This has been a strong month for history blogging. There are also good book reviews and podcasts as well.
Blogs
Nick Sacco writes about historian Karen Cox’s recent book on Confederate monumentation. Sacco says that “Cox clearly describes the ways Confederate monuments have always been inherently political.”
Kevin Levin has been very active over the last month. One of the earliest bloggers and probably the best known, Levin had been down to one or two posts a month in recent years. The controversy over CRT and history education has drawn him back to the blogosphere! A high school history teacher himself, Levin has a lot to say on the controversies roiling school board meetings around the country.
Levin asserts that “Parents are not history teachers,” in one post. Levin writes that a proposed Indiana law has him particularly concerned:
what really has me reeling this morning is the provision in the Indiana legislation that would allow parents to form committees to review school history curricula. As a history teacher with 20+ years experience I find this to be absurd. The proposal rests on an unstated assumption that parents are in the dark as to what their students are learning or that they have no contact with their children’s teachers. Of course they do. Many school districts now post assignments, grades, and other useful information online. At my last school parents could spend hours reading through history assignments as well as the wide range of resources that I use. Schools hold back-to-school events at the beginning of the year and there is always a way to schedule a parent-teacher meeting.
Kevin Levin also has a good commentary on the Critical Race Theory witch hunt. I have a comment at the end of his post that you might find interesting. The controversy is playing out in the real world as books are banned and teach development workshops on civil rights history are cancelled.
Bull Runnings has a nice remembrance of Joe Maghe, a Civil War collector specializing in the material culture of Irish immigrant soldiers. Joe passed away at the start of the New Year.
Glenn David Brasher is an expert on the Peninsula Campaign, so I take his book recommendations for those wishing to study the campaign very seriously. He writes them up in the Civil War Monitor’s free Front Lines blog.
Daniel W. Crofts has a long piece in the blog Muster on the 1891 attempt to pass an election protection bill that would take the vote count out of the hands of the White supremacist election officials in the South. What happened next will not surprise anyone familiar with the current effort to make sure Blacks are not disenfranchised.
The John Banks blog is, shall we say, quirky. Here is a post from John on a “hidden-in-plain-sight” fort near Franklin, Tennessee.
Civil War Picket has the story of an arson attack on a Union monument at Stones River. The site also tells the story of underwater archeology near Savannah.
Al Mackey discusses the latest developments in the History Wars.
Podcasts
National Park Service historian Frank O’Reilly discusses his book The Fredericksburg Campaign: Winter War on the Rappahannock, the classic tactical study of the battle. This is an interesting hour chat on the campaign and battle. O’Reilly recommends reading George Rable’s Fredericksburg, Fredericksburg and John Matteson’s new A Worse Place Than Hell: How the Civil War Battle of Fredericksburg Changed a Nation along with his own book for a full view of the battle.
Another good interview from Civil War Talk Radio is this one with Chuck Veit, author of “A Lively Little Battle: New Perspectives on the Battle of Fort Butler, Donaldsonville, Louisiana, 28 July 1863.” This little-known battle in Louisiana pitted several thousand Confederates against a few hundred Black and white Union soldiers. As you might expect, the Unionists won a one-sided victory.
The final interview of the month takes place with John F. Messner, author of “A Scottish Blockade Runner in the American Civil War: Joannes Wyllie of the Steamer Ad-Vance.”
Video
Reconstruction Era National Park has an interesting interview about a Northern woman who went South to teach newly freed slaves how to read and write. Rich Condon and Jonathan White are the conversants.
Book Reviews
The Cacophony of Politics: Northern Democrats and the American Civil War by J. Matthew Gallman is reviewed in the Civil War Monitor by Daniel W. Crofts who writes: Gallman’s “Cacophony” reports that most Northern Democrats were not traitorous Copperheads: that is, fifth-column pro-Confederates who sought to subvert the Union cause. He thinks the rank-and-file took their cue from leaders who understood the necessity of continued war. But he recognizes that the peace wing had a following, especially in the Midwest, and it put the party in an awkward spot as the 1864 elections approached. His opponents, Abraham Lincoln quipped, needed to “nominate a Peace Democrat on a war platform, or a War Democrat on a peace platform.” The quandary proved insoluble.
Also reviewed in the Monitor is Rites of Retaliation: Civilization, Soldiers and Campaigns in the American Civil War by Lorien Foote. According to the review:
This excellent study is written in a clear and graceful style. While several works on restraint and violence in the Civil War have been published in recent years, this book is notable in not limiting itself to high level declarations of policy, but for also thoroughly examining the sources to determine whether those policies were—or were not—carried out by soldiers in the field. The author discusses the full historical context of the various retaliation incidents she covers.
Civil War Books and Authors reviews a new work that considers the political decisions behind Robert E. Lee’s 1862 Maryland Campaign. According to the review of Their Maryland: The Army of Northern Virginia From the Potomac Crossing to Sharpsburg in September 1862, author Alexander Rossino makes a “sound argument for seeing Lee’s unwavering decision to make a defensive stand at Antietam not as a foolhardy gesture based on a poor reading of his enemy, but rather as a decision in close alignment with the military and political considerations behind his launching of the campaign in the first place.”
The same site also reviews a new photo book Port Hudson: The Most Significant Battlefield Photographs of the Civil War. According to CWBA, a set of “carefully curated images are compiled in the stunning new volume.” I did not know this, but Port Hudson was the third most photographed battlefield of the Civil War.
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