Contact a company that specializes in Civil War tours, such as Civil War Travelers. You can set up tours in any one of 30 states to see battlefields, battle re-enactments, cemeteries and sites that were important in the war that took place from 1861 to 1865.
Visit a National Civil War Park. Check the schedules for such sites as Andersonville, Antietam, Appomattox, Chattanooga, Ford's Theatre, Gettysburg, Harper's Ferry, Manassas, Richmond, Shiloh or Vicksburg.
Tour a lesser-known museum such as White Oak Museum near Fredericksburg, Virginia. "The New York Times" notes that this is one of the best places to see what the war was like during the winter months. Besides relics dug up from the battlefield, there are tents set up to show war encampments. You can also see chess pieces that soldiers carved from bullets.
According to the National Park Service, "The White Oak Museum is perhaps the greatest locally oriented collection of Civil War artifacts in the country."
See the No. 1 Civil War attraction named by "National Geographic." Fort Sumter National Monument in Charleston, South Carolina, was where the Civil War started when Confederate troops fired upon the fort. The first two deaths of the war took place here, followed by more than 600,000 other deaths before the war ended four years later.
There is a fort museum and at the nearly Charleston Naval Yard, the long-buried Confederate submarine H.L. Hunley can be seen.
