Thanks to fellow Revise and Dissent blogger Alun Salt for nominating this blog for a Cliopatria Award. I was so impressed with the nomination that I decided to post it here. Given the competition out there I don’t have a chance in hell of winning, but it is nice to know that there are people out there who think so highly of this project.
I think a good blog is going to be regularly updated, thoughtful and
capable of surprising the reader, so my vote goes to Kevin Levin’s Civil War Memory.All I ‘know’ about the American Civil War is what I’ve heard in largely
dire documentaries. The ones where someone with a croaky Southern
accent reads something like "Things got so bad we wuz pulling our own
teeth to use them fer shot, but that didn’t matter cuz we wuz fahting
for Liberty."Kevin’s blog makes the Civil War a much more textured and interesting
event than the cartoon version that we get on the other side of the
Atlantic. You can dip into any week in the archive and pull out a gem.
With no effort at all I can point you at Remembering Memorial Day, Blacks in Gray or "Enough is Enough" or Confederate Military Executions. He’s also very good on the process of making history. From just this week we have Balancing Interpretation, Celebration, and Entertainment In Public Spaces, How Wide Is The Gap Between Professional Civil War Historians And The General Public? and Interpreting Slave Narratives.The war may have been the Union versus the Confederacy, but reading
Kevin’s blog makes it clear that the modern United States has its
history on all sides of the war.
I will eventually nominate my favorite blogs, but there are so many that I don’t even know where to start. So head on over to Cliopatria and say something nice about your favorite bloggers. They deserve the kind words.