Historians Brooks Simpson and Mark Grimsley lead a group on a day-long tour of Antietam National Battlefield, the 1862 engagement that is considered the bloodiest single day in American history. Visiting key locations at the National Park, including the Cornfield, Sunken Lane and Burnside Bridge, the historians use the landscape and demonstrations to show what the battle was like for the armies on the ground.

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Harvard University history professor and author Megan Kate Nelson talks about the battlefield photography and illustrations made in the wake of the Battle of Antietam in September of 1862. Many of the images feature dead soldiers, and Ms. Nelson discusses the impact of those images both during the war and today. This talk is from the 2012 Civil War Institute Conference at Gettysburg College. It contains graphic content and images.

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Dennis Frye, author and chief historian at Harpers Ferry National Historical Park, talks about the state of the war in early September 1862. Confederate General Robert E. Lee was poised to invade the North, causing alarm among northern government officials and citizens. General Lee’s goal was Pennsylvania, but by what route and through what cities and towns was unclear.

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Lincoln Bicentennial Foundation Chair Harold Holzer talks about the photographs, prints, and political cartoons featuring two of the war’s leading generals, George B. McClellan and Robert E. Lee. He explains how the tone of those images changed over the course of the war and beyond, as dictated by each general’s successes and failures both on and off the battlefield. This talk is from the 2012 Civil War Institute Conference at Gettysburg College.

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Two historians talk about the Shenandoah Valley Campaigns of 1862 and 1864, which involved some of the fiercest fighting of the War. This is the fourth in a series of sessions from a conference organized by the Virginia Civil War Sesquicentennial Commission. The theme of this year’s gathering was Leadership and Generalship in the Civil War. The Virginia Military Institute hosted the conference.

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University of Virginia history professor Gary Gallagher talks about the Seven Days’ Battles, a series of conflicts fought during the last week of June 1862. In those battles, Confederate forces under Robert E. Lee thwarted George B. McClellan’s Army of the Potomac in the Union attempt to take the Confederate capital of Richmond. Professor Gallagher argues that, in many ways, the Seven Days’ Battles were more of a turning point in the Civil War than was the Battle of Gettysburg a year later. The Virginia Historical Society hosted this event.

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The New-York Historical Society hosts this discussion with historians Harold Holzer, James McPherson, and William Davis, who talk about Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis as opposing Civil War commanders-in-chief.

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Two speakers make presentations at the U.S. Capitol Historical Society’s 2012 Civil War Symposium. First, author Fergus Bordewich talks about the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, the Congressional panel created to monitor Northern military affairs. Then, economics professor Jenny Bourne talks about how the war was financed.

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Historians and authors discuss ongoing legacies of the Civil War — the issues and controversies still being borne out today. Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition hosted this event.

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Each week American Artifacts takes viewers into archives, museums and historic sites around the country. At the outbreak of the Civil War in the spring of 1861, Washington, DC, was lightly defended and vulnerable to attack, with only one fort located 12 miles south of the city and the Confederate state of Virginia just across the Potomac River. By 1865, the nation’s capital arguably had become the most fortified city in the world, with about 70 armed forts and batteries encircling the city. We visited three of the surviving forts with Dale Floyd, author of a study on the Civil War Defenses of Washington for the National Park Service.

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