In the Battle of Ball’s Bluff, Virginia, on October 21, 1861, the 1st Minnesota Volunteers had just one casualty: a man named Lewis Mitchell. Mitchell was “only a private,” one of the approximately 750,000 casualties in the Civil War.

In celebration of National Poetry Month, we’ll be highlighting some of the intriguing, eloquent, and historically significant poems in the Gilder Lehrman Collection. These poems shed a personal light on momentous events in American history, from the American Revolution to World War I.

The first Battle of Fredericksburg, fought December 11–15, 1862, has the distinction of being the largest Civil War battle, with a staggering total of 173,000 combatants. On December 11, Union troops came under heavy fire as they built bridges across the Rappahannock River. They crossed into the town of Fredericksburg the next day and clashed with Confederate troops, making this the first urban battle of the war. On December 13, 1862, Union troops led by General Ambrose Burnside faced off against General Robert E.

Congratulations to Lamar University history professor Jeff Forret, who has been selected as the winner of the 2016 Frederick Douglass Book Prize for his book Slave Against Slave: Plantation Violence in the Old South (Louisiana State University Press). Forret’s book explores the physical conflicts between enslaved people in the American South prior to the Civil War.

On November 14, 1775, Richard Henry Lee, a Virginia delegate to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, visited fellow delegate John Adams, and the two held a fruitful discussion on “what fo