The American Narrative: Histories of a Nation

The Brooks-Baxter War was not a mere accident that arose from Arkansas’s contentious 1872 gubernatorial election. Rather, it was a cataclysmic consequence of intense political infighting and systemic corruption that defined Reconstruction. Although the conflict is named after its principal disputants, it was anarchy that ultimately prevailed. This thirty-day struggle in 1874 would ultimately resha...

On September 14, 1874, New Orleans witnessed a violent confrontation that left lasting implications across the post-Civil War South. Approximately 8,000 armed members of the Crescent City White League—a white supremacist paramilitary organization—clashed with 3,500 state militiamen and Metropolitan Police in a bloody street fight known as the Battle of Liberty Place. The White League succeeded in...

During the summer of 1864, hundreds of Confederate sympathizers had allegedly constructed a fortress deep within the mountains of Columbia County, Pennsylvania. Nearly 1,000 Union soldiers scoured the forested landscape looking for these perpetrators. However, there was no Confederate stronghold, rather a larger conspiracy that inflamed tensions along the home front. This is a story of political r...

On October 19, 1864, the tranquility of the Northern home front was shattered when a gang of marauding Confederate raiders ransacked the town of St. Albans, Vermont. While recognized as the northernmost land action of the American Civil War, the significance of the St. Albans Raid extends far beyond this distinction.  This international incident posed serious implications regarding Canadian neutra...