The following clip was pulled from a recent NEH panel on the legacy of emancipation. It included Ed Ayers, Gary Gallagher, Christy Coleman, Eric Foner, and Thavolia Glymph. I highly recommend viewing the entire session if you have the time, but for now check out this short clip from the Q&A. In it an African-American [...]
Civil War Sesquicentennial
This event has been a long time in the making and I signed on to take part when I was still living in Virginia. John Brown Lives! is a small organization led by Martha Swan, which focuses on public and educational outreach around issues related to freedom and oppression in history and in our world [...]
I had no idea that there is now a chapter of Flaggers in North Carolina. It would be a stretch to draw any type of formal connection with the Flaggers in Virginia. It’s the same inane rhetoric about a subject they apparently know very little about. In this case, it’s a new exhibit about Lincoln [...]
Not too long ago I suggested that H.K. Edgerton’s performance is geared to and best received by white Southerners, who find vindication in his narrative of slavery as a benign institution and the peaceful co-existence of the races during the antebellum period and through the war into Reconstruction and beyond. Today I learned that [...]
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 [...]
It’s probably too late to say anything substantial about the sesquicentennial at this stage, but two recent events suggest that Americans remain interested in the Civil War and continue to travel to various destinations in impressive numbers. Fellow bloggers Robert Moore and Craig Swain both attended events commemorating the 150th of Antietam and were encouraged [...]
That on the first day of January in the year of our Lord, one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any state, or designated part of a state, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and the executive [...]
One of the features of American Experience’s documentary Death and the Civil War that I really like is its emphasis on the lingering bitterness over how to commemorate the Civil War dead. Although the film says nothing about the significance of Lincoln’s death it does explore the decision by the federal government to re-inter only [...]
A few months ago I received a preview copy of American Experience’s Death and the Civil War, which will air on PBS this week. This weekend I finally had a chance to watch it through, which seems appropriate given that we are commemorating the 150th anniversary of the battle of Antietam. I am not going [...]