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A father-son duo of Pennsylvania treasure hunters have sued the FBI for failing to produce records chronicling a top-secret excavation the agency administered in the state nearly four years ago that may have yielded a $400million cache of Civil War-era gold. Court documents unsealed earlier this year revealed that the bureau had in fact engaged in the previously undisclosed dig in Elk County in search of the fabled treasure, lost by the US government in 1863. The filing attested that agents engaged in the dig came up empty-handed.Fortune seekers Dennis and Kem Parada, however - who together comprise the lost...

It has two bedrooms and one bathroom. There’s also a private garden and roof deck. The story of the unique building, called a “spite house,” dates back to when a man returned home from the Civil War and learned his brother had taken the property. So the man built the tiny house to block sunlight from his brother’s home. (Image Credit: CL Properties)

WASHINGTON, Tuesday, Aug. 13. The following persons were to-day appointed: Brig.-Gen. DAVID HUNTER to be a Major-General of Volunteers. Lieut.-Col. H. STONEMAN, United States Cavalry, to be Brigadier-General of Volunteers. Major W.T. SMITH, Topographical Engineers, United States Army, to be a Brigadier-General of Volunteers. Capt. HENRY W. BENHAM, Engineers, United States Army, to be Brigadier-General of Volunteers. The river steamer Resolute to-day brought up ten contrabands, the property of a Secessionist named BROWN, living near Machacdge. The steamer was fired on from the house, when the crew went ashore, burned the buildings, and brought off the contrabands. Gen. PORTER, the...

On May 23 and 24, 1865, before the soldiers were mustered out of the Union Army, a Grand Review of the Armies was held in Washington, D.C., to honor the victorious troops. President Andrew Johnson also hoped to elevate the mood of a city that was devastated by the loss of President Abraham Lincoln. Over two hundred thousand soldiers marched from the Capitol to the White House before the largest crowds ever seen in that city. In a letter to Anna, Edwards estimated the number of spectators to be around fifty thousand. [SNIP] On the second day, General William T....

It's undeniable much was taken from enslaved black Americans, but forcing those uninvolved in slavery to pay reparations risks worsening racial tensions.After being first proposed more than 30 years ago by Rep. John Conyers, D-Michigan, the 116th Congress of the United States voted last week to advance H.R. 40, the Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African-American Act. Aided by the Democratic Party’s control of the executive and legislative branches of government, the current sentiment in the country regarding racial justice and equity may provide the bill’s proponents the opening they seek. To start, it’s worth noting reparations...

On April 12, 1861, Confederate troops fired the opening shots of the Civil War at Fort Sumter in South Carolina. This month marks the 160th anniversary of the beginning of the war, the deadliest conflict ever fought on American soil. The Civil War lasted four years and resulted in an estimated 620,000 deaths and 1.5 million casualties. Approximately one in four soldiers that went to war never came back home. This impacted families, communities, and the entire country for generations to come. Historical photograph of Fort Sumter The years leading up to the beginning of the Civil War were filled...

New standards proposed by the Minnesota Department of Education would banish lessons about World War I, World War II, the Holocaust, the Civil War, the American Revolution, communism, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Replacing those significant history topics will be "systemic racism," how democracy has "excluded certain groups," an "awareness" of "the LGBTQ+ community" and how the disenfranchisement of freed blacks during Reconstruction connects to "persistent discrimination and inequity" today.

According to a Facebook page called Left Behind USA, Antifa domestic terrorists are planning to desecrate the Gettysburg National Cemetery and set the American Flag ablaze on Independence Day. Gettysburg, the site of the bloodiest battle of the Civil War and on American soil, is respected and revered by every sane American.

Exactly 123 years to the day that it was dedicated, the Shaw Memorial, a monument honoring the first all-volunteer black regiment of the Union Army in the Civil War, was defaced by rioters demanding justice for African-Americans. On May 31, 1897, the monument was erected on Boston Commons to honor the 54th Massachusetts Regiment of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, who bravely attacked Confederate forces at Fort Wagner. One of the soldiers, Sgt. William Harvey Carney carried the American flag throughout the battle, never dropping it despite being shot 7 times. Carney was the first black American to win the Congressional...

Last Person to Receive a Civil War Pension Dies at 90The Department of Veterans Affairs' motto is "to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow, and his orphan." The meaning of those words was perhaps never more apparent than in the case of Irene Triplett, who died Tuesday from surgical complications following a fall at a North Carolina nursing home, according to The Wall Street Journal. She was the last person to receive a pension from a veteran's Civil War service. Her father, Mose Triplett, fought on both sides of the Civil War, first...

We are studying the Civil War as a family these days, and unlike many other historical events, there is no shortage of good films dealing with the this topic, among them: Glory, Gods and Generals, and Gettysburg. We watched Gettysburg last night. I hadn’t seen it since it was originally released in 1993 when I saw it on the big screen. Since that time, I have visited the battlefield at least twice. The last time was in 2016 with my oldest daughter on our way back from a homeschool conference in Maryland. It was during that visit that we came...

Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrenders the Army of Northern Virginia to Union Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant. Lee is the third Confederate General to surrender their army to Grant.

On August 8th, 1885, New York City hosted the longest funeral procession in history for General U.S. Grant. Grant had died two weeks earlier at Grant Cottage near Saratoga Springs, NY after completing his memoirs. The photos are mostly from a rare commemorative book published shortly after the funeral. This video has been produced by Tim Welch from scans of photographs shot by the U.S. Instant Photographic Company of Boston. (appx 20 mins)

One of the advantages of the present media-driven furor to remove or demolish monuments to the Confederacy is that it is forcing numerous Americans, myself included, to dig deep into the history of the Civil War. And what a strange, convoluted period of history it is! The primary sources are plentiful, rich and deep which makes for endlessly fascinating reading. If the aim of the iconoclasts was to push this period of history even further from the national consciousness, or gloss over it with cherry-picked anecdotes allowing for knee-jerk verdicts, they have failed miserably. For my own part, I have...

The wreck of the last slave ship ever to reach American shores has been found in a river delta near Mobile, Alabama, according to the state's historical commission. In 1860, on the eve of the American Civil War, the schooner Clotilda took aboard 110 individuals in West Africa and sailed across the Atlantic to deliver them to slaveowners in Mobile. After they were unloaded, the ship was burned outside of the port. The transatlantic slave trade had already been banned in the U.S. for decades, and at the time of the landing, importing African people for purposes of slavery was...

CHICKAMAUGA, Ga. — Next door to a plantation built by slaves, Gov. Brian Kemp defended Georgia's Confederate monuments as educational resources while he signed a bill to further protect them Friday. "It is true that there are monuments in our history that do not reflect our values," he said, during a ceremony in front of Gordon Lee High School. "We cannot erase them from our history. We must learn from them. These monuments and markers remind us of how far we've come not only as a state but as a country." Sponsored this year by state Sen. Jeff Mullis, the...

Kurt Luther, Virginia Tech assistant professor of computer science, has developed a free software platform that uses crowdsourcing to significantly increase the ability of algorithms to identify faces in photos. Through the software platform, called Photo Sleuth, Luther seeks to uncover the mysteries of the nearly 4 million photographs of Civil War-era images that may exist in the historical record. Luther will present his research surrounding the Photo Sleuth platform on March 19 at the Association for Computing Machinery's Intelligent User Interfaces conference in Los Angeles, California. He will also demonstrate Photo Sleuth at the grand opening of the expanded...

On the river boat “River Queen”, in Hampton Roads, President Abraham Lincoln and Sec of State. William Seward met with Confederate VP Alexander Stevens, Asst Sec of War John Campbell Sen Robert Hunter These men met to discuss a possible end to almost 4 years of bloody Civil War. The Hampton Roads Peace Conference lasted about 4 hours and produced no visible results. A detailed account of this event can be found at: https://www.essentialcivilwarcurriculum.com/the-hampton-roads-peace-conference.html

BRYAN, Ohio -- When the New England Confectionery Co. filed for bankruptcy in Boston last spring, there was such an immediate and deep sense of loss across the country that folks took to local stores and Amazon to claim a piece of yet another what-used-to-be. Necco Wafers, its signature product, had been part of Americana since before the Civil War. In fact, the company said the sugary, chalky wafers were a favorite of soldiers because the confection didn't melt, and that they were consumed by Union soldiers on the battlefield during the Civil War and by GIs during World War...

  SHARE:FacebookTwitter Today marks the 156th anniversary of Antietam, arguably the pivotal battle of the Civil War. Had the South won on that September day, Robert E. Lee could have marauded through Union territory, European powers might have intervened on behalf of the Rebels, Maryland might have flipped its loyalty to the Confederacy.What we know as America might be two separate nations today. Instead the Union was victorious, banishing Lee’s army from the North, paving the way for the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed the slaves.So much was at stake — the fighting rose to a pitch that was heretofore unimaginable....