The citations that accompanied Civil War era Medal of Honor awards tend to provide us with precious little detail. Regularly restricted to one or two lines, they often lack description, and do little to transmit the horrors of the sights and sounds that must have accompanied the actions associated with them. Such is certainly the......
The Civil War world has been captivated in recent weeks by the identification of a previously overlooked burial map of the Antietam battlefield, prepared by Simon G. Elliot in 1864. The staff of New York Public Library first recognised the map’s historic value, digitising it and making it available online as part of their Digital......
The latest in the Storied Tombstones series looks at some of the Irish American graves I encountered during my brief visit to Gettysburg National Cemetery. As regular readers will be aware, the premise behind the series revolves around photographs I take of probable Irish American graves that I randomly encounter during wanderings in these graveyards.......
As regular readers will be aware, Andersonville Prison and Andersonville National Cemetery are regularly featured on this site. It is almost certainly the National Cemetery that contains more Irish American dead from the Civil War than any other in the United States. I have been working towards establishing a formal project examining the Irish and......
Earlier this month I was delighted to be asked to contribute to the National Museum of Civil War Medicine lunchtime Facebook Live series. I spoke with the Museum’s John Lustrea about the Irish experience of the conflict, touching on a variety of topics, from motivations for service to the Irish relationship with African Americans. If......
Many of you will be familiar with the Civil War Monitor, one of the leading magazines focusing on the American Civil War. In each issue they run a two-page infographic feature entitled “Figures”. For their Summer 2020 edition I teamed up with the Monitor’s graphics team to explore the widows and dependents of Civil War......
In Belfast, Northern Visions TV and historian Barry Sheppard have been partnering up for quite a while to produce the excellent History Now. For anyone interested in Irish history it has become a must watch, given the volume and breadth of topics Barry and the NVTV team get through. I was delighted to chat with......
Regular contributor Brendan Hamilton returns with more utterly fascinating research from his project examining underprivileged boys from the North’s juvenile justice system who found themselves in Union service during the American Civil War. You can catch Brendan’s previous post on this topic here. This time round he tells us the story of three boys who......
Like many I have had a number of events cancelled or postponed due to the pandemic. One talk that fell victim was for the Kilrush and District Historical Society, where I had hoped to discuss stories of local men and women from that part of Co. Clare who left for America in the 19th century.......
This week marks the tenth birthday of the Irish in the American Civil War website. Fittingly it has concided with some recent milestones for the site: surpassing 1,000,000 views, and passing the 1,000,000 published words mark. A decade on from the first post, those words are now spread out across more than 725 articles and......