We are back for a look at the Best of the Web over the last month. Zooms continued strong, and are likely to endure even as the Pandemic is finally beginning to lessen in its intensity. And while some questioned whether history blogging has a future, March was overall a good month for that form.
Blogs
Nick Sacco is a National Park Service Ranger at U.S. Grant’s house outside of St. Louis. His blog Exploring the Past often offers insights from his research as well as from his interactions with visitors to his historic site. As one of the top Civil War bloggers, he wrote a long post entitled Where Did All the Bloggers Go? A Few Thoughts on Historians and Blogging. This looks at the decline in the number of active blogs on the Civil War Era. While the readership of the remaining blogs is still high, many of the old warhorses have either closed their blogs or only write very occasionally. His thoughtful article is worth reading and I left a long comment at the bottom giving my reasons for continuing to blog. He is correct that many of the academic bloggers have shifted over to Twitter and other platforms, but blogging still has some virtues that can’t be matched elsewhere. At some point I will offer a longer response to Nick on The Reconstruction Era Blog.
Damian Shiels announced a new project he is working on to uplift the stories of the lives of immigrants and African Americans serving in the Navy. Called The Bluejacket Project it is sponsored by Northumberland University in the United Kingdom. Damian, who is finishing up his doctorate at the university, is working on this with Professor David Gleeson, one of the foremost experts on the American Civil War over in the UK. Damian hopes to begin publishing the results of their work soon.
Kevin Levin has been unusually busy over the last month. His Civil War Memory is among the most visited Civil War blogs on the web, but he only occasionally posted there last year. March saw a flurry of activity on the site. One article looks at how historians explain Confederate defeat and how the focus has changed over the last few decades.
Levin also has a blog post occasioned by the impending 160th Anniversary of the start of the Civil War. He wonders whether the Sesquicentennial would have been framed as it was if we knew in 2011 what we know in 2021.
The blog of The Civil War Monitor has an interview with Bryan Cheeseboro of the National Archives on his work uncovering the hidden treasures on the Civil War Era at that institution. He is also a Civil War reenactor who occasionally gets asked about the mythical “Black Confederate!” Bryan is well known on social media for his Civil War Era Historian’s Page on Facebook. Errata: The original version of this post said that Mr. Cheeseboro was asked to portray a “Black Confederate.” In fact, he was asked by people attending a reenactment if he was portraying a “Black Confederate.”
The Journal of the Civil War Era’s Blog Muster has a post by Angela Pulley Hudson on the Mount Vernon Barracks in south Alabama was home to thousands of people. Over the years it housed white soldiers, Apache prisoners, and Black psychiatric patients, Confederates, yellow fever victims, and psychiatric patients. According to the author, “the stories of the men, women, and children who lived and died at this place shed light on some of the most important historical phenomena of the late 19th and early 20th-century United States—many of which we don’t usually consider together: federal Indian policy, public health crises, and Jim Crow segregation. It is a place layered with meanings and resonances. Peeling back those layers can illuminate how deeply enmeshed our histories—and subfields—truly are. And it could be a phenomenal site from which to teach and learn.”
Finally, at Emerging Civil War David Dixon has a a great piece on a diary of an officer from a regiment commanded by Ulysses S. Grant who spent months at the end of the war in a Confederate prison.
Podcasts
Gerry Prokopowicz interviews Cynthia Nicoletti, the author of “Secession on Trial: The Treason Prosecution of Jefferson Davis.” The author is both an historian and an attorney and her book is great legal history. Gerry is also both historian and lawyer, so the conversation is great.
Gerry had another great program with James P. Byrd, author of “A Holy Baptism of Fire and Blood: The Bible and the American Civil War”.
LeeAnna Keith, author of “When It Was Grand: A Radical Republican History of the Civil War” was interviewed in mid-March.
Brian Jordan, author of “A Thousand May Fall: Life, Death, and Survival in the Union Army”, discusses a regiment with a strong German immigrant contingent from the XI Corps.
Videos
The Reconstruction Era National Historical Park has an active Facebook page that you should check out. In March “Ranger Rich” Condon did a way too short interview with Dr. Jared Frederick, history instructor at Penn State Altoona, about “depictions of the Reconstruction Era through film.” Although this was only 15 minutes long, it is a good overview. These two should get together each month and host a “movie night” Facebook Live. They could tell us what movie they will discuss so we can watch it in advance, and then do a half hour on the film and respond to comments from the Peanut Gallery. Both Ranger Rich and Jared “The Galleria of Reconstruction History” Frederick would be fun companions for an audience participation-type talk. You can watch the discussion on the player below. I’ll start the popcorn!
The Tattooed Historian had a couple of really good Zooms last month. The first is an interview by John Heckman with Gordon C. Rhea, the foremost historian of the 1864 Overland Campaign. Dr. Peter Carmichael (Director, Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College) was John’s very animated partner during the discussion.
John next interviewed Stephen Berry on digital history in all of its manifestations. A really good discussion between Berry and Pete Carmichael on making documentary evidence from common soldiers available digitally.
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