Well, I guess you have to give the guy credit for taking the time yesterday to visit Howard University and engage students in a little politics and history. I was particularly interested in the latter. One of the problems that Senator Paul ran into was his insistence on giving the student body a history lesson, [...]
Civil Rights History
Over at the Atlantic I share some thoughts about the recent controversy in Memphis surrounding the renaming of Forrest Park. I hope the essay at least provides a bit of historical context to this issue. Once again, thanks to Court Carney for making my job much easier. Tennessee’s state legislature finally passed a measure making [...]
Many of you have viewed the Open Yale Course on the Civil War and Reconstruction taught by David Blight. It’s a wonderful opportunity to take a survey course with one of the nation’s most respected Civil War scholars. I am currently making my way through Professor Jonathan Holloway’s course, African American History: From Emancipation to [...]
Unfortunately, this may be the closest we get to any formal acknowledgement of the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation by the federal government. I love the broadside/poster theme and the use of one of the oldest letterpress print shops in the country to create the image. In addition to the stamp, you can also [...]
In February 2011 a group of teachers, accompanied by Dr. John Stauffer of Harvard University, flew from Boston to Memphis, TN and from there traveled by bus through the South visiting sites of historic importance to the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement, seeking a better understanding of each period and of the relationship [...]
Today marks the 50th anniversary of campus violence at Ole Miss over the admission of James Meredith. NPR interview with Meredith Photographs from Ole Miss Special Collections Interpretation by James Sakoguchi Student-produced documentary on Confederate symbology at Ole Miss James Meredith’s new autobiography, A Mission from God: A Memoir and Challenge for America New York [...]
Yesterday I posted a video on the Civil War Memory Facebook page about the recent controversy in Jacksonville, Florida concerning Nathan Bedford Forrest High School. The short documentary tells the story of the steps that one local community college professor took to change the name of the school. The center of the story is Professor [...]
It’s nice to see that Ta-Nahesi Coates’s contribution to the The Atlantic’s special Civil War issue is getting so much attention. It nicely sums up why I am now a regular reader of his blog and why last week I went to meet him in person at MIT. Coates’s essay is a very personal and [...]
The vast majority of black Confederate accounts on the Internet follow a well-worn narrative. First, we are somehow to believe that servants/slaves volunteered to accompany their owners to war and in doing so solidified a bond of friendship and a commitment to the achievement of Confederate independence. Many of these postwar accounts offer rich descriptions [...]