Author: Patrick Young
The Contested Election of 1876
The Election of 1876 was the most contentious in United States history. While Lincoln’s election in 1860 had more tumultuous consequences, once the Democratic Party…
Around the Web January 2021: Best of Civil War & Reconstruction Blogs and Social Media
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…
Celebrating Emancipation Day in the Heart of the Confederacy January 1, 1869
January 1 was celebrated in Black communities as Emancipation Day, a commemoration of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. While Juneteenth was celebrated in Texas, in many areas…
Around the Web December 2020: Best of the Blogs, Zooms, and Pods on The Civil War and Reconstruction
My long-time readers know that I have taken the journal Civil War History to task for an article last year critical of historians engaged in…
Video: Historian Brooks Simpson Gives Good Overview of Reconstruction Era Policies
Brooks Simpson is one of America’s leading scholars of Ulysses S. Grant and Andrew Johnson. He has written leading scholarly works on the Civil War…
New Curriculum Available on “Lincoln and the Jews”
The Shapell Foundation was the force behind a Civil War Sesquicentennial exhibition at the New York Historical Society on Lincoln’s interactions with the emerging Jewish…
Frederick Douglass Identifies the Cause of Death of Robert E. Lee in 1870
Frederick Douglass published the New National Era newspaper in Washington beginning in 1870. When Robert E. Lee died on October 12, 1870, his passing was…
When Frederick Douglass Met Pres. Johnson to Ask for Right to Vote, Johnson Warned of Race War
On February 7, 1866 Frederick Douglass led a delegation of 13 representatives of the National Convention of Colored Men to the White House to meet…
An Irish Immigrant Supporter of Lincoln Writes to His Daughter that the 1876 Election Is a Fraud
Patrick Guiney was the colonel commanding the Irish 9th Massachusetts Regiment when he was badly wounded during the Battle of the Wilderness. He would suffer…
Podcast on the 1898 White Supremacist Coup that Took Control of Wilmington, N.C.
In 1898 the Redshirts, a White Supremacist paramilitary organization operating in the Carolinas, staged a coup in which they took over North Carolina’s second largest…








