Reality TV Show For Historians?

You heard that right.  It was just a matter of time before someone came up with the idea of basing a reality TV show around the eccentricities and annoying behavior of history buffs.  Here is the description for the casting call: Are you a curious person, and obsessed with history? Can you recite facts inside [...]

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From Heroes to Survivors

Earlier today I finished reading Michael J. Bennett’s essay “The Black Flag and Confederate Soldiers: Total War from the Bottom Up” which is also published in Andy Slap and Michael Smith eds., This Distracted and Anarchical People: New Answers for Old Questions about the Civil War-Era North.  In his essay, Bennett explores accounts of massacres [...]

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Confederate Camp Servants on Saturday Night Live

Bonus material compliments of The Onion. [H/T to Bjorn Skaptason] A number of my Civil War peeps on Facebook are passing around a Comedy Central skit about the Civil War, which I posted here a few years back.  To return the favor I give you another classic from Saturday Night Live.  Not surprisingly, I love [...]

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Black Confederates At Appomattox

It never fails that at some point during the Q&A following a talk about my Crater book an audience member brings up the subject of black Confederate soldiers.  Most of the time the issue is raised in complete innocence.  They heard about it from a fellow history enthusiast or, more likely, read about it online.  [...]

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The Community of the Civil War Regiment

I had one of those moments this morning when reading the work of another historian opened my eyes to ways to deepen my own thinking about a particular subject.  Much of what I’ve written about in the first chapter of my black Confederates book explores the relationship between individual camp servants and their masters.  It [...]

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The Future of Civil War History Is Not On the Battlefield

Tomorrow I hope to finish up an essay that I was asked to write for one of the Civil War journals over a year ago about the the influence of digital technologies on how we write and research history and how that has fueled the myth of the black Confederate soldier.  At the end of [...]

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Should This Confederate Flag Be Allowed in School?

Once again, the courts have supported the right of school districts to ban students from wearing clothing that includes the Confederate flag.  The most recent case involved a school district in South Carolina in which a student repeatedly clashed with school administrators over a number of t-shirts that likely were purchased at a local Dixie [...]

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Stonewall Jackson’s Black Friend

Update: Richard Williams has decided to respond to this post on his blog. What I find interesting is that he has nothing to say about the content of the post. Instead he takes issue with one of my comments about my characterization of his understanding of the influence of Nat Turner’s Rebellion on race/slavery and [...]

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