The first time I took my wife to visit the Crater she was less than impressed. If I remember correctly she said something along the following lines: “This is it? This is what you’ve been spending your time on?” Well, maybe I’m exaggerating a bit, but not by much. There are a number of points [...]
Petersburg
I hope that all of you have had a chance to read my article on Confederate military executions in the current issue of Civil War Times. It should be on the newsstands for a few more weeks, but you can also read it online. I’ve been quite pleased with the response thus far. I am [...]
I am pleased to announce that I will once again be participating in the annual Civil War seminar sponsored by The George Tyler Moore Center at Shepherd University. In the summer of 2007 [here and here/photos] I took part in the center’s conference on Civil War Memory. It was a wonderful experience and I couldn’t [...]
Thanks to Brooks Simpson and Ken Noe for participation in my most recent post on black Confederates. Their thorough comments in response to a reader who put forward what he believed to be evidence for black Confederate soldiers is a clinic on how to engage in serious historical analysis. I can’t tell you what it [...]
I know I promised to stay away until January, but I don’t really consider this to be a violation of my blogging hiatus. My review of Will Greene’s book, Civil War Petersburg: Confederate City in the Crucible of War (University of Virginia Press, 2006), is included in the most recent issue of the journal, Civil [...]
The following review of Richard Slotkin’s new book, No Quarter: The Battle of the Crater, 1864 is now available in the latest edition of Civil War Book Review. With the publication of three books on the battle of the Crater in the past two years, one might reasonably ask if there is a need for [...]
The latest post by Ta-Nehisis Coates beautifully captures the frustrations that many African Americans experience when visiting America’s Civil War battlefields and specifically those places where African Americans participated. A recent visit to the Petersburg battlefields, including the Crater, by Coates and his children highlights the continued challenges facing museums, the National Park Service, and [...]
I am just about finished reading Richard Slotkin’s new book on the Crater, No Quarter: The Battle of the Crater, 1864, and have enjoyed it immensely. The book is very different from the two previous studies of the battle in that Slotkin provides a much needed analysis of the racial components of the battle rather [...]
