An American Turning Point: The Civil War in Virginia—a 3,000 square foot gallery exhibition featuring more than 200 objects and 17 state-of-the-art audiovisual programs—encourages visitors to consider how a single event, separated by 150 years can influence and address the questions of today: what was gained, what was lost, what was undecided, and what was left for us to resolve?

The traveling exhibit consists of two parts. This half of the exhibition, "Waging War" examines the battlefront, explains how the war was fought in Virginia, and details the impact of the war on the home front.

From 1861–1865 Virginia stood at the center of a military and social revolution. How we define freedom, liberty, patriotism, and nation today is directly related to the experiences of the generation that waged and survived the American Civil War.

An American Turning Point is a signature program of the Virginia Sesquicentennial of the American Civil War Commission. The exhibition opened at the Virginia Historical Society on February 4, 2011, and will travel to seven other Virginia museums from January 2012 through August 2015.

About this video
Why Did the Civil War Happen? is the subject of the introductory video for the VHS blockbuster show, An American Turning Point: The Civil War in Virginia. Slavery caused the war, but the war did not begin to free the enslaved. Throughout the 1850s, slavery had kept the free North and the slaveholding South on a collision course that could end in dissolution of the Union or a war to preserve it.