MULTIFACETED DIAMOND

The first thing you notice are the faces. Black and white, male and female. All the faces have names; some famous, many not. At the recently opened American Civil War Museum at the Historic Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond, Va., the Civil War is presented as an intensely personal experience. From a 19th-century wall of red brick taken from the original iron works, a contemporary structure of glass and concrete emerges like a multifaceted diamond. The stories inside the 29,000 square feet of gallery space are also multilayered—immediate as today’s headlines and historic as the perpetual search for personal freedom and full citizenship in a changing America.

In 2013, the American Civil War Center at Historic Tredegar merged with the Museum of the Confederacy to create the American Civil War Museum, greatly expanding its scope. The new facility, of course, has its share of the artifacts you’d expect to find in a Civil War museum—rifles, pistols, swords, uniforms, etc. “But you don’t have to be a buff