Built by contract with John Ericsson at Green Point, Long Island, and launched January 30, 1862, the USS Monitor saw its first naval action at Hampton Roads, Virginia, on March 9, 1862. Despite the CSS Virginia being almost twice its size, with ten guns, the Monitor wit

1896 Pattern Medal of Honor awarded to Daniel Butterfield, “for distinguished gallantry in action at Gaines Mills, Va. June 27, 1862” Perhaps best known as the composer of the bugle call "Taps," Daniel Butterfield began his Civil War service as a sergeant in the Washington, D.C

These two minie balls from opposing sides met head-on during fierce fighting at the Battle of Fredericksburg, Virginia, in December 1862.

General William T. Sherman wore this Model 1850 staff and field officer's sword during the Battle of Shiloh in Tennessee, April 6–8, 1862.

Seal with an equestrian portrait of George Washington, surrounded by a wreath composed of the principal agricultural products of the Confederacy including cotton, tobacco, sugar cane, wheat, and rice. Embossed around the edge, "The Confederate States of America: 22 February, 1862" and the motto D

This Medal of Honor was awarded to Sergeant Major Christian Fleetwood, 4th U.S. Colored Troops, for heroism on the field of battle at Chaffin’s Farm on September 29, 1864. Fleetwood seized the colors after two color bearers had been shot down, and bore them nobly through the fight. Fleetwood wa

In this post, readers will see what a Civil War-era lithograph reveals about life in a prisoner of war camp early in the Civil War.  The significance of the piece, however, lies both in that insight and in the contrast between living conditions in the camp in 1862 and in the later war years.

In this post, students will explore Louisa May Alcott's service as a nurse during the Civil War. While Alcott is perhaps best known as the author of the 19th-century classic Little Women, she also served as a Union nurse in Washington, D.C. at Georgetown’s Union Hotel Hospita

In this post, students will learn about the Civil War through a photographic album presented to Anna Lowell in 1864 by a group of attendants in D.C.'s Armory Square Hospital. In 1862, having recently been trained as a nurse, Lowell had traveled from Cambridge to D.C. and immediately gotten t