Today I picked up the most recent issue of Civil War Times (August 2010) which includes my editorial on Governor Robert McDonnell’s Confederate History Month Proclamation. I joined an impressive group that included William Marvel, Susannah Ural, Lesley Gordon, S. Waite Rawls III, Catherine Clinton, Harold Holzer, Harry Smeltzer, and Michael Fellman. I enjoyed reading [...]
Civil War Culture
Those are the words of that great American historian…umm…I mean news anchor, Brian Williams, on Abraham Lincoln. Who the hell knows what he is talking about. I caught a few snippets of History’s recent series, “America: The Story of Us” and was disappointed on every level. Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t expecting much, maybe [...]
The Internet can be a wonderful source for reliable and important information on historical subjects. It can also be, and often is, a source for misleading and damaging information about the past. There is no better example of this than the divisive topic of “black Confederates.” Misinformation abounds on sites organized by individual SCV chapters [...]
Hope everyone is having a pleasant Memorial Day and has spent a little time in thought about why we set aside this day. President Obama decided to spend Memorial Day at the Abraham Lincoln National Cemetery in Illinois. In the spirit of acknowledging sacred sites beyond Arlington National Cemetery here is a news article and [...]
Virginia Governor Robert McDonnell will mark Memorial Day with an address at the Fredericksburg National Cemetery, which contains the graves of roughly 15,000 Union soldiers. Over at Mysteries and Conundrums, John Hennessy offers a brief history of the earliest Memorial Day observances, which were organized by the town’s African Americans. This continued until the early [...]
From Wikipedia: Set during the American Civil War, “Rebel Love follows a Yankee war widow who takes an injured Confederate spy into her home out of pity, only to find herself falling in love with him. The film was a finalist in the 1985 USA Film Festival in Dallas. Despite a modest theatrical run, Rebel [...]
I still don’t get what is so wrong with this shirt that Eric Wittenberg found in the gift shop at the Gettysburg Visitor Center. At first I thought that Lincoln was reacting to a gun shot, which would seem inappropriate, but I quickly realized that “Old Abe” was kickin’ some new dance moves. It’s a [...]
Last month I was honored to be asked by an editor at the Wilson Quarterly to respond to an essay by Christopher Clausen. I was given roughly a 300-400 word limit, which didn’t give me room to go into much detail so I decided to offer a few words about one particular passage that I [...]
As he promised in January Ed Sebesta has petitioned President Obama to discontinue the practice of sending a wreath to the Confederate statue at Arlington National Cemetery on Memorial Day. Actually, this petition goes much further than last year’s in requesting that the federal government “revoke the Sons of Confederate Veterans participation as a recognized [...]