Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchFort Pillow 1864: A Blind-Spot Parapet, a Silent Gunboat and a Massacre
Episode 12978
Fort Pillow stood on a bluff above the Mississippi River in Tennessee, held in April 1864 by about 600 Union men, roughly half white West Tennessee U…
1 day, 2 hours ago
1863 New York City Draft Riots: The Black Joke Company and the Orphanage
Episode 12977
By the 1860s New York City's merchants and bankers depended on Southern cotton, Mayor Fernando Wood had proposed in January 1861 that the city declar…
1 day, 2 hours ago
Henry Halleck: Old Brains, Corinth's Empty Trains and Sherman's Snub
Episode 12976
Henry Wager Halleck, born in 1815 on a farm in Westernville, New York, ran away to an uncle in Utica to escape farm work and became a prodigy at West…
1 day, 2 hours ago
Philip Sheridan: Army Auditor, Missionary Ridge and Yellowstone's Guard
Episode 12975
Philip Sheridan, a son of Irish Catholic immigrants raised in Somerset, Ohio, stood about five foot five and began as a dry goods clerk. At West Poin…
1 day, 2 hours ago
Fort Wagner's Sand Walls: A 60-Yard Beach and the End of Prisoner Swaps
Episode 12974
On July 18, 1863, Brigadier General Quincy Gillmore sent Union infantry against Fort Wagner on Morris Island, which guarded the southern approach to …
1 day, 2 hours ago
Bleeding Kansas: Beecher's Bibles, Rigged Ballots and Four Constitutions
Episode 12973
In 1854 Senator Stephen A. Douglas, seeking to organize territory for a transcontinental railroad, pushed through the Kansas-Nebraska Act, replacing …
1 day, 2 hours ago
Stonewall Jackson the Man: Orphan, VMI's Tom Fool, a Unionist Sister
Episode 12972
Thomas Jonathan Jackson was born in 1824 in Clarksburg, in present-day West Virginia, lost his sister and father to typhoid as a toddler, and was orp…
1 day, 2 hours ago
Traveller, Robert E. Lee's Horse: Plucked Tail Hairs and Bleached Bones
Episode 12971
Traveller was foaled in 1857 in Greenbrier County, Virginia, sired by the racehorse Grey Eagle out of a mare named Flora, and first named Jeff Davis.…
1 day, 2 hours ago
Benjamin Butler in New Orleans: The Woman Order, Spoons and Sanitation
Episode 12970
After David Farragut's fleet ran past Fort Jackson and Fort St. Philip in late April 1862, New Orleans, the Confederacy's richest port, fell almost w…
1 day, 2 hours ago
Battle of Glorieta Pass 1862: 80 Burned Wagons End the Confederate West
Episode 12969
In early 1862, Confederate Brigadier General Henry Hopkins Sibley persuaded Jefferson Davis to back an invasion up the Rio Grande from the Confederat…
1 day, 2 hours ago