This was a great month for Civil War and Reconstruction social media. The first video in my lineup this month includes a half hour segment on the USCT that is important for everyone to watch.
Videos
The Tattooed Historian John Heckman has been doing some livestreams with the Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi (CWRGM) project. The project makes letters to the state’s governors available digitally. Part 1 here has a few real technical problems, but once Barny Schoby launches into his presentation on the USCT, the video is on fire. This is one of the most memorable live streams I have seen in the last year. WOW! Schoby’s amazing presentation begins around the 22 minute mark. Normally I don’t tell people to skip ahead in a video, but this one is so important to watch. Barny Schoby presents on the USCT at Natchez National Historical Park in Mississippi.
Heather Cox Richardson gave a talk on historiography last week and nearly a hundred thousand people have watched it already! I can guarantee, half the viewers did not know what historiography was before they saw her talk, but from the comments it is clear they were into her explanation. Professor Cox Richardson discusses the different and evolving ways historians have explained the United States over the last two hundred years.
Reconstruction Era National Park has a short video on Emancipation and the recruitment of the United States Colored Troops, using Camp Saxton in South Carolina and Camp Nelson in Kentucky as examples of the interplay of the two. The Camp Nelson discussion includes a telling of the shameful expulsion of Black refugees by the Union commander.
The Virginia Museum has a Zoom on YouTube of Kevin Levin speaking about the 32 year old film Glory, the first major Hollywood film on Black soldiers during the Civil War. I missed this one when it came out in February. Levin is writing a bio on the 54th Massachusetts commander Robert Gould Shaw.
Blogs
David Dixon, the author of a new biography of Union Brig. General August Willich, has an article on Emerging Civil War on the recruitment and training of Willich’s first Union regiment, the German 9th Ohio.
If the regiment’s story intrigues you, you are in luck. It has its own facebook page! Andrew Houghtaling’s Facebook page, The Ninth Ohio, A Living History can be found here.
Emerging Civil War author Adam Burke has an interesting two-parter on The Paradox of the Lost Cause. Part 1 can be found here. Here is Part 2. Check out the comments at the bottom of each installment for a mix of the scholarly and the balmy. Overall, an insightful essay with a scattering of deranged critical comments.
The scholarly blog Muster had a couple of interesting articles last month. The first reports on a study by the Nau Center for Civil War History at the University of Virginia on its home university’s alumnus who served the Union cause. As you may imagine, the post-war Confederate project to erase the real history of the Civil War led to the purposeful ignoring of the UVa students and grads who remained loyal to the United States. Talk about “erasing history.”
Historian Holly Pinheiro has a useful article on searching for soldiers of the United States Colored Troops (USCT) in the Census Records. He is working on a new book The Families’ Civil War that is widely awaited.
Al Mackey posted a piece on his blog on two minutes of tape left on the cutting room floor by Ken Burns in which novelist Shelby Foote talks about slavery. While Ken Burns did a lot to revive interest in the Civil War, and many parts of his docuseries are excellent, he also spread Shelby’s Lost Cause views to a whole generation of innocent viewers.
Here Al, a retired Air Force officer and a current educator, discusses the “History Wars” being waged over the teaching of the history of race in the United States.
Phil Gast at Civil War Picket has a story that warmed my heart. It is about new interpretive signage for the Battle of Ox Hill, or Chantilly as it is known in New York. This battle was fought right after Second Bull Run and led to the death of Union General Phil Kearney. A lot of us visit the small park at the site on our way home from a visit to the big Manassas National Park. The neighborhood has a large immigrant community and there will now be signage interpreting the battle in Spanish and Korean. As someone who has fought for Language Access in New York State I am very happy with this.
David Kent introduces the new website of the Lincoln Group of D.C. Some good resources for those studying the Civil War president.
Sarah Kay Bierle has a piece on General Ben Butler’s decision to designate escaped slaves as “contraband of war,” allowing him to protect them from recapture by their “owners.”
Kevin Levin has been active in discussing Confederate monuments over at Civil War Memory. First he mused on what Charlottesville might do with its infamous Confederate monuments. The comments in which his readers make their own suggestions are entertaining.
Kevin also published a call for the Noah Trudeau book Like Men of War on the Black military experience during the Civil War to be published in a new edition.
Finally, his latest post discusses the possibility that the Confederate monument covering Stone Mountain’s face might be removed. One day I will write about my own experience at that Confederate Disneyland many years ago. Unlike most Confederate monumentation, Stone Mountain is a genuine tourist attraction and it is too massive to simply move.
Podcasts
Gerry Prokopowicz has a great interview with Mark Bielski, author of “A Mortal Blow to the Confederacy: The Fall of New Orleans, 1862,” over on Civil War Talk Radio.
Gerry has an interesting discussion with James Oakes on the U.S. Constitution, slavery, and how Republicans came to see the Constitution as an anti-slavery document.
Chris Mackowski of Emerging Civil War interviews historian Diana Dretske about her new book The Bonds of War: A Story of Immigrants and Esprit de Corps in Company C, 96th Illinois Volunteer Infantry. The book follows a group of Irish, English and Scottish immigrants serving in the Union Army. Follow this link to listen to the interview for free on Patreon.
Book Reviews
My readers are, well, readers, so I am now going to include a separate section for written book reviews. I have always included a few links to reviews, but now they will have their own section.
This month, the Civil War Monitor offers a review of Christian Citizens: Reading the Bible in Black and White in the Post Emancipation South by Elizabeth L. Jemison. Reviewer Caleb Southern writes:
Christian Citizens is an important work about the intersection of religion, race, gender, and nineteenth century Southern politics with important implications not only for Civil War/Reconstruction scholars, but also for modern political historians. Elizabeth L. Jemison’s work is likely to be debated, discussed, and expanded in the coming years.
The venerable blog Civil War Books and Authors has a favorable review of the new Emerging Civil War volume on the Union capture of New Orleans. The review says A Mortal Blow to the Confederacy: The Fall of New Orleans, 1862 by Mark F. Bielski “is highly recommended reading for those seeking modern answers to the many how and why questions attached to Union triumph and Confederate failure in the critical New Orleans campaign of 1862. Hopefully, this fine volume might also inspire some up and coming scholar to finally complete the definitive treatment the subject so richly deserves.”
A much-anticipated book by Kenneth Noe, The Howling Storm: Weather, Climate, and the American Civil War also was reviewed last month by CWBA. According to the review:
Kenneth Noe’s The Howling Storm brings weather effects out of the realm of excuse making and into their proper place as a major variable impacting victory and defeat on the Civil War battlefield. Noe’s study ends with an interesting capstone conclusion that the Union Army won the weather war as well as the shooting war. His argument developed throughout the book that Union leadership and logistical superiority in providing better transportation, better winter shelter/housing, more reliable food and medical supplies, all-weather clothing, and consistent quantities of replacement footwear all combined to both sustain Union soldier morale amid the most trying environmental circumstances…
Historian Gary Gallagher has an appreciation of of W.E.B. DuBois’s 1935 classic Black Reconstruction: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880. According to Gallagher, “Du Bois treated enslaved people during the war and freedpeople in its aftermath as important actors, rather than as passive pawns in the political, military, and economic struggles of the era.”
Coming Soon…
I hope to start a new series on this monthly review of the best of the web highlighting older social media posts from before this blog started. I hope these “gems” are as important to you as they have been to my development as an online researcher and writer.
Also, I have finished the first episode of my new podcast series. When I get three episodes in the can, I will begin their release.
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