Today the city council in Lexington, Virginia will vote on a controversial ordinance that would ban display of Confederate flags on Main Street. As many of you know, Lexington is the burial place of Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee and the home of the Virginia Military Institute. The city is steeped in Confederate history. [...]
H.K. Edgerton
It looks like H.K. will not be performing as part of the Guyandotte Civil War Days, scheduled for Nov. 1-6 near Huntington, West Virginia. Apparently, Edgerton spoke last year at the event, but this year organizers were denied matching funds by the state’s Civil War sesquicentennial committee. That was sufficient to cancel his appearance. Of [...]
In response to my last post in which I suggested that public historians have reason to feel good about the seismic interpretive shifts that can be seen in our museum’s and other historical institutions John Hennessy offers the following: As it relates to the supply-side of the equation, I think there is little doubt that [...]
Looks like the newest line of Dixie Outfitters t-shirts is now available and with this little gem you are likely to be noticed miles away. Actually, I can’t tell whether we are supposed to celebrate black Confederate soldiers or H.K. Edgerton. Doesn’t this look utterly ridiculous when you put it up against this?
I noticed that Ann DeWitt has taken the time to respond to one of my recent posts about Entangled in Freedom [and here]. I will leave it to you to decipher her post. In addition, yesterday Hampton historian, Veronica Davis filed a lawsuit to halt the deletion of the controversial passage about black Confederates in [...]
Over the past few weeks I’ve used Ann DeWitt’s website as a case study of what is wrong with the current debate about black Confederates as well as the pitfalls of doing online research on this specific subject – a fact that was confirmed this past week. This morning I was browsing the Virginia Sesquicentennial [...]
If you haven’t done so already, I encourage you to read Andy Hall’s analysis of the DeWitt-Weeks saga. I tend to agree with Hall that there is no reason to believe that Ms. DeWitt’s goal is to intentionally mislead her young readers or distort the history covered in her book. However, as we now know [...]
It just continues to get more and more bizarre with each passing week. Ann DeWitt promised to continue to develop her Black Confederate Soldiers website and she does not disappoint. She recently added a section on the pension records of Alabama, South Carolina, and Tennessee. Nowhere does she inform her reader that these pensions [...]
