48th Pennsylvania Veteran Volunteer Infantry

John Hoptak, a full time ranger for the National Park Service at Antietam National Battlefield, writes and photographs on events at that park. As the blog name here indicates he has a special interest in the 48th PA V.V.I. and so there are posts on other battles or actions or persons related to that regiment.  

Abraham Lincoln Blog

 Geoff Elliott writes, as you might guess, about the 16th President. His well-written posts range from clips of news stories to insightful explorations of how Lincoln --both the real one and the one we know from our "civic mythology--impacts politics and other fields of society today.

 Army of Tennessee

 This group blog is run by Christopher Young, Daryl Black, Patrick Lewis and Lee White and explores topics pertaining to the great Confederate army of the Western Theater. As their blog URL "bullyforbragg" suggests they attempt to turn a more charitable eye on the army's best known commander than popular perception would have it, while avoiding the pitfalls of revisionism.

Battlefield Wanderings

Nick Kurtz is a self-described "Civil War nut" who doesn't just wander battlefields but photographs them. Well. He has an exceptional eye through the lens and an added ability to shoot modern-day battlefield landscapes in such away as to convey where monuments are in relation to each other.

Blood, Tears and Glory

James Bissland runs this site in part as an offshoot of, and promotion for, his recent book on Ohioans in the Civil War. It is a "This Week in the War" format with a heavy emphasis on the always-underappreciated Western Theater.

Bull Runnings

Harry Smeltzer uses Bull Run (or Manassas if you prefer) as a home base from which to venture forth with posts on everything from excerpts from the Official Record to baseball to Civil War horror movies. The white-type-on-black-background is somewhat aggravating but the writing makes it worth slogging through.

Civil War Books & Authors

Andrew Wagenhoffer has one of very few blogs which must be regarded as "go-to sites" prior to buying Civil War books. In fact looking here is very likely to direct your book budget to items you would never have heard of otherwise. We can do no better than to quote his own site description: "...with a special emphasis on the lesser known and underappreciated American Civil War books, authors, and publishers."

Charge! Civil War Wargaming & News

Scott Mingus' site caters to what you would think was an incredibly tiny audience: players of non-computer tabletop war games played with elaborate scale model figures and fields. But the blog is fun to read even if you wouldn't know a 15mm from a hole in the ground. Periods other than the Civil War are covered here and actually a computer game or two occasionally merits a post as well.

Chronicles of the American Civil War

Mike Goad has a blog on which the voice of the blogger is almost never heard. Instead the posts consist of some of the most honest, personal and often poignant remarks of dead men, some semi-famous (US Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles) and some utterly obscure (the "Rebel War Clerk" John Beauchamp Jones of the Davis administration in Richmond.) These diary entries are posted on the dates on which they were originally written by their authors. Needs to be read almost daily due to the quantity of material posted.

Civil War Bookshelf

Dmitri Rotov has a site which is almost impossible to categorize. He reads and has read. Widely. Then he thinks, and then he writes (activities which, alas, do not always occur together or in that order.) Social and cultural allusions abound, sometimes to the mystification of the less-informed reader, but never less than intriguing. He doesn't allow comments, and every so often explains why, and why he doesn't think other sites should either. You will probably not agree with his reasoning. He almost certainly doesn't care.

CivilWarCavalry.com

Eric Wittenberg writes about Cavalry, primarily Union, with a heavy concentration in recent years on operations in and around, and before and after, Gettysburg. The occasional post on politics, Judaism and baseball will be featured, and the subject of amateur- versus professional historians is a frequent subject of discussion.

Civil War History

Daniel Sauerwein is the principal blogger here, with the recent addition of co-author Billy Whyte. A wide range of topics are covered as the authors' inclinations see fit, from a long analysis of a battle to a brief mention of an item recently in the news. An enjoyable site for "general reading" if you will, if time forbids reading absolutely everything and one has no particular field of specialized interest like cavalry or navy.

Civil War Literature

Craig A Warren defines "literature" in the broadest possible sense of the word, with posts and even series delving into such areas a music and poetry as well as prose. A frequently-mentioned name is Ambrose Bierce, as he runs another website pertaining to this author. Citations are often to books from the late 19th and early 20th century, making this a useful stop for those with an interest in historiography, or "the history of the history" of the war.

Civil War Medicine (& Writing)

Jim Schmidt is also the author of a regular column on the subject of Civil War Medicine in another publication, which columns often find their way to this blog as publication schedules permit. Other posts of the honorable name of "shameless self promotion" pertain to his other books, particularly the latest which is on the topic of companies still in business today which were around in Civil War times.

Civil War Memory

Kevin Levin teaches at a private high school of exceptionally high caliber in Virginia, and he blogs what he teaches his students: to always look at the primary source before examining how the meaning of events has changed over time. Writings both professionally and on the blog often have to do with black Americans both slave, free and military, with focal emphasis on the US Colored Troops experience at the Battle of the Crater in Petersburg.

Civil War Navy, et al.,

Andrew Duppstadt is, by day, the Assistant Curator of Education for the North Carolina Division of State Historic Sites. After hours and on weekends he changes into his secret (well, okay, not very secret) identity as a seagoing man of an earlier time, ranging from the colonial/Revolutionary War period to that of the Late Unpleasantness. Good discussion of earlier period firearms is to be found here as well.

CivilWarriors.net

This group blog is the joint project of Sean B. Dail, Mark Grimsley, Ethan S. Rafuse, Brooks D. Simpson, and Steven E. Woodworth, making it by far the most "academically" oriented heavyweight on the blog scene. They could easily overcome any disputatious commenter by dropping one copy of each book all of them have written onto the pest's head, squishing it at once. Wide range of topics here from the sorts of professors you wish you could have had in college.

Civil War Women

Maggie, or "Maggiemac" as she calls herself for blogging purposes, covers a wide range of women from the Civil War era. While nurses and abolitionists and vocal advocates of women's rights are somewhat overrepresented since they were more likely to have written or been written about, all levels of society can be found mentioned here. Women of both north and south, black, white, Native American and mixed race, of high and low social station are all to be found her if Maggie can find any details on them at all.

Crossed Sabers

"Don" is another of those who sticks to the old tradition of blogger anonymity, at least as far as last name is concerned. He was a member of a more recent version of a Regular Cavalry unit, and blogs here about Regular Cavalry forces of the Civil War period. He notes that these are often under-represented in historical attentions due to greater emphasis on the volunteer cavalry units. Officers and common soldiers of the horse troops all find a place here as Don turns up information about them.  

Draw the Sword

Jenny  Goellnitz describes herself as "...an avid runner, cancer survivor, and student of the Civil War." She is also an absolutely terrific photographer, and visitor to Gettysburg as often as can be arranged from her home base in Ohio. Her studies of each and every Union monument at that battlefield may be the best pictures of many of them ever taken, and a smart publisher would arrange to promptly buy them to illustrate a new book on the subject.

Hoofbeats and Cold Steel

 J. David Petruzzi or "JD" as he is commonly known is the book-writing partner of Eric Wittenberg whose "Civil War Cavalry" blog is mentioned earlier on this page. There is often a certain degree of overlap between the two blogs, but JD has interests of his own and a nice way of expressing them. Another good site for regular reading by cavalry fans and others.

Lincoln Studies

Samuel Wheeler is another blogger whose focus is the 16th President. Since we already have the "Abraham Lincoln Blog" of Geoff Elliott noted above, why have another site devoted to a man dead nearly a century and a half? Turns out two smart, witty, perceptive people can find different things to say about the same subject and both are well worth reading. Wheeler also covers "Lincoln on eBay" which is not to be missed.

Michigan Civil War Blog

John Dempsey, who usually goes by "Jack" is a member of the Michigan Historical Commission with a mission: he wants it known, remembered and noted what his state did in the Civil War. This is very easy to do in a state like Virginia where you have a battlefield about every mile and a half, but harder to do in the upper Midwest where the action was in the packing plants and the industrial foundries and the recruiting stations. Jack keeps at it though, and there is more to be found than you might expect.

North Carolina and the Civil War

Michael Hardy studies and writes about, as you might well have guessed, the participation of North Carolina in the Civil War. Unlike Andrew Duppstadt, whose interests are coastal and maritime, Hardy works more in the western and mountainous parts of the state. He has published books on the topic and is currently researching on another regiment from that part of the state.

Of Battlefields and Bibliophiles

David Woodbury is a well known name to long time participants in Civil War activities on the Internet. Besides noting and writing on a wide range of topics--often book related but by no means always--he frequently reprints material including interviews from the  Civil War Forum from years, nay decades, gone by.

Pinstripe Press Blog

Michael Aubrecht might be one of those items that "Where have I heard this name before?" section of your brain. If so you are probably a baseball fan since he has written extensively for heavy publications in that field. Nowadays he lives with the Civil War on all sides in Fredericksburg Virginia, where he devotes much attention to religious matters and combines this with Civil War writing.

The Old Virginia Blog

Richard G. Williams Jr. is a long-time, as in several generations worth, resident of the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia and draws much sustenance from the depths of his roots there. The writer of a book on Stonewall Jackson which has been adapted into a recent movie, he writes more on conservative political and religious subjects than the Civil War in recent times.

Throwing Down the Gauntlet

Mike, another blogger who adheres to the old style of using no last name on his blog, is another generalist. He comes up with some of the oddest stories found on the Web and online news sites. A persistent interest in studying the Lincoln assassination and associated mysteries and myths is a frequent source of posts. His secret identity is as a substitute school teacher. This site does not have a conventional Blogger masthead and first time visitors might think they are at a football blog. It is one which for some reason you cannot get out of by using the "back" button on your keyboard.

My Year of Living Rangerously

Mannie Gentile had a perfectly respectable career as a museum educator in Michigan, which he threw over to become a park ranger at Antietam. He's still only on part time seasonal status, so in winter we hear of his adventures as a substitute teacher at RhinoVirus Elementary in nearby Sharpsburg. Adept at photography, video work, drawing and cartooning, war helmet collecting, woodworking and no doubt other skills as yet unmentioned, we suspect he may be the happiest man on the face of the earth.

Teaching the Civil War With Technology

Jim Beeghley runs what he describes as " Curriculum integration strategies and ideas for incorporating technology into the teaching of the American Civil War." The object is to both point out online sources of Civil War information to classroom teachers, and bring them up to speed on how to use them without begging for aid from their more web-savvy students. 

 TOCWOC

Brett Schulte is the primary operator of this site, whose name is not really an ancient Indian word but in fact stands for "The Order of Civil War Obsessively Compulsed." Originally set up as a group blog they have had a variety of posters come and go. Fred Ray has the most historically oriented posts, Brett covers books and games by and large, and occasional poster Jim Lamason has a concentration on New Jersey and its role in the war.

 Touch the Elbow

Tom Churchill, Donald Thompson and Stephen McManus make up the team at this group blog. A careful reader of URLs will find that the address of this site mentions the name "18thmass" and indeed that regiment and its members are the frequent topics of posts. The bloggers are the authors of a Civil War guidebook which gets a modest does of shameless self-promotion on the site.

Wig-Wags

Rene Tyree's site is named, of course, for the signal flags used for daylight communication across long distances in the days before radio communication was available. Currently a student of military history, the blog often focuses on whatever the classroom topic of the day might be. Some awesome erudition here with coverage of important figures in military theory from a wide range of countries and periods.

With Sword and Pen

Paul Taylor's blog covers books but from a different perspective than most. His interest is that of a book collector so there is much discussion of the relative importance of acquiring first editions as opposed to later ones, and notes on the current prices being paid for works on auction sites. The contents of the books in question are by no means ignored, but the outsides are as important as the insides in many ways. Reviews of current and recent works are also featured frequently.