Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchJ.E.B. Stuart: A Renamed Son, a $5,000 Saber Hook and Yellow Tavern
Episode 12928
James Ewell Brown Stuart, born in Virginia in 1833, was nicknamed Beauty at West Point for his short chin and grew a full beard as soon as regulation…
22 hours ago
The Lost Cause: Pollard's Book Title, the UDC and the 1919 Measuring Rod
Episode 12927
This episode examines how the defeated Confederacy shaped American memory of the Civil War. The phrase Lost Cause came from Virginia journalist Edwar…
22 hours ago
Anaconda Plan: Winfield Scott's Mocked Blockade and the Mississippi Squeeze
Episode 12926
After Fort Sumter in 1861, George B. McClellan proposed a fast overland march on Richmond by way of the Kanawha River or across Kentucky to Nashville…
22 hours ago
The 1872 Presidential Nominee Who Died Before the Electoral College Met
Episode 12925
This biography follows a New Hampshire-born editor, born in 1811, who did not breathe for the first 20 minutes of his life. Raised in poverty by a fa…
22 hours ago
Memorial Day Origins: Charleston Freedmen, Decoration Day and the Indy 500
Episode 12924
More than 600,000 military deaths in the Civil War shattered the Victorian ideal of a good death at home, and Americans improvised new rituals of mou…
22 hours ago
Battle of Pea Ridge 1862: Van Dorn's Freezing March and Sigel's 21 Guns
Episode 12923
The Battle of Pea Ridge was fought on March 7 and 8, 1862, in northwestern Arkansas, as Earl Van Dorn tried to destroy Samuel R. Curtis's Union Army …
22 hours ago
Total War Explained: The Levée en Masse, Sherman's March and Stalingrad
Episode 12922
This episode opens at Stalingrad in 1942, where unpainted T-34 tanks rolled from the factory straight into battle, and asks how war grew to absorb en…
22 hours ago
USS Cairo: First Ship Sunk by an Electric Mine and Its Century in the Mud
Episode 12921
The USS Cairo was a city-class ironclad built in 1861 at Mound City, Illinois, by James Eads and company, paid for by the War Department, crewed by t…
22 hours ago
Atlanta Campaign 1864: Snake Creek Gap, Kennesaw and 81 Exploding Rail Cars
Episode 12920
With Ulysses S. Grant coordinating offensives across the Confederacy, William T. Sherman moved south from Tennessee in May 1864 with nearly 100,000 m…
22 hours ago
Abraham Lincoln's Negative Capability: Frontier Grief to the Almanac Trial
Episode 12919
This episode traces Abraham Lincoln through the idea of negative capability, the ability to hold opposing views amid uncertainty without grasping for…
22 hours ago