Civil War

Adam Arenson, assistant professor of history at the University of Texas at El Paso, examines the efforts of St. Louis’ intellectuals and mercantile elite to make their city the capital of a vast Western empire in the wake of the Civil War. That ambitious dream was never realized, but the city grew t...

University of Pennsylvania historian Stephanie McCurry offers a new interpretation of the Confederacy that contends the South sowed the seeds of its demise in creating a regime that excluded white women and slaves, which together comprised a majority of the population. Confederate...

Shawn Faulkner of the Military History Department at the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth discusses the conditions faced by the average Civil War soldier – on and off the battlefield – in a presentation titled Jonny Reb and Billy Yank. Faulkner explains th...

The Border Reconstructed and Remembered, moderated by Gary Kremer, The State Historical Society of Missouri, and featuring talks by: Aaron Astor, Maryville College; The Lexington Weekly Caucasian: White Supremacist Discourse in Post-Civil War Western Missou...

The Border Reconstructed and Remembered, moderated by Gary Kremer, The State Historical Society of Missouri, and featuring talks by: Aaron Astor, Maryville College; The Lexington Weekly Caucasian: White Supremacist Discourse in Post-Civil War Western Missou...

Sectional Crisis and Civil War on the Western Border, 1860-1865, moderated by William Piston, Missouri State University, and featuring talks by: Randy Mullis, Command and General Staff College; The Illusion of Security and the Fragility of Peace: Kansas and...

Michael Fellman, a preeminent scholar of the American Civil War and an expert on the guerilla warfare that characterized the conflict in the Missouri-Kansas borderlands, considers how perfectly ordinary Americans could revise their moral and religious beliefs to justify such extraordinary violence wit...

Terry Beckenbaugh of the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth discusses the first Civil War battle fought west of the Mississippi River, which took place in southwestern Missouri. On August 10, 1861, Union General Nathaniel Lyon — who was encamped at Springfield with nearly 6,...

The Plaza Branch concludes its annual Kansas City Architectures series, which in recognition of the sesquicentennial of the Civil War focused on antebellum homes this year. Alana Smith, president of the Westport Historical Society, shares the history of the Harris-Kearney Home, the oldest remaining brick resi...

Although relatively small compared to the great clashes to come, the Battle of First Manassas (Bull Run) was a seminal event in American history. When the smoke cleared on July 21, 1861, nearly 900 men were dead, the Union army was in retreat, and the South had won the first major battle of the Civil War. Dr....