Update – 01/24: Yesterday the bill was stricken from the Senate’s calendar. Update: Head on over to Robert Moore’s site for some thoughtful commentary on Lincoln’s connection to the Shenandoah Valley. Turns out that the Lincoln family’s roots are deep. The Virginia General Assembly is considering a bill that would designate the third Monday in [...]
Civil War Sesquicentennial
Over the past few days I’ve been putting together some thoughts for a panel on the Civil War sesquicentennial that I am taking part in this coming April at the annual meeting of the OAH in Milwaukee. I shared my proposal a few months ago and am now trying to fill in some of the [...]
The coins represent all thirteen Confederate states. Somehow the 9-11 commemorative coin collection makes this looks reasonable. Oh…inventory is limited so order yours today.
In the process of reviewing the final edits for my Crater book I’ve had to go through research files that have not been touched in a couple of years. Today I read through a bunch of editorials concerning the 1937 Crater re-enactment in Petersburg, which the National Park Service used to mark the inclusion of [...]
After Virginia no other state has done more to commemorate the American Civil War than North Carolina. Their state commission has done an excellent job thus far of organizing activities that reflect an incredibly rich and complex past. They are doing their very best to make the war relevant to the state’s diverse population by [...]
This week the local newspaper in my former home of Charlottesville, Virginia reported that the Lee statue had been vandalized. I hope the perpetrators are caught and punished to the fullest extent of the law. I spent countless hours in that park with my students interpreting the monument and using the park to better understand [...]
It’s been interesting to watch the comments section at The Atlantic evolve in response to my most recent post. I have no moderating power so it is just a matter of sitting back and watching individuals talk past one another in their typical self-absorbed fashion. That said, some of the comments are worth a bit [...]
Last month I gave a talk to the Rhode Island Civil War Round Table in which I offered an assessment of the first full year of the Civil War Sesquicentennial celebrations and commemoration. I decided to work on it a bit more and I am pleased to share it with you in The Atlantic. It [...]
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 [...]