Boys' Life is the official youth magazine for the Boy Scouts of America. Published since 1911, it contains a proven mix of news, nature, sports, history, fiction, science, comics, and Scouting.

It is 1876 America. Ulysses S. Grant is completing his second term as president, the Civil War has been over for eleven years, and Sitting Bull’s Lakota have just defeated Custer’s seventh calvary. But now as rumors begin circulating about a mystical being that is stalking the moonlit skeletons on the battlefield, the US Army begins developing a plan to investigate. A year later, the army dispatches an expedition to return to the Little Bighorn to retrieve the remains of the officers and unearth the alleged mystery behind the rumors. Accompanying the soldiers is a thirty-one-year-old undercover private investigator tasked with interviewing any and all witnesses to Custer’s movements and the subsequent battle along the banks of the Little Bighorn. As DelCol searches for men to interview who he hopes will answer all his questions, he is led down a fascinating path into the history of one of the most famous battles of all time—and eventually to a destiny he never could have imagined. The Storytellers is the tale of a private investigator’s odyssey as he rides along with the US Army in 1877 to investigate the mysteries surrounding the battle of the Little Bighorn.

From Birth of a Nation to Cold Mountain, Hollywood has used the Civil War to create compelling cinema with each generation resolving the tug of war between entertainment value and historical accuracy differently. Wills looks at the portrayal of the war in film, explores their accuracy, how the films influenced each other, and how they reflect America's changing understandings of the conflict and of the nation.

More than sixty years ago, the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that America’s schools could no longer be segregated by race. Critically acclaimed novelist Jim Grimsley was eleven years old in 1966 when federally mandated integration of schools went into effect in the state and the school in his small eastern North Carolina town was first integrated. Until then, blacks and whites didn’t sit next to one another in a public space or eat in the same restaurants, and they certainly didn’t go to school together. Going to one of the private schools that almost immediately sprang up was not an option for Jim: his family was too poor to pay tuition, and while they shared the community’s dismay over the mixing of the races, they had no choice but to be on the front lines of his school’s desegregation. What he did not realize until he began to meet these new students was just how deeply ingrained his own prejudices were and how those prejudices had developed in him despite the fact that prior to starting sixth grade, he had actually never known any black people. Now, more than forty years later, Grimsley looks back at that school and those times--remembering his own first real encounters with black children and their culture. The result is a narrative both true and deeply moving. Jim takes readers into those classrooms and onto the playing fields as, ever so tentatively, alliances were forged and friendships established. And looking back from today’s perspective, he examines how far we have really come.

Examines the events and effects of the American Civil War.

In Troubled Commemoration, Robert J. Cook recounts the planning, organization, and ultimate failure of United States Civil War Centennial and reveals how the broad-based public history extravaganza was derailed by its appearance during the decisive phase of the civil rights movement.