Clay Risen is a staff editor at the New York Times op-ed page, where he oversees “Disunion,” the paper’s online series about the Civil War. He is the author of American Whiskey,...

Here’s what I love most about whiskey: time. You need time to make a good whiskey; Scotch takes at least three years by law, bourbon has no legal minimum, but in either case it’s four...

Is there any better-trod topic in American history than the Civil War? In 2002 the Library of Congress estimated that 50,000 to 70,000 books and monographs about the conflict had appeared...