About the Author
Joseph Ryan was the author of the original American Civil War feature series preserved here, with a particular focus on the campaigns in the Eastern Theater and on the constitutional questions that underlay the conflict.
Ryan's month-by-month chronicle followed the war as it unfolded a century and a half earlier, from the election of 1860 through the great campaigns of 1862, pairing narrative with close attention to the sources.
The articles gathered under his name range from battlefield narrative to legal history, reflecting a lifelong effort to understand not only what happened in the Civil War but why.
Ryan's features belong to a larger archive of campaigns, timelines and constitutional debates. For the full overview of the conflict, start at the American Civil War history site.