I was reading Kevin Levin’s Substack yesterday and he posted this talk by historian Barbara Gannon, which I had not seen before.
Gannon teaches history at the University of Central Florida. She is a scholar of the Civil War Era and she has done important research on African Americans during the war. In this video, Professor Gannon discusses the Battle of Olustee in northern Florida. Many of the Union troops who fought there were African Americans, members of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry and the United States Colored Troops. Gannon discusses why the battlefield became a haven for Confederate memory, how Union monuments were excluded from the battlefield by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and how many of the bodies of Black soldiers were unaccounted for. Gannon’s research project, involving her students, has focused on identifying where the soldiers’ bodies lie and telling their stories. Historian Nina Silber questions Gannon in the second half of the program at the Massachusetts Historical Society.
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