Category: Civil War Memory

  • ADAH Digital Collections On Line

    Rob Wynstra sends along a tip that the Alabama Department of Archives and History now has a lot of its collections available on the web, including quite a lot of Civil War info. This includes period photos and textual materials, and is well worth a look. The Confederate soldiers section, for example, has a wealth […]

  • Review: The Day Lincoln Was Almost Shot: The Fort Stevens Story by B.F. Cooling

    The Day Lincoln Was Almost Shot: The Fort Stevens Story by Benjamin Franklin Cooling III The Scarecrow Press $45.00 May 2013 ISBN: 978-0-8108-8622-3       Most people would put the high water mark of the Confederacy at a copse of trees near the crest of Cemetery Hill just outside of Gettysburg, PA, on the […]

  • Archer’s Brigade sharpshooters (and who shot Reynolds)

    Information about Confederate sharpshooter battalions is often hard to come by and you have to dig it out piecemeal and then try to assemble it into some sort of coherent whole. Often all you have is some offhand mentions in letters, reports and reminiscences. Such is the case with Archer’s mostly Tennessee brigade. The presence […]

  • Fort Stevens – Scaring Able Lincoln Like Hell

    A hundred and forty-nine years ago today the Confederates stood with sight of the unfinished US capitol dome—the closest they would get to it under arms. The resulting fracas is usually called the Battle of Fort Stevens and altho minor compared to contests like Gettysburg, it was a hard fought action, well remembered by those […]

  • Who’s a Cracker?

    There’s been a good deal of discussion lately about the origins and meaning of the word “cracker” because of its use in the high profile Zimmerman murder case in Florida. Just before being shot Trayvon Martin complained about a “creepy-ass cracker” following him, and considerable ink has been spilled about whether this was a racial […]

  • Two Views of Gettysburg Town

    With the Sesquicentennial of the Battle of Gettysburg almost on us I thought I’d post a couple of contemporary views of the town. As most of you know the Confederates swept through the town on July 1, driving the Federals before them and capturing large numbers of them. The Federals, however, held Cemetery Hill just […]

  • Short Takes

    Tony Horowitz (Confederates in the Attic) has an article on “150 Years of Misunderstanding the Civil War.” A better title would be “150 Years of Changing Interpretations of the Civil War.” Historians, as Lord Acton observed, are merely politicians looking backwards, and they have their own prejudices and points of view. As he notes most […]