Welcome to Week 3 of #CWM101, which will take place on Twitter on Sunday, April 12th at 8pm. One of the things that I really appreciate in these early chapters of Caroline Janney’s Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation is its emphasis on the war years. This focus drives home the Read more

Update: A number of you have asked about purchasing personalized copies of Searching for Black Confederates through PayPal. I finally got around to setting it up and a new box of books is scheduled to arrive early next week. I will also include a free copy of The Civil War Monitor magazine while supplies last Read more

The Virginia Flaggers are celebrating the beginning of Confederate History and Heritage Month. Unfortunately, they seem to be unaware of the fact that the Commonwealth of Virginia no longer officially recognizes it. Now before you blame or praise the Democrats, who now control the state assembly, it might be worth remembering that it was a Read more

Next Class: Sunday April 5 at 8pm. We are going to continue this week with chapter 2 in Janney’s Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation. This chapter explores the major events at the end of the war that shaped Reconstruction, but also provided a foundation for the early formation of competing Read more

Introduction With so many of you hunkering down in your homes I thought it might be a good idea to move forward with my idea to offer a course/discussion group on twitter on the topic of Civil War memory. I’ve had difficulty focusing on my own research and have been looking for ways to connect Read more

I hope that all of you are safe and doing well during this very difficult period. Here are some new books that have come my way that you might find enjoyable. All of my talks for March, April, and May have been cancelled, which means that I have plenty of copies of Searching for Black Confederates Read more

As history educators we routinely ask our students to interpret historical documents such as letters and diaries. We ask them to interpret these primary sources to gain insight into a specific moment or period in history. Students explore, among other things, the importance of perspective, significance, and cause & effect. History may often appear to Read more

Last night C-SPAN featured this recent panel discussion about Confederate monuments from last year’s Lincoln Forum that included historians Harold Holzer, Edna Medford, Elizabeth Varon, and Gary Gallagher. It’s well worth watching, but if you’ve seen a panel discussion like this you won’t learn much of anything new. That is not a criticism of the Read more

I got a real kick out of this short video featuring Virginia Flagger Barry Isenhour and Teresa Roane, who used to work as an archivist at the Museum of the Confederacy and now with the United Daughters of the Confederacy. The video posted just yesterday focuses on black Confederates. I am singled out, along with Read more