This month was a good one for podcasts and video. Happy New Year!
Blogs
Civil War Books and Authors handed out its annual awards for the Best Civil War Books of the Year. The Book of the Year was PORT HUDSON: The Most Significant Battlefield Photographs of the Civil War by Lawrence Lee Hewitt (University of Tennessee Press). You should read the article to see the other nine books CWBA thought were the BEST.
Speaking of Best Books, the Civil War Monitor has a great article in which historians discuss their choices of the Best Books of 2021. At the same site, you can read Drew Bledsoe’s examination of Ben Butler’s role in the early Emancipation of escaped slaves.
At Emerging Civil War, David Dixon talks about German immigrant soldiers at the Battle of Rowlett’s Station. Dixon is the biographer of General August Willich, the commander of the immigrant troops. At the same site, Jon Tracey discusses the opposition to placing Confederate memorials at Gettysburg and how the Virginia monument finally was erected. As Tracey documents, the dedication of the monument was a triumph for the Lost Cause distortion of history.
Al Mackey at Student of the American Civil War continues the story of NeoConfederate retreat in December.
Kevin Levin writes about the role the Virginia Flaggers failed to play in stopping the removal of Confederate symbols. The group’s racism so aroused Virginians against Confederate propaganda that they likely contributed to the sudden departure of Robert E. Lee from the statuary scene. Levin also discusses the proposal to move Confederate statuary to an African American history museum.
At the blog Muster, Nathan Marzoli has an interesting article on how Republican newspapers characterized anti-draft violence in New Hampshire. The state’s Republican media tended to depict anti-draft actions as carried out by “ignorant” men who were easily manipulated by Democratic politicians who spread falsehoods about the draft. After a hotel was burned, presumably to interfere with the draft, the Republican newspapers carried these accounts:
A correspondent for the Boston Journal, who had been in Jackson at the time of the burning of the inn, penned an account that made its way into numerous papers across the state and into the minds of countless readers. The journalist ultimately did not regard “those ignorant fellows who commit the overt acts as so guilty as certain leading politicians in that region,” who had done a great deal to “deceive and inflame the masses.” The Oxford (Maine) Democrat meanwhile, asserted that “the trouble [was] attributed to the influence of politicians rather than a disposition to resist on the part of conscripts.” The Exeter Newsletter similarly claimed that the townspeople’s ignorance contributed to their belief in the righteousness of their resistance, and their choice to treat the Army officers “quite uncivilly” upon their arrival in Jackson. Although the Boston Journal correspondent maintained that the government would still enforce the draft in Carroll County, he also warned that “a few desperadoes may be incited to [additional] deeds of violence by men who claim to be respectable.”
Podcasts
Jamelle Bouie explains the Reconstruction Era to journalist Sarah Marshall. There is a lot of banter between the host and guest and modern parallels are drawn. Also, Bouie touches on the manufactured CRT controversy.
Over at Civil War Talk Radio, Gerry Prokopowicz has a great conversation with Caroline Janney on her new book “Ends of War: The Unfinished Fight of Lees Army after Appomattox.” This is a book I highly recommend and Gerry does as well.
Gerry had another very good interview in the last month. This one with Deborah Willis, author of “The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship.” She is an NYU professor who has uncovered many photos of Black men in the United States Colored Troops and the navy.
One of our favorite podcasts, The Battle of Gettysburg Podcast with Jim Hessler and Eric Lindblade is finally back after a five month hiatus. They finish up a two-parter looking at Chambersburg, Pa., Gettysburg’s western neighbor. In this episode, Tracy Baer discusses the role the town played in the 1863 Gettysburg Campaign and the burning of Chambersburg by Confederate forces in 1864.
Ben Franklin’s World is a podcast about “Early America.” While I often listen to it, most of its episodes fall outside of the scope of this blog. Last month, there was an excellent episode on Yellow Fever in New Orleans. Kathryn Olivarius, an Assistant Professor of History at Stanford University and author of Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom, discussed the incredible death toll the Yellow Fever Epidemics took in 19th Century New Orleans, the impact of the disease on the development of slavery in Louisiana, and the effect on immigration there. When you hear how horrible the suffering was during Yellow Fever outbreaks, then you might appreciate the impact of Ben Butler’s efforts to control the disease.
Book Reviews
Civil War Books and Authors reviews Southern Strategies: Why the Confederacy Failed edited by Christian B. Keller from University Press of Kansas (2021). According to the review, “All of the essays in Southern Strategies are highly recommended for their freshly formulated insights into arguments new and old regarding the Confederate leadership’s role in its own defeat.”
Hard to believe it took the Civil War Monitor until the last weeks of 2021 to review Robert E. Lee: A Life by Allen C. Guelzo published by Alfred A. Knopf (2021). This has been one of the most talked about books of 2021, with an author who is both widely respected and intensely disliked. Historian A. Wilson Greene writes, “I must confess that I was prepared to dislike this book. What new could possibly be said about Lee, except to paint him in the dark colors of a contemporary culture that disdains everything and everybody associated with the Confederacy? But the Lee that emerges from Guelzo’s pages rises above simplistic evaluation, reflecting the complexity of one of the central figures of the Late Unpleasantness.”
Brian Matthew Jordan reviews Stephen A. Swails: Black Freedom Fighter in the Civil War and Reconstruction by Gordon C. Rhea at Civil War Monitor. Swails was a veteran of the 54th Massachusetts who became a political leader in South Carolina. According to Jordan:
Engaging and accessible, Rhea’s short biography is ready-made for adoption in the undergraduate classroom. Marked by hope and fear, herrorism and heartbreak, promise and betrayal, loss and recovery, Stephen Atkins Swails embodied the triumph and the tragedy of the Civil War era.
The Journal of the Civil War Era reviewed Kevin Levin’s Searching for Black Confederates. According to Professor Scott Hancock:
We now have a manual for how to respond to anyone insisting that enslaved black men served as soldiers in the Confederate army. In Searching for Black Confederates, Kevin Levin systematically dismantles the myth of slaves fighting in gray. He explicates the myth’s origins, its reliance on faulty evidence, and the motives behind it. The book is not only an incredibly useful manual but also an excellent model for undergraduates in a historical methods course on how to situate careful research within broader contexts such as the politics of race. It is a valuable study of how race and memory have worked in tandem, constantly adapting to changing social circumstances to perpetuate “the myths and self-serving narratives of loyal slaves and brave black Confederate soldiers that have long played a role in maintaining the color line in American life” from the end of the Civil War to the present. Levin draws a bold line from the past to the present, particularly in the introduction and in the conclusion, pointing to the ways this history shapes present realities politically and at times violently.
YouTube
Bernie Sanders, yes THAT Bernie Sanders, hosts a discussion of the lessons of Reconstruction with Cornell West, Eric Foner, Keeanga Yamatha-Taylor. If you are afraid of Bernie, don’t watch this!
And here is Irish researcher Dr. Damian Shiels speaking about his project examining the history of Irish immigrants at Andersonville Prison. Emerging Civil War’s Sheritta Bitikofer is the interviewer.
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