civil war history

The Civil War saw advances in rapid fire weapons. It saw armored ship firing guns at each other and it saw the beginnings of submarine warfare. The CSS Alabama inspired the German Uboat campaign. After the war was over the northern discovered a brand new version of a rapid fire weapon that...

I live in Conyers GA and my town and another town called Madison bribed Sherman and his men into not destroying their homes like they did in Atlanta. IN Conyers there were a lot of freed slaves who ran thriving little businesses and a small Jewish community. They got together with the white...

Has anybody read Brian McGinty’s The Rest I Will Kill about the Civil War hero William Tillman? I first heard about Tillman 10 years ago in British stand-up comedian Mark Steel’s 30-minute lecture about the American Civil War (available online in audio (mp3) versions), in which he mentions how...

HBO is working on a series based on the premise that the Confederacy won the Civil War. Approached from the other direction, assume that the U.S. had never instituted slavery. Suppose that the farm and other work performed by slaves was done by voluntary immigrants paid fair wages, who were...

In thinking about the "states' rights" claims about the Confederacy, I wonder, were they really in support? I mean, we have the real life attempts to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act, and the fact that they threatened to secede over the fact that Delaware tried to get around it. But let's take...

This comes out of Trump's tweets on the civil war and other comments I saw on it. We know why the south wanted to secede. Why did the North want to stop them? We just take it as a given that the North is pro Union. We can probably rule out that it was because they opposed slavery. Wars are...

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/bill-oreilly-slaves-that-built-white-house-were-well-fed/ar-BBuX1eV?ocid=ansmsnnews11

I didn't see one of these active, so apologies if it's already been covered. I think there was at least one occasion where the South could have at least gotten much better terms for quitting the war. In 1864, things weren't going so well. Grant was bogged down in a siege outside Petersburg...

I still cannot fathom how one of the greatest Generals ever made one of the worst, most glaringly boneheaded decisions ever ie to do this. I'm sure theories abound.....what do you Civil War buffs think? Simple arrogance and overconfidence due to prior victories? Misjudged the Union troops in...

What if there hadn’t been a war between the States instead a huge opponent from Europe such as France, England and Spain combined? (just for instance). Who could have been the US commanders at the start? Robert E. Lee Overall Command, (Winfield Scott Aide to Lincoln) Army Commands: P.T...

The renewed controversy over the Confederate flag reminds me once again that the South never really stopped fighting the Civil War. The Black Codes and Jim Crow laws, the lynchings, the "massive resistance" to civil rights, etc., were basically guerrilla war against America. Question: Suppose...

We're two days shy of Lee's surrender to what's-his-face at Appomattox Courthouse. So, I'm wondering. Did the South ever have a realistic chance of rising again after the ACW?

In the US Civil War, holding the Union together was a much more popular cause in the North than abolitionism. I've thought about that and asked about that, and here are two possibilities: The South's unilateral secession was a recipe for anarchy. What was the point of having a Union when states...

I was watching a show on THC about Gettysburg. Amazingly they repeated several myths. They claimed that the battle began because Confederate soldiers were looking for shoes. There was no shoe factory or warehouse in Gettysburg. The Confederate soldiers would have had to have been incredibly...

In honor of the sesquicentennial of the seminal strife of the Civil War, I present this theory. Anyone who has ever stood at the Copse of Trees and looked down across the long sweep of the wheat fields to the distant tree line knows the utter futility of Pickets Charge. How could anyone...

...if South USA had successfully seceeded? At least Dawkins possibly thinks so: It's an interesting topic. Without the South there would be significantly less people in the USA, which might mean a lack of synergy effects, maybe.

April 6th and 7th mark the 150th Anniversary of the Battle of Shiloh,one of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War. Wikipedia is not to be totally trusted, but the article on Shiloh is pretty good: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Shiloh Shiloh was the first real bloodbath of the Civil...

I’m working on a an alt-history story around the American Civil War era, and just for kicks I thought it might be fun to change up the presidency. So I wondered what would have happened to the American Civil War time line if Stephen Douglas had won the 1860 campaign? This isn’t a question of...

http://blog.movies.yahoo.com/blog/495-redford-talks-about-the-conspirator I don't remember reading anything about this "conspiracy". A quick search of the forum came up with nothing. If anything it looks to be an interesting movie (opening April 5).

I asked a question about this video on yahoo answers. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwgRLRZe14U&feature=channel_page SomeonE, Said something to the effect that "America has kicked racism out" or something like that. She also tied the confederate flag as a symbol of racism. SHe said she was...

Republican Abe Lincoln Used Deceit and Deception to Start the Civil War http://books.google.com/books?id=hJGpAT7IWhwC&pg=PA231&lpg=PA231&dq=civil+war+lincoln+john+denson&source=web&ots=KB0kJRWfkn&sig=k92QWieSxzx3wqypEgyqhJYCCK8&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=3&ct=result This is yet...

From http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=107084 We recently got badly offtrack and I'm more posting this because I'm curious. So, Jerome da Gnome: You think the primary cause is states rights. Can you explain how you got here?