Jing and Voting America

I am playing around with a new social media tool called Jing, which allows you to take screen shots and videos of your desktop.  It’s free and seems to be easy to use.  I’m not quite sure how I might use this in class, but I did take a few minutes to introduce you to [...]

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Rape in the Civil War, Memory, and the Problem of Gender Bias

Yesterday’s post about sexual violence and rape in the Civil War led to a spirited exchange.  As always, I appreciate your comments even when the topics are emotionally divisive.  My wife, Michaela, read through the entire exchange and, as a result, formulated some strong opinions which she wrote up as a comment.  After reading it [...]

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Rape and the Threat of Sexual Violence in the Civil War South + Gary Casteel

I came across an interesting little post at the New York Times’s Idea of the Day in which the question of rape and sexual violence during the Civil War is raised.  The blog post links to an essay by historian, Crystal N. Feimster, which recently appeared in Daedelus.  While the essay is worth reading the [...]

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Please Stop Using Our Civil War To Satisfy Your Own Fantasies

Gary Casteel’s previous projects include a sculpture of Jefferson Davis holding hands with his biological son and “adopted” black son, Jim Limber.  That project satisfied the fantasies of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, which as far as I know still cannot find a home for it.  From the fantasy of southern paternalism we move to [...]

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“History Through the Veil Again”: A Response to Ta-Nehisi Coates

The latest post by Ta-Nehisis Coates beautifully captures the frustrations that many African Americans experience when visiting America’s Civil War battlefields and specifically those places where African Americans participated.  A recent visit to the Petersburg battlefields, including the Crater, by Coates and his children highlights the continued challenges facing museums, the National Park Service, and [...]

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“A Bloody Affair”

[My review of John Schmutz's recent book on the Crater is now up at H-Net] The last several years has witnessed a sharp increase in the number of studies focused on the final year of the Civil War in Virginia and specifically the Petersburg Campaign.  Much of this can be traced to a renewed scholarly [...]

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A Civil War Museum of Facts and Not Beliefs

Are you tired of the continued attack on American culture by liberal academic and public historians who present history in a way that conflicts with your cherished notions of the Civil War and Southern history?  Well, head on down to Jacksonville, Florida to the Museum of Southern History.  Although it claims to be a museum [...]

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2009 Frederick Douglass Book Award Nominees

I‘m a little late in posting this, but wanted to point your attention to the three finalists for this year’s Frederick Douglass Book Award that is sponsored by Yale’s Gilder-Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition. The finalists are Thavolia Glymph for Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the [...]

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