The first few installments of this monthly survey of the best Civil War and Reconstruction Social Media have been more popular than I anticipated. Thanks to everyone who has sent me messages of support on this feature.
I was gratified to unexpectedly hear Gerry Prokopowicz discussing the November edition of Around the Web, although it mostly to good-naturedly contest my characterization of him as the “granddaddy” of Civil War podcasting. He pointed out that while he has children, he has yet to have his first grandchild! I was, of course, referring to his creating a podcasting format a decade and half ago before most of us knew what a podcast was. In fact, he started before the term was even coined!
Program Notes: I had been posting this feature towards the end of the month, now I will be posting it at the start of the month instead. Also, each month I will end with a “Meme of the Month.” Please share these if you see fit.
Before We Start: The Case of Heather Cox Richardson
Last month I highlighted the social media work of historian Heather Cox Richardson. She is a professor at Boston College and has written about the Civil War and Reconstruction Eras as well as the history of the Republican Party. She is a star on Facebook Live and she puts out a newsletter through Substack. Right after Christmas, Ben Smith, the media critic at the New York Times did a major write-up on her. According to Smith, she is now the most successful author on Substack. He estimates that her Substack writing over the last year will bring in over a million dollars.
Richardson sometimes writes and talks just about history. She recently spent three hours discussing the Reconstruction Era. But she often examines current events (impeachment and presidential pardons for example) in light of history. According to Ben Smith, many of Richarson’s readers:
“are women around Dr. Richardson’s age, 58, and they form the bulk of her audience. She’s writing for people who want to leave an article feeling “smarter not dumber,” she says, and who don’t want to learn about the events of the day through the panicked channels of cable news and Twitter, but calmly situated in the long sweep of American history and values.”
She is a good answer to the question posed by Earl Hess last year in Civil War History which I paraphrase (and slightly distort) as: “Why should a historian spend (waste) time writing on social media?”
A lot of historians have taken to Twitter over the last five years. The nature of Twitter means that you will never see a groundbreaking Tweet, but following certain historians on areas you are interested in will keep you up on their work and opinions. Of course, in addition to hard history, many Tweet out personal stuff as well as their takes on contemporary politics, pop culture and sports.
There is a certain amount of whimsy too on this ephemeral platform. For example, Adam Domby, author of a recent book on the memory of the Confederacy in North Carolina, asked if getting a child’s Junior Ranger badge from the Reconstruction Era National Monument certified his expertise in the field.
So can I call myself an expert on Reconstruction now? pic.twitter.com/tf9QZueStD
— Dr. Adam H. Domby (@AdamHDomby) December 20, 2020
You can find him at @AdamHDomby where his tagline is “Come for the history, stay for the dog pics and political commentary.” His book The False Cause: Fraud, Fabrication, and White Supremacy in Confederate Memory was one of my favorite new releases in 2020.
Manisha Sinha @ProfMSinha is an expert on the Abolition Movement. Her book The Slaves’ Cause is a must-read. She keeps up a steady flow of insightful Tweets tying history to contemporary events.
Now that I am throwing Twitter into the mix of my monthly roundups of the “Best,” I won’t be trying to single out the best “Tweet of the Month,” just point you in the direction of people doing interesting work on this platform.
By the way, if you want to keep up with the work and opinions of a lot of historians of all different eras, use the hashtag #twitterstorians. This is the “secret password” to find them on Twitter.
Podcasts
Gerry Prokopowicz, host of Civil War Talk Radio, had a really fascinating discussion last month with Ken Noe who talked about his new book on ways that weather and climate effected the Civil War. Noe’s integration of meteorology, climatology, geology, and geography into the way the war was fought, and its outcome, is novel and intriguing. By the way, if you visit Prokopowicz’s web site Impediments of War. You can access his entire catalogue of interviews, which stretch back sixteen years. There is some great stuff in there. I have listened to all but three of his shows over the years and have enjoyed the bulk of them.
The New York Times Book Review Podcast recently reviewed two new books on slavery before the Civil War. The historian Kerri Greenidge talks about “South to Freedom,” by Alice L. Baumgartner, and “The Kidnapping Club,” by Jonathan Daniel Wells. “South to Freedom” is about escaped slaves fleeing to Mexico, and “The Kidnapping Club” tells the story of how the police in New York City worked with Southern slavecatchers to kidnap Black children from the city’s streets to sell South into slavery. According to Greenidge, “What these two books argue is that there’s a complicity in this relationship between the North and the South and enslavement. There’s a vested interest by the most populated city in the country — New York City — in maintaining enslavement. And that really slavery begins to collapse, it’s challenged, it’s pushed by African-American people themselves.”
Ben Franklin’s World is a weekly podcast by William and Mary University about, well, Ben Franklin’s World of Colonial and Revolutionary America. But sometimes the years leading up to the Civil War get in there. A recent episode includes an interview with Professor Marcus Nevius on Maroonage in the Great Dismal Swamp. Maroons were escaped slaves who formed small communities of resistance within slave societies. In the Great Dismal Swamp of Virginia and North Carolina, escaped slaves sought refuge in one of the most forbidding environments in the Upper South. You can listen to the podcast on the player below.
John Batchelder is someone every student of the Battle of Gettysburg knows, but almost no one else has ever heard of. After the battle ended in July 1863, Batchelder arrived taking down notes on what the Union soldiers there, and their Confederate prisoners, said about the battle. He then spent decades studying what had happened during the fighting. While his judgement on the facts has been questioned, he put together an unmatched set of veterans’ recollections of the battle, and he campaigned for the site’s recognition as an historical site.
Battle of Gettysburg Podcast hosts James Hessler and Eric Lindblade discuss this artist who became an early historian of Gettysburg, an important figure in preservation of the battlefield, and a commercial promoter of historical tourism before than industry knew it existed. Batchelder also did some mythmaking.
As their regular listeners have come to expect, there is the usual friendly banter between the hosts mixed in with well-researched history in this hour-long podcast. Use the player below to access it.
Zooms, Facebook Lives, and Other Video
Has your office started “Virtual Happy Hours” to allow folks to get together after work for a drink with colleagues in the safety of their own homes? Well, the folks over at the National Museum of Civil War Medicine are trying the format out as a way of having a couple of their staff discuss 19th Century medical practices over beers. This isn’t “Drunk History,” but it is informal and informed. Jake Wynn and Kyle Dalton discuss beer and the Civil War in this installment, among other topics.
There is an interesting discussion of prejudices against beer by the Know Nothings who tied the drinking of beer to Irish and German immigrants. Nativists drank cocktails and hard cider by the gallon, but they stigmatized the drinkers of beer. The chat also covers the medical benefits of beer, and its uses by doctors. Apparently men who could not hold down solid food could sometimes get nourishment through beer! The beverage was also effective at getting sick men to fall asleep.
There were problems with beer beyond alcoholism. Sometimes impurities got into the brew and sickened drinkers. Of course, the same problem afflicted the drinkers of milk back in the days before refrigeration. You can watch this happy hour on the video below.
Prager University is not a real college, it is an online scamversity. It puts out videos on a variety of subjects. It recently came out with a video defending the statues of Robert E. Lee. The liberal podcast The Majority Report sends up this wacky video.
Finally, here is a comedic look at the Black Confederate Myth.
Blogs
Al Mackey spent big chunks of December reporting on the failing rearguard actions of the defenders of Confederate Heritage. Here is one of his more in-depth pieces.
Kevin Levin, one of the most popular Civil War bloggers on the web, asks whether we need a new biography of Robert E. Lee and if Allen Guelzo is the person we want it from. Guelzo recently participated in a highly charged political event attacking high school history teachers and he has been in bad odor ever since. [Full confession: my nephew Pat Young is a high school history teacher, so I am a little prejudiced in defense of those called to teach history to our young.] Levin says that there have been surprisingly few full-scale biographies of Lee and that there is more to learn about the uber-Confederate. Levin says that “Whether we need a new Lee biography by Allen Guelzo should ultimately come down to the substance of the argument contained in the book.” If you read the comments at the bottom of his post, or on his Twitter post on the same subject, a lot of people disagree.
Meme of the Month
Tired of Lost Cause memes flooding social media? I am creating memes on Reconstruction and the Civil War, and I will highlight one each month. Feel free to spread them using #Reconstruction.
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