Air Date: 120707
Subject: Civil War Soldiers at Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery
Book: Final Camping Ground: Civil War Veterans at Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery, In Their Own Words
Website: http://www.green-wood.com
Guest: Jeffrey Richman
Summary: Jeffrey Richman, official historian of the Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, discusses the Cemetery and his new Book on Civil War veterans located there.
Brett’s Summary: Jeffrey Richman, a former lawyer, first came to the Green-Wood Cemetery in 1987 and eventually convinced the staff there that he could be the full-time historian of the cemetery.
In the first segment, the history of Green-Wood Cemetery itself is discussed. Richman went over the rural cemetery movement of the early 19th Century, where graveyards were located within reach of urban centers but far enough away to provide the ability to have a religious experience with nature. The movement started in Paris, spread to the United States in 1831, and reached New York with the opening of Green-Wood in 1838.
The second segment covered the Civil War soldiers buried there. At first, Richman says, he thought there might have been several hundred. However, after extensive research and a lot of help from volunteers, he now believes the number is closer to 10,000, of which 3,000+ have been identified. There are even several Confederate generals buried there.
The last segment focused on Richman’s book, Final Camping Ground: Civil War Veterans at Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery, In Their Own Words. The link to the book takes you to The Green-Wood Cemetery web site, the only place online where the book is available. Diary entries and letters from some of the thousands of veterans buried at the cemetery allow these men to speak for themselves. An interesting addition is the inclusion of a CD-ROM which collects biographical information for all of the Civil War soldiers known to be buried there.
Civil War Talk Radio airs most Fridays at 12 PM Pacific on World Talk Radio Studio A. Host Gerry Prokopowicz, the History Chair at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina, interviews a guest each week and discusses their interest in the Civil War. Most interviews center around a book or books if the guest is an author. Other guests over the years have included public historians such as park rangers and museum curators, wargamers, bloggers, and even a member of an American Civil War Round Table located in London, England.
In this series of blog entries, I will be posting air dates, subjects, and guests, and if I have time, I’ll provide a brief summary of the program. You can find all of the past episodes I’ve entered into the blog by clicking on the Civil War Talk Radio category. Each program should appear either on or near the date it was first broadcast.
Check out more summaries of Civil War Talk Radio at TOCWOC – A Civil War Blog.
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