Music
Shh . . . I hear a siren sound. I’m walking down Long Street in Cape Town with two Black South African women I met while visiting the local university. I’m in my work clothes on a Friday night more than eight thousand miles away from anything that looks familiar. The last thing I expect »
Essay
In July 1993, Wanda and Brenda Henson bought a “defunct pig and grape farm” in Ovett, Mississippi. Brenda described the land as “right outside Hattiesburg, 77 miles from the Gulf Coast,” where they’d been living in Gulfport. Located on Bogue Homa Creek, the 120-acre property had “five barns and one house to be renovated” and »
In the first battle of the Civil War, the only casualty was a horse. When the smoke lifted after the bombardment of Fort Sumter in April 1861, southerners hailed the “bloodless victory” that had yielded the federal fort into Confederate hands without the loss of a single human life. The death of an army horse »
“The most powerful memories of the Civil War continue to be the personal stories, and while the transmission may be sputtering today, they remain the most evocative, both of the winners’ frail victims and the losers’ human pain.” Readers who experienced the Civil War Centennial of 1961–65 may recall a pair of cartoons that circulated »
Photo Essay
Born and raised in the American South by a white Northern family, I have felt my experiences and identity straddle a line between the two, even while identifying with both. Growing up, my father took the initiative to teach and cultivate a deep appreciation of history and culture, taking the family to the many historical »
University of North Carolina Press, 2004 Soon after the Civil War—and long before the current interest in “historical memory”—Americans understood that the way they remembered the Civil War would define their nation. For nearly a century and a half, commemoration of the Civil War has served as a sort of national Rorschach test, exposing divisions »
“‘The war is surging up close about us. – O . . . if I could put into your and every true woman’s heart the inexpressible loathing I have for it! If you could only see the other side enough to see the wrong the tyranny on both!’” The decades leading up to the Civil »
The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001 America has an inexhaustible store of anecdotes about the Civil War, but here’s one that never made it into the nation’s collective memory. In May 1865 African American troops marched toward Smithfield, North Carolina. When they came to the Neuse River at the edge of town, they »
“[B]y emphasizing military conflict over political debate, by privileging valor over ideology, and by accentuating white heroism over black activism, the Foote–Burns interpretation of the Civil War gave PBS’s mainstream American audience something to feel good about.” This year marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of filmmaker Ken Burns’s PBS television series on the American Civil War. »
“These wartime memorials represent the earliest efforts to [illuminate] the sentiments of soldiers who memorialized their very recently fallen comrades and the heroic events of the war on the very ground where the historic actions occurred.” The New York Times was wrong in more than one respect when it heralded the dedication of two monuments »
“More Americans died in the Civil War than in all other American wars combined up to Vietnam. Death touched nearly every American, north and south, of the Civil War era, yet the unanticipated scale of the destruction meant that at least half these dead remained unidentified.” We take for granted the obligation of our government »