Over the weekend C-SPAN televised a panel on emancipation that took place over the summer as part of the Civil War Institute. Pete Carmichael was kind enough to invite me to take part on this particular panel, though I have to admit that I felt a bit out of place next to my colleagues. The [...]
Slavery
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 [...]
I like the idea behind this short film. Young African-American woman gets an A on an essay she wrote about the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry after having viewed the movie, Glory. Her adviser suggests that she visit the African American Civil War Museum in Washington, D.C. to talk with curator Hari Jones. The two walk [...]
I am close to finishing up a magazine article on Confederate camp servants. This morning I read through a number of postwar accounts, which are always tricky to interpret. Consider the following passage from Andrew Ward’s, The Slaves’ War: The Civil War in the Words of Former Slaves. After the war, a slave named Luke [...]
This is one of those events that makes me wish that I still lived and taught in Virginia. My Civil War class would be front and center at this event. On September 22 a recreation of an 1862 slave crossing of the Rappahannock will take place at Cow’s Ford near Tin Pot Run. The famous [...]
You can decide whether you find this offensive. It’s a clip from an old show called History Bites, which ran from 1998-2003. Here is a link to the show’s Wikipedia entry if you are interested in learning more about the program.
I don’t normally share reader mail, but this struck me as worth posting. It’s been a few years since I last visited Stratford Hall and while I had a pleasant visit I too was struck by the emphasis on the cherubs. Today I visited Stratford Hall. The Great House obviously demonstrates the Lee family’s tremendous [...]
On June 30 the Anderson County UDC dedicated a marker to Wade Childs, who accompanied his owner as a body servant in Orr’s Rifles. Andy Hall recently took this one apart, not that it takes much time and effort to uncover these cases of so-called black Confederate soldiers. This one is an absolute mess. There [...]