Thousands of Americans are expected to crowd the streets of Columbia, South Carolina today to demand the removal of the Confederate flag from statehouse grounds. This is the 10th such rally in South Carolina. I published this post back in 2008, but thought it might be appropriate to highlight it once again. By now most [...]
Southern History
It’s difficult to tell whether much of anything is going to happen here in Virginia this weekend in acknowledgment of Lee-Jackson Day. Yes, there is the parade tomorrow in Lexington, but that’s not surprising given the fact that the city serves as their final resting place. It would be very strange indeed if the city [...]
Looks like anti-Neo-Confederate crusader, Edward Sebesta, is getting a head start on this year’s petition requesting that President Obama not send a wreath to the Confederate monument at Arlington National Cemetery. I covered this in some detail on the blog and was very open in my opposition to such a petition. [You can read my [...]
I don’t know how I failed to comment on this, but the discussion early on in the interview is important. It is unusual to hear two African-American men talk about the importance of the Civil War as one of the most important democratizing events in American history. Of course, Coates is referring to the end [...]
This year is the 70th anniversary of Gone With the Wind and this week my Civil War Memory class will watch it. Depending on how they respond to it we may even watch it in its entirety. There are so many thought provoking scenes, which will allow us to address a number of interpretive threads [...]
I‘ve been thinking quite a bit about Sgt. Richard Kirkland lately. Last week Peter Carmichael referenced Kirkland in his speech marking the anniversary of the battle of Fredericksburg. Carmichael used the Kirkland story and his monument on the Fredericksburg battlefield to point out our tendency to glamorize the Civil War and ignore the more horrific [...]
Update: Is Jackson’s dark complexion just an accident or is this an attempt to blur the racial line? If you didn’t know any better one might think that Confederate leaders were at the forefront of the civil rights movement. Case in point is the popular and misunderstood story of Stonewall Jackson’s black Sunday School which [...]
One of my biggest complaints about the many stories about so-called “black Confederates” is that the authors in question have almost no interest in doing serious research. Most of the stories that you will find on the Internet are simply cut and pasted from one site to another. Essentially, these men are treated as a [...]
