In recognition of Black History Month, Fold3 wants to remind you to access all publications in its Black History Collection. In order to make browsing these records easier, Fold3 has divided them into the categories of Slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction & Jim Crow Laws, the World Wars, and the Civil Rights Movement. Just select…
One of our newest collections on Fold3 is The Civil War Horse Soldier Artifacts Collection. Like the title suggests, this collection contains images of Civil War artifacts from the Horse Solider antique store in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Many of the artifacts are photographs of soldiers, but there are also some images of weapons—like guns and swords—as…
January 5 marks the day in 1942 that Rear Admiral Ben Moreell was given authorization to create the Seabees, the naval force that would carry out an astonishingly diverse array of construction tasks at home and abroad for the Navy during World War II. The creation of the Seabees (short for Construction Battalions) was deemed…
On January 15, 1865, Fort Fisher, in North Carolina, fell after a three-day combined land-and-sea assault by Union troops. In December, Union major general Benjamin Butler had tried to bring down the Confederate fort (known as the “Gibraltar of the South” for its defenses) with the assistance of Rear Admiral David D. Porter but had…
Though you’re probably unfamiliar with the 307th Bomb Group, you may have heard of one of its members: Louis Zamperini, whose World War II survival story is the subject of the popular book Unbroken, by Laura Hillenbrand, and the new film of the same title, directed by Angelina Jolie. If Unbroken has sparked your interest…
Following the Battle of Franklin, which had devastated John Bell Hood‘s Confederate forces, Hood pursued the Union troops to Nashville, where they had joined with those of George H. Thomas. Now vastly outnumbered, Hood’s battered Army of Tennessee took a defensive position parallel to the Union lines on December 2, 1864, and waited for the…
On December 26, 1861, President Lincoln and his cabinet decided to release imprisoned Confederate envoys James Mason and John Slidell in order to avoid the possibility of war with Britain, thus concluding the diplomatic uproar known as the Trent Affair. It all started when an overzealous Union commander, Charles Wilkes, stopped a British mail ship,…
