As you may know, I was ill with a life-threatening condition in March and April, which gave me plenty of time to lay in bed and check out Civil War social media! Here is some of what I think was best on the web.
Blogs
Student of the Civil War’s Al Mackey has a good piece looking at how to evaluate the credibility of historical sources.
Al Mackey also gives us his list of the best books on Ulysses S. Grant for the Grant Bicentennial.
The blog Irish in the American Civil War has a new post coming out of historian Damian Shiels research at Andersonville Prison. This one has the reassuring virtue that the man he is writing about DID NOT DIE during the war!
Poor Virginia Col. Barnard Bee is mostly known for being one of the first high-ranking officers to die in the Civil War and for giving Col. Thomas Jackson the nickname “Stonewall” shortly before he died at the First Battle of Bull Run. The Blog Bull Runnings posted an August, 1861 Obituary for Bee that does not mention Stonewall at all.
David Dixon, a fine historian, had a nice article on Emerging Civil War on a Black soldier from New Hampshire who served with the 54th Massachusetts. This is on the Emerging Civil War site.
Chris Mackowski has a great piece for the Grant Bicentennial at Emerging Civil War. W. Todd Groce, president and C.E.O. of the Georgia Historical Society, has a piece at the same site in which he uses a photo from 1875 to show that while Sherman did a lot of damage to Atlanta in 1864, he did not destroy the whole city.
Sarah Kay Bierle at Emerging Civil War has an interesting article on Union General Francis Barlow. She says that Barlow “could be a brilliant commander or a walking disaster, and sometimes both in the same campaign.” I pay attention to Barlow in part because he was the son of one of the earliest pastors of my wife’s church, First Unitarian in Brooklyn. After the war he married Ellen Shaw, sister of Col. Robert Gould Shaw of the 54th Massachusetts.
Substack
I am listing Substack as a separate category, but I will provide links to individual Substack posts which you can click to read just like you would a blog post. As I mentioned last month, Kevin Levin has just started Substacking and he has been posting almost every day! Here are some of his best:
Kevin Levin asks a great question on his Civil War Memory Substack: With all the talk of banning the 1619 Project from schools, has anybody even studied its impacts? Levin writes: “The 1619 Project…has been explicitly banned from the classroom in a number of states. I could write an entire post about why I think it has been singled out, but we still have no clear sense of how many school districts have adopted it; the number of individual teachers that have adopted it and; for those that have adopted it, how it is currently being used.” Levin taught history to students for years and he has a lot to say about the new restrictions being imposed by districts and politicians.
Levin is the author of a book on the Battle of the Crater in 1864, and he has a very detailed post about the battle and how it has been remembered over the last 158 years. He also has a good list of books to read if you want to learn about the relationship of the Confederacy and slavery. There is also a list of five must-reads about Ulysses S. Grant.
The last of Levin’s Substacks that I want to note is a piece discussing published accounts of African Americans expressing support for the Confederacy in the past.
Book Reviews
Historian Jonathan W. White has been quite busy recently, with two books out and multiple interviews on his central subjects involving Black participation in Civil War Era politics. The Civil War Monitor reviews White’s A House Built By Slaves: African American Visitors to the Lincoln White House on its book review blog. Cecily Zander of SMU writes that:
“For many years, historians have debated the answer to the question, “who freed the slaves?” One camp, headed by James M. McPherson, argued for the centrality of President Abraham Lincoln in the process of slavery’s abolition; another, led by Ira Berlin, insisted that the actions of enslaved peoples and their abolitionist allies forced Lincoln to act. In A House Built By Slaves, historian Jonathan W. White deftly shows that both Berlin and McPherson were correct in their assertions. By examining the day-to-day life of Lincoln’s White House, White offers a narrative of Black Americans pushing the president toward emancipation and Lincoln listening to their arguments as he steered the ship of state through the turmoil of the Civil War. This is a book that underscores the degree to which ensuring freedom for nearly four million people held in bondage was not the work of one faction or one man, but the work of many hands.”
Zander concludes: “this is a work that will long deserve a place on the bookshelves of Civil War historians and enthusiasts. To find something new to say about Abraham Lincoln is certainly an achievement; to tell the stories of countless others while doing so cements White’s work as some of the best in the field today.”
Last year, Jonathan White edited a book To Address You as My Friend: African Americans’ Letters to Abraham Lincoln which is reviewed in Civil War Monitor by Brian Dirck, Professor of History at Anderson University. Dirck gives the book a strong recommendation: “Having sifted through thousands of letters, many from collections heretofore untapped for publication, White, with an expert editor’s touch, has deftly assembled a wonderfully rich and fascinating mosaic of the hopes, dreams, and frustrations of African Americans during the Civil War.”
First Fallen: The Life of Colonel Elmer Ellsworth, the North’s First Civil War Hero by Meg Groeling has been getting good reviews since it appeared earlier this year. Kevin McPartland, who is a PhD. candidate at the University of Cincinnati reviews it for the Civil War Monitor. McPartland writes:
“In this work, Meg Groeling explores Elmer Ellsworth, the first Union Civil War hero. Most historians know Ellsworth for the end of his life, when he was shot and killed after taking down a Confederate flag in Alexandria, Virginia, in 1861. But Groeling insists his story is much more than this singular event. Not only was Ellsworth somewhat of a celebrity, but he was a close friend of the Lincoln family.”
While the reviewer says that the author makes “some analytical overreaches that put too much weight on Ellsworth,” he concludes that “First Fallen remains an interesting book that does find a unique lens into the mind of a Northern patriot prior to the Civil War. Historians have done much work on the pre-war South and its militaristic character. This is a welcome addition to literature that casts its gaze on the North and the men who rallied to the United States flag in 1861.”
The respected Civil War Books and Authors (CWBA) blog had several reviews of new books over the last month. The new reference work The Oxford Handbook of the American Civil War edited by Lorien Foote and Earl J. Hess gets a very positive review on every level (except for its price ($150.00)). It collects chapters written by three dozen scholars into “essays charting the military progress of the war” according to the CWBA review. The volume centers the military history of the war, while understanding the indispensable social and political causes and consequences. CWBA says that:
“The Oxford Handbook of the American Civil War, through its critical engagement with current trends in the military and social history scholarship and its noteworthy identification of topics meriting further exploration, succeeds admirably at fulfilling the challenging mandates of OUP’s Handbook series. Those qualities as well as the highly accessible nature of the writing makes this handbook excel as a broadly useful guide to the present state of the Civil War military history literature.”
Another book CWBA was very positive about is Destruction of the Steamboat Sultana: The Worst Maritime Disaster in American History by Gene Eric Salecker. If you are even slightly interested in the Sultana, you should read this review because CWBA gives a lot of details from the book. According to the review:
“The end result of three decades of intensive primary research, thorough investigation, and deep reflection, Gene Salecker’s Destruction of the Steamboat Sultana surpasses all previous coverage of the topic and is clearly poised to become the new standard history of the tragic event and everything that surrounded it. One hesitates to declare any history book to be the last word on its subject, but suffice it to say that this rigorously comprehensive treatment of the Sultana is destined to become an enduring classic among Civil War history studies and waterborne disaster chronicles.”
Suffering in the Army of Tennessee: A Social History of the Confederate Army of the Heartland from the Battles for Atlanta to the Retreat from Nashville by Christopher Thrasher has gotten a lot of attention in the last few months. It is “highly recommended” by CWBA.
Podcasts
Because of my hospitalization I was not able to follow all the podcasts and videos that were released last month, so I will try to check them all out before my next Around the Web in June.
Civil War Talk Radio had a good interview with Jim Downs, author of “Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine” on that subject. Downs is also the new Editor of the scholarly journal Civil War History, which is also discussed. You can listen on the player below:
Michael E. Block, author of “The Carnage was Fearful: The Battle of Cedar Mountain, August 9, 1862” also appeared on Civil War Talk Radio. Host Gerry Prokopowicz has been to the site of the battle and he and Block were amazed that the scene of the battle is little changed since the 1860s. It is not a park, but efforts are underway to have Virginia create a state park there. This Union defeat was foreseeable, given that the Federals were outnumbered, attacking, and going up against Stonewall Jackson.
I don’t review my own materials for obvious reasons, but I want to let you know that the second episode of my Civil War Reconstruction Podcast is out. It focuses on why understanding Reconstruction is so important to people who want to understand the Civil War.
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