Civil War Talk Radio

Dr. Doris Kearns Goodwin discusses her prize-winning study of Lincoln and his Cabinet, Team of Rivals: the Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln.

Beyond the CSS Hunley, the Civil War saw the invention of other submersible warships, and Dr. James P. Delgado has found one of them intact.

Dr. Thomas J. Brown, author of The Public Art of Civil War Commemoration, analyzes the meaning of monuments

James A. Morgan III, author of A Little Short of Boats: The Fights at Ball's Bluff and Edwards Ferry

The legendary Ed Bearss, Chief Historian Emeritus of the National Park Service.

Out of the more than one hundred people who make all or part of their living portraying Abraham Lincoln, none does it better than Richard 'Fritz' Klein.

Mark Bradley, author of This Astounding Close: The Road to Bennett Place, discusses the North Carolina campaign of 1865.

Shane Seley and Ed Leydecker of Wide Awake Films describe the process of making Civil War battle documentary videos.

Unlike the soldiers themselves, author Thomas Lowry, MD, is happy to discuss The Story the Soldiers Wouldn't Tell: Sex in the Civil War. Most CWTR programs unavoidably make reference to the massive bloodshed that marked the Civil War. This program discusses not only violence but also sex, using plain language. Educators and parents may wish to preview this show before recommending it to students o...

Dr. Michael Vorenberg, author of Final Freedom: The Civil War, The Abolition of Slavery and the Thirteenth Amendment, analyzes the politics of the 13th Amendment.

Dr. Richard P. McMurry, author of The Fourth Battle of Winchester and Two Great Rebel Armies, presents a fresh approach to Civil War history.

Dr. Elizabeth Leonard, author of Lincoln's Avengers and All the Daring of the Soldier: Women of the Civil War Armies, covers topics from the Lincoln assassination to the participation of women soldiers

Seventy-five years before the Lincoln Presidential Museum opened in Springfield, a small jewel of a museum was launched in northeast Indiana. Carolyn Texley, Director of Collections at Fort Wayne's Lincoln Museum, talks about the challenges of preserving the Lincoln story.

In 1865, Jefferson Davis was the leader of a failed experiment in creating a new nation, hated by his enemies and despised by his own people for losing the war. By the first decade of the 20th century, Davis had joined the beloved Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson as the third member of the Confederate pantheon. Donald E. Collins, author of The Death and Resurrection of Jefferson Davis describes...

If you haven't been to Gettysburg in a while, you may not realize how much has changed, much for the better! Listen to an audio snapshot of Gettysburg as the town prepares to commemorate the anniversary of Lincoln's Address, with host Gerry Prokopowicz and guest David Long, author of The Jewel of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln's Re-election and the End of Slavery.

Based on years of archival research, as well as personal experience as an embedded journalist with US forces in Iraq, Richard F. Miller has written a new kind of regimental history that focuses on the social and class identities of officers in a unit made up of equal parts Harvard-educated Boston brahmins and working class immigrants from Ireland and the German states. How these disparate groups u...

After writing or editing more than thirty books on the war, University of Virginia history professor Gary W. Gallagher has become one of the leading scholars in the field. Hear his views on why the South lost, how battlefields should be interpreted, and other controversial topics.

One way that the internet has revolutionized communication is by allowing anyone to publish his or her thoughts to an unlimited audience through a weblog. Dimitri Rogov's blog, Civil War Bookshelf, is a model of provocative commentary on current issues in Civil War history.

Hostages taken and killed; civilians murdered to terrorize others; military prisoners subject to abuse... not in the 21st century Middle East, but in the United States, 1861-1865. Lonnie Speer, author of Portals to Hell: Military Prisons of the Civil War and War of Vengeance: Act of Retaliation Against Civil War POWs, reveals some harsh realities of the war.

Few Civil War battles had more impact, and yet were more quickly forgotten, than Perryville. Kenneth Noe, author of Perryville: This Grand Havoc of Battle, details the campaign and battle, and discusses why its importance faded from view.

As an artistic format, the 32-page picture book looks simple, but using it to bring history to children is a challenge. Karen B. Winnick, author of Mr. Lincoln's Whiskers and Cassie's Sweet Berry Pie, both set in the Civil War era, describes how she uses words and illustrations to communicate important truths in historical settings.

Living in Gettysburg, historian Thomas Desjardin discovered that many of the most well-known stories of the battle are badly distorted versions of the original events. In These Honored Dead: How the Story of Gettysburg Shaped American Memory Desjardin describes how the postwar efforts of John Bachelder, Dan Sickles, and others helped to create the modern view of what happened at the battle. He rai...

Did the blockade make a difference? Why did Union forces spend so much effort to take Wilmington, N.C., in the final year of the war? Wilmington native and UNC-Wilmington professor Chris Fonvielle, author of The Wilmington Campaign: Last Rays of Departing Hope, analyzes the important and fascinating events that marked the war in North Carolina in 1864-65.

Mark H. Dunkelman has spent a lifetime researching the story of the 154th New York Volunteer Infantry Regiment. It's a fascinating story, stretching from Chancellorsville to Chattanooga to the March to the Sea. In Brothers One and All: Esprit de Corps in a Civil War Regiment, Dunkelman goes beyond antiquarian detail-mongering to show how the 154th NY became the world in which its members lived, an...

'LET US HAVE FAITH THAT RIGHT MAKES MIGHT, AND IN THAT FAITH, LET US, TO THE END, DARE TO DO OUR DUTY AS WE UNDERSTAND IT.' This was the ringing peroration of Abraham Lincoln's 1860 speech in New York City that established his reputation as a powerful antislavery voice and started him on the road to the White House. Listen to Harold Holzer, author of the award-winning Lincoln At Cooper Union: The...