“‘No war? I have come to you directly from Washington City, where the caissons are rolling, where a great army has been gathering, where Lincoln is planning for war. Whether you are or not.’” Bland Simpson’s Two Captains from Carolina tells the story of Moses Grandy (ca. 1791–ca. 1850) and John Newland Maffitt Jr. (1819–1886), »
“‘In the name of the future manhood of the south I protest. What are we to teach them? If we cannot teach them that their fathers were right, it follows that these Southern children must be taught that they were wrong.’” In the July 1900 edition of Confederate Veteran magazine, readers discovered that a “sensation” »
“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 »
“We started to wonder: did twenty-first century Charleston have separate—even segregated—tourism industries, one that focused on the city’s white history and another that told of its Black past?” I was so rushed that I could barely maintain my balance. The struggle to pull pantyhose over my tired feet, newly liberated from a pair of running »
“I drilled until the book was lace.” The gaps between experience and history are filled with unauthorized cosmologies. Worldview. Origins of myth. While artifacts of war are found in pawnshops, artifacts of survival are found in cosmology. Through my work, I chart the southern imaginary—from the Culture Wars back to Reconstruction, from a Food Lion »
“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 »
Politics
“He had acted so precipitously so often in affairs of honor, and it had won him only paternal disapproval and a cane, a limp, and ignominy in Mexico. Now he had righted the ship; he had become a man of greater moderation and restraint.” Looking out across the scorched strand from atop one of the »
“There were more threatened than actual lynchings in the twentieth century, while the reverse was true in the years prior to 1900. These trend data suggest that the South became more effective in suppressing mob violence after 1900, such that, although threats of mob violence remained high, the number of persons killed annually declined significantly.” »
“‘How can I be bitter? You are my strength, you ghosts.’” In Vietnam and the Southern Imagination, Owen W. Gilman Jr. writes that “Southerners have an affinity for history, and thus Vietnam has been joined frequently to the long span of history cultivated in the South.” One of the more vocal critics of the American »
“[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. »
“People see in the events at Appomattox what they want to see: testimony to Americans’ shared greatness or testimony to promises unfulfilled. Both of those things are real.” The meaning of the events at the McLean House on April 9, 1865, seem firmly embedded in our national story. In our country’s understanding, Appomattox is America »
I could not bring myself to warn Joe,doing so would cause his legs to give out,his heart collapse: you told me every life is sacred. Army of the CumberlandFebruary 5, 1862, cold and snowing Dear Father,More pitiful than packs of feral catsthe horde staggered into camp,their black faces smothered in clay,arthritic fingers mangled with dirt,echoes »