The historian Allen C. Guelzo believes that the Confederate general deserves a more compassionate reading.

American history begs the question: Can immigrants possibly inherit the mythology of the U.S.?

Qaddafi’s son is alive. And he wants to take Libya back.

How Abraham Lincoln’s lifelong struggle with clinical depression was a key to his presidency.

The post–civil war boom in shark fishing that saved Congolese fishermen and their families is now drying up.

A hundred and fifty years ago, slightly more, a strange notion: the dead could be counted. In the Civil War, in the lush fields of the South, Americans first, as a culture, began to imagine death in numbers. Rosters of soldiers, as well as lists of war casualties, were not common practice in the mid-nineteenth century. Many officials feared responsibility for the dead by numbering or naming them, and military leaders felt an accurate count might embolden their enemies.

In 1865, a failed stockbroker tries to pull off one of the boldest financial schemes in American history: the original big short.

A reporter encounters the echoes of family and the struggle for civil rights in Mississippi.

A pro-Ukraine activist goes silent in separatist-held Donetsk. A foreign correspondent goes looking for him.

Two brothers divided by Central African Republic’s civil war.

“We are invited to listen, but never to truly join the narrative, for to speak as the slave would, to say that we are as happy for the Civil War as most Americans are for the Revolutionary War, is to rupture the narrative.”

A deserting Civil War soldier sets out for home.

"As he approached Jacob Story’s farm, Benjamin saw that the corn stood dark and high. No hard frost or gullywasher had come. The signs held true, not only for the corn but the beans and tobacco. Smoke rose from Jacob’s chimney. Noon-dinner time already, he thought. Benjamin followed the trailway through a stand of silver birch, straddled a split-rail fence, placed one foot on his land and then the other. He had hoped Emma would be in the cabin. That way he could step onto the porch, open the door, and stroll in no differently than he would coming from a field or the barn. Benjamin wanted their separation to seem that way, he wanted to never speak of the war or their months apart. He wanted it to become nothing more than a few dark moments, like a lantern carried through a cabin’s low door."

How a disgraced Civil War general became one of the best-selling novelists in American history.

The Civil War started 150 years ago today. A primer on how and why.

The strange life of Boston Corbett, the soldier who killed John Wilkes Booth in 1865.

Like hundreds of other local slaves — [they] had been pressed into service by the Confederates, compelled to build an artillery emplacement amid the dunes across the harbor. They labored beneath the banner of the 115th Virginia Militia, a blue flag bearing a motto in golden letters: “Give me liberty or give me death.”