The Civil War Podcast

If – like me – you’re planning a visit to DC during this 1862 sesquicentennial year, be sure to add the National Portrait Gallery to your must-sees.  In addition to an exhibition of Brady’s portraits of the Union generals, there’s a collection of Adalbert Volck etchings on display. A Volck lithograph was reproduced in the [...]

Civil War buffs in Washington, DC have another month and a half to partake in the Corcoran Gallery’s Shadows of History exhibition. The photographs capture a wide range of subjects, from geographical views, landscapes, and portraits of soldiers and officers at rest, to the death and destruction in the aftermath of battles. Photographs by George [...]

As I mentioned yesterday, The Atlantic Monthly is knocking the sesquicentennial celebrations out of the park. This piece on the Gettysburg Cyclorama is fantastic, and is making me greatly regret declining a ticket on both my trips to the park. Four hundred feet long. Fifty feet high. It was art on an astonishing scale. All [...]

One of the members of my Civil War Round Table reminded me – in stunning fashion, by bringing in his entire set – that Topps issued a series of trading cards in the 1960s, commemorating the centennial. They’re beautifully rendered in gory detail for their target market of pre-teen boys: A painting on the front [...]

Another one of those out-of-nowhere serendipitous museum stories that warm the cockles of my nerdy, bookish heart: For years, the Danville Museum of Fine Arts and History hoped to display a piece of work by Henry VanderWeyde, an artist turned Union prisoner of war who spent a year behind bars in Danville. “We had a [...]