This is hilarious. Enjoy
Reenactors
“People forget that slavery existed in the whole country at the time, and less than 10 percent (of Confederates) actually owned slaves,” Waller said. It must be about heritage because it certainly isn’t about history.
And the winner is: “Celebrating the little-known Battle of Calico, California, (or Farb Forks) apparently fought over possession of the town’s only all-you-can-eat buffet.” — Ken Noe Those of you who are into reenacting are either going to get a good laugh out of this or have your day ruined. Each year, Calico Ghost Town [...]
You should definitely take a look at Drew G. Faust’s NEH 2011 Jefferson Lecture, titled, “Telling War Stories: Reflections of a Civil War Historian.” [pdf] It is incredibly thoughtful. [Click here for David Blight's introductory remarks.] I think Faust effectively explains the difficulty of trying to capture the horrors of war as well as the [...]
I missed having the opportunity to comment on this story last week. First, let me say that I couldn’t be more pleased that developers will be prevented from building a casino at Gettysburg. That said, I’ve always thought that the battlefield preservation debate is best understood as a negotiation between legitimate competing interests rather than [...]
Things have been a bit slow around here this week owing to the amount of time I’ve spent preparing our house to be sold. I have to say that it was at times difficult going through my library and making the tough decisions as to what to keep and what to discard. One of my [...]
[Thanks to Ta-Nehisi Coates for the link.] The ongoing debate about Republican candidate for Congress, Rich Iott’s hobby of portraying a Waffen SS soldier, raises a number of interesting questions about what we expect from people who choose to embrace the past through reenacting. In the case of Iott, there seems to be little patience [...]
