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Born enslaved, Romeo Smith of Windham, Maine, entered the Continental Army with the promise of freedom in exchange for military service. He served in the 7th Massachusetts for three years and was supposedly manumitted. Yet in January...

Vivandieres, sometimes known as cantinieres, were women who followed the army to provide support for the troops. Ideally, a vivandiere would have been a young woman—the daughter of an officer or wife of a non-commissioned officer—who...

George Tillotson from Greene, New York, enlisted with the 89th New York Infantry in November of 1861. This ambrotype (photograph made on glass) and a series of letters from the summer of 1862 remind us that soldiers and their families...

One hundred years ago this weekend, the RMS Titanic sank, claiming the lives over 1,500 passengers and crew. In this account, Dr. Washington Dodge recounts his tale of survival. Written on board the RMS Carpathia during the three-day...

In 1836, Abraham Lincoln found himself in a tenuous situation. He was engaged to a woman he barely knew and didn’t want to marry. Mrs. Elizabeth Abell had been pushing for a romance between Lincoln and her sister, Mary Owens, whom...

What would be a better Mother’s Day present than learning that your child would be returning home from war? In 1919, thirty-year-old Lawrence Hopkins of the 305th Engineers was at the Forwarding Camp in Le Mans, France, awaiting...

When the Civil War broke out, David McNeely Stauffer (1845–1913) was only sixteen years old. While attending Franklin and Marshall College in Pennsylvania from September 1861 through June 1863, he served brief, emergency enlistments...

Between the pages of his math exercise book John Barstow jotted down a patriotic tune called "The Amaricans Challing" on January 2, 1777. Carefully written in a youth’s unsteady hand, the text appears to be a transcript of a popular...