Civil War

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  1/17/2022
  

  New Book Challenges Civil War Myths in Maryland

  Charles W. Mitchell and Jean H. Baker's book assembles essays from historians who undermine myths of Maryland history shaped by Confederate sympathizers. 

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• SOURCE: Slate
  1/17/2022
  

  Imagining Another Civil War is a Lost Cause (But That's Not Stopping People)

  by Richard Kreitner

  Journalist Stephen Marche presents scenarios under which the historical tensions among groups of Americans could openly rupture, but reviewer Richard Kreitner thinks some are unlikely, and don't grapple with the way that American institutions are implicated in the crisis of democracy.

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• SOURCE: The Bulwark
  1/7/2022
  

  Our Last Insurrectionist President

  by Daniel N. Gullotta

  John Tyler's post-presidential second act, as a secessionist, yielded something worse than historical condemnation: irrelevance. 

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• SOURCE: Substack
  1/6/2022
  

  How Twitter Explains the Civil War (and Vice Versa)

  by Ariel Ron

  Violence in the Capitol a year ago called to mind events like Preston Brooks's brutal caning of Charles Sumner. But a closer look shows that, like today, antebellum politics were disrupted and made volatile by revolutions in communciation technology. 

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• SOURCE: The Atlantic
  12/16/2021
  

  Beware Prophecies of Civil War

  by Fintan O'Toole

  Northern Ireland's history shows how "premonitions of civil war served not as portents to be heeded, but as a warrant for carnage," as a seemingly inevitable mass conflict justifies and normalizes smaller-scale political violence as an everyday phenomenon.

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• SOURCE: History.com
  12/6/2021
  

  The 1860 Crittenden Compromise Aimed to Stop Civil War while Preserving Slavery

  John J. Crittenden hoped that restoring the Missouri Compromise and other measures to stop slavery's expansion would prevent slaveholders from following through on threats to secede. Abraham Lincoln wasn't buying it. 

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  11/6/2021
  

  3 Black Soldiers Executed by the Confederacy to be Honored by Virginia

  A Confederate private's diary casually described the execution of three members of the U.S. Colored Troops near Culpeper, Virginia. Today the work of Howard Lambert and his Freedom Foundation will honor the anonymous soldiers. 

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• SOURCE: Los Angeles Review of Books
  11/3/2021
  

  Lee's Fault: On Allen Guelzo's Biography

  by John Reeves

  A reviewer concludes that Allen Guelzo's new biography succeeds in evaluating Robert E. Lee's military career but misses in its assessment of his relationship to slavery and his legacy.

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• SOURCE: New York Times
  11/2/2021
  

  Wilentz: New Book Says Jefferson Davis was Right About the Constitution. What About Lincoln?

  by Sean Wilentz

  Noah Feldman's new books says that, in 1861, Jefferson Davis was right about the Constitution's sanction of slavery, and only the rupture of the Civil War could amend and reset the document. Sean Wilentz disagrees. 

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• 10/24/2021
  

  Flying the Confederate Battle Flag in the North is a Special Sort of Disgrace

  by Daniel Koch

  Upstate New York was once the most pro-Lincoln and anti-slavery part of the Union. The growing presence of Confederate symbols there insults the region's history and contributions paid in blood for freedom. 

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• SOURCE: Washington Monthly
  9/23/2021
  

  Garrett Epps: The Civil War Roots of the Debt Ceiling Crisis

  Congress wrote the 14th Amendment to guarantee the legitimacy of the United States' debt, because Southerners restored to power provoked a crisis over the respective war debts of the United States and the Confederacy. 

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• 9/19/2021
  

  Richmond's Lee Statue Has Come Down. What About Confederate Memorials in Cemeteries?

  by Jeffrey Smith

  The statue of Robert E. Lee on Richmond’s Monument Avenue finally came down, to both fanfare and controversy. But some Confederate monuments are even more politically loaded—the ones where we bury the dead.

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• SOURCE: Black Perspectives
  9/1/2021
  

  Black Women and Civil War Pensions

  by Holly A. Pinheiro, Jr.

  Widows and surviving children of Black veterans of the Civil War used their status as pensioners to claim belonging in the nation, but authorities frequently allowed notions of respectability rooted in white supremacy to undermine them. 

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• SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
  7/14/2021
  

  Conservatives are Once Again Trying to Erase Black History

  by Tyler D. Parry

  There are, in fact, millions of southerners from the antebellum,Civil War and Reconstruction eras that deserve to be memorialized. Their stories have been suppressed not out of political correctness but because they were Black southerners fighting for freedom and interracial democracy.

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• SOURCE: MSNBC
  6/12/2021
  

  North Carolina Plantation's Juneteenth Event Underscores South's Historical Whitewashing

  by Keisha N. Blain

  "The plan to center a Juneteenth event around so-called “displaced white refugees” is deeply racist. But it’s also part of a much larger public effort to distort historical narratives and, in this case, miseducate the public about slavery in the United States."

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  6/13/2021
  

  Plantation Planned Juneteenth Event that would Tell the Stories of Displaced ‘White Refugees’

  Was the planned event unduly sympathetic to slave owners, or a reflection of the historical intertwining of the lives of Black and White southerners? 

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  6/7/2021
  

  Plantations Aren’t Paying Reparations, But Have Started Programs To Give Back To Descendants

  Joy Banner, descended from people enslaved at the Whitney Plantation in Louisiana, is pursuing reparations in the form of input into the use of land owned by the Whitney, saying “there are as many different forms of reparations as you can think of, because healing looks different in every community.”

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• SOURCE: Black Perspectives
  4/8/2021
  

  Black Soldiers and the Civil War

  by Aston Gonzalez

  Deborah Willis's book "The Black Civil War Soldier" utilizes visual imagery other historians have often passed over to describe how Black soldiers understood military service in relation to their hopes for future economic, political, and familial security. 

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• SOURCE: New York Times
  3/30/2021
  

  Maryland’s State Song, a Nod to the Confederacy, Nears Repeal

  "Maryland, My Maryland" was written by a Confederate sympathizer in 1861 and has come under scrutiny in recent years for its characterization of the Union army as a force of tyranny and call for listerners to fight for the Confederacy. 

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• SOURCE: Civil War Memory
  3/10/2021
  

  When It Comes To a Bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest, ‘The Cruelty Was the Point.’

  by Kevin M. Levin

  The Nathan Bedford Forrest bust placed in the Tennessee State Capitol in 1978 was not the work of people who could reasonably be said to have the values of another era. Its placement forces us to consider head-on the values of the Confederacy and people who celebrate it.