You can now pre-order Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth direct from the University of North Carolina Press at a 40% discount. Use the discount code 01DAH40 on the purchase page. With the discount you pay $18 + shipping, which is a great deal, especially for those of you who are Read more

My goal in the first two chapters of Searching for Black Confederates was to try to understand the role of enslaved labor in the Confederate army, in camp, on the march, and on the battlefield. In doing so I offer a picture of how the challenges of military life shaped and on occasion stretched the Read more

I haven’t written about Earl Ijames on this blog in quite some time. The curator at the North Carolina Museum of History is notorious for his presentations and even film about what he calls “Colored Confederates” – another misnomer that distorts the legal status and role of the vast majority of black men who labored Read more

The Confederacy’s reliance on slave labor throughout the Civil War is easily explained. The difference in population between North and South necessitated the mobilization of as many black bodies as possible. Enslaved people were needed on the home front to harvest crops for the army. They labored in mines, constructed rail lines and earthworks, and Read more

Update: You can now pre-order Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and IndieBound. Amazon is offering a pretty good discount on the list price so secure your copy today. John Conroy, Lincoln’s White House: The People’s House in Wartime (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017). Michael J. Larson Read more

I’ve been wanting to write a book about the history of Confederate monuments ever since the spring of 2017, when New Orleans completed the transformation of its Civil War commemorative landscape. I eventually dropped the idea having assumed that my window of opportunity had passed. Given some of the more recent debates and rallies at Read more

Yesterday New York Times Op-Ed writer, Charles Blow, posted a short video about the First Louisiana Native Guard on his twitter page. His interest in the subject appears to be connected to a current book project. Unfortunately, Blow offers a rather misleading interpretation of the men who volunteered and briefly served in the unit. BETRAYAL Read more

One of the things that researching and writing Searching for Black Confederates has done is shifted how I think about slavery and the Confederate army. More specifically, it has forced me to reconsider how to approach the relationship between the Confederate soldier and slavery. Historians such as James McPherson have written extensively about the defense Read more

Update: You can now pre-order Searching For Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and IndieBound. Emerson Baker, A Storm of Witchcraft: The Salem Trials and the American Experience (Oxford University Press, 2016). Philip Gerard, The Last Battleground: The Civil War Comes to North Carolina (University of North Carolina Read more