Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchOld Abe the War Eagle: Bought for Corn, Shot at Corinth, Killed by Smoke
Episode 12948
Old Abe was a bald eagle taken from a nest near the Flambeau River in Wisconsin in the spring of 1861 by a young Ojibwe man known as Chief Sky, who c…
21 hours ago
Elmira Prison Camp: Hellmira, Foster's Pond and Paid Observation Towers
Episode 12947
In the summer of 1864, residents of Elmira, New York, could pay 10 or 15 cents to climb a wooden observation tower, buy snacks, and look down into a …
21 hours ago
Montgomery Meigs: Capitol Dome Builder Who Put Graves in Lee's Garden
Episode 12946
Montgomery C. Meigs was born in Augusta, Georgia in 1816 and raised in Philadelphia, entering the University of Pennsylvania at 15 before West Point.…
21 hours ago
Missouri Bushwhackers: General Order No. 11, Centralia and Jesse James
Episode 12945
During the Civil War, guerrilla fighters known as bushwhackers turned rural Missouri into a war of neighbor against neighbor, rooted in the Bleeding …
21 hours ago
Mary Todd Lincoln: Bonds in Her Petticoats and the 1875 Insanity Trial
Episode 12944
Mary Todd was born in 1818 into a wealthy Lexington, Kentucky family, lost her mother at six, and studied French, classical drama and Whig politics a…
21 hours ago
Robert Anderson at Fort Sumter: Sock Powder Bags and a 34-Hour Barrage
Episode 12943
In December 1860, after South Carolina seceded, Major Robert Anderson, a Kentuckian, commanded 85 men at Fort Moultrie, a coastal fort with sand dune…
21 hours ago
Antietam: Three Lost Cigars, Miller's Cornfield and Burnside's Bridge
Episode 12942
In September 1862 two Union soldiers resting in a Maryland meadow found three cigars wrapped in a copy of Robert E. Lee's Special Order 191, which sh…
21 hours ago
Lew Wallace at Monocacy: The Ben-Hur Author's Defeat That Saved a Day
Episode 12941
In July 1864, with Ulysses S. Grant's armies concentrated around Petersburg, Jubal Early led 14,000 to 16,000 Confederate veterans into Maryland towa…
21 hours ago
Gettysburg Address: Smallpox, Everett's Two Hours and Five Manuscripts
Episode 12940
On November 19, 1863, Abraham Lincoln was asked by organizer David Wills only to offer a few appropriate remarks at the dedication of the national ce…
21 hours ago
Edwin Stanton: Fake Rust, the Sickles Defense and a Barricaded Office
Episode 12939
Edwin Stanton, born in 1814 in Steubenville, Ohio, suffered severe asthma, left school at 13 when his physician father died, and passed the bar in 18…
21 hours ago