhouse, known as the “Birthplace of American Railroading” and now the home of the B&O Railroad Museum. Built in 1884...

I once heard historian Drew Gilpin Faust tell an audience at the National Humanities Center that at least one book about the Civil War had appeared for every day since Lee surrendered at Appomattox. That’s a major challenge for the historian who seeks to say...

Octavius McFarland was one of the millions of nameless, faceless slaves who toiled in Southern fields during antebellum times. His ceaseless labors made life comfortable for his white masters and fueled the booming Southern agrarian economy. His legal status...

Perhaps it’s the election of 2016. More and more of us, it seems, are obsessively checking the news on cable channels and websites several times a day. Or we haunt Twitter and Facebook for the latest updates. We typically think of this obsession with the news...

In a recent talk to a group about my new book, Faces of the Civil War Navies, an audience member approached me with a question shortly before I stepped up to the podium. He politely inquired which aspect of the navy I’d talk about, Brown Water (rivers) or Deep...