This is a new feature here at the The Reconstruction Era Blog: Each month I will highlight a few new articles from other blogs that are among the best writing on the Civil War and Reconstruction. Here is the First Installment:
John Hennessy works for the National Park Service at Fredericksburg. He has been blogging for more than a decade and he has a fluid voice informed by deep experience with public history. This month he wrote about the role of National Park Service historians in the process of social change. Hennessy writes:
In the end, the NPS always has and always will reflect the society it serves—or at least those parts of society that have political voice. For long stretches, America behaved as though it had a single, universal history, whose virtues the NPS faithfully emphasized and promoted. As political power has dispersed throughout or society, so have the demand that both academic historians and public historians in the NPS (and elsewhere) recognize aspects of the American story long overlooked, or even purposely forgotten. This is not political correctness. This is historical justice within a society built on the concept of equality and justice.
Emerging Civil War is a scholarly blog that published a dozen or so authors (including me). Last month it had a very positive review of David Dixon’s new book on German immigrant August Willich. The radical warrior was a revolutionary in Germany who became an abolitionist in the U.S. and a general in the Union Army. Dixon himself has an article on the military innovations of Willich.
Emerging Civil War also has an article on the Niagara Falls Underground Railroad Heritage Center.
Another multi-author blog is Muster, owned by the Journal of the Civil War Era. They have a post asking why Union monuments in the Southwest have not been subjected to the same scrutiny as Confederate monuments.
Civil Discourse has an in-depth article from historian Ron Roth on Susie King Taylor, one of the most recognizable Black women of the era.
Blogger Al Mackey takes the president to task over his recent touting of Confederate memorialization.
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