Blog
Published: 4/18/12
The Abolitionist Imagination (2012)
This call and response volume grew from the Alexis de Tocqueville Lectures on American Politics at Harvard. Andrew Delblanco provoked and the other authors responded. Delbanco, a literary historian, holds...
Published: 4/18/12
Albert Taylor Bledsoe (2011)
Terry Barnhart’s intriguing biography of Albert Taylor Bledsoe reveals that Bledsoe, like the Old South he cherished, was a paradox. Long recognized as one of the most respected—and most unrepentant—southern...
Published: 4/15/12
Did a C.S.S. Alabama Veteran Die in the Titanic Disaster?
The December 1912 issue of The Confederate Veteran carries a list of eleven members of the Joe Johnston UCV Camp No. 94 of Mexia, Texas, who died between July 1911...
Published: 4/12/12
Voice from the Past: “Another Bloodless Victory”
In belated honor of the fall of Fort Pulaski (April 11, 1862), we bring you Miss Susan Walker’s account of the battle: Friday 11th April Heavy firing all morning yesterday...
Published: 4/11/12
Drinking Patterns in the Civil War (2011)
In his General Orders of February 4, 1862, General George McClellan admonished his troops that “total abstinence from intoxicating liquors … would be worth fifty thousand men to the armies...
Published: 4/7/12
Voice from the Past: “Victory is Sufficiently Complete…Victory is Lost”
Our sesquicentennial celebration of the Battle of Shiloh continues with an excerpt from Confederate Colonel S.H. Lockett’s account of the battle printed in Battles and Leaders. It recalls how quickly...
Published: 4/7/12
Voice from the Past: “Those Savage Yells, And The Sight of Thousands of Racing Figures Coming Towards Them”
We close our Shiloh sesquicentennial celebration with Henry Morton Stanley’s recollection of the battle and the effectiveness of the legendary rebel yell. After a steady exchange of musketry, which lasted...
Published: 4/6/12
Voice from the Past: “Terrible Tales of the Scenes in Corinth”
In honor of Shiloh’s sesquicentennial, we bring you the following voice from the past. Taken from the April 9, 1862 diary of Kate Cumming, it recounts the battle’s deadly aftermath....
Published: 4/6/12
The Drummer Boy of Shiloh
Duke Library One of the legends of Shiloh was of a young drummer boy who died on the battlefield. Cast as a young lad who had run away from home...
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Published: 4/5/12
“Life Studies of the Great Army”
At the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibit of 1876, Edwin Forbes, renowned for his work during the Civil War as a “special artist” for Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, displayed a collection of...
Published: 4/4/12
The Grand Design (2010)
In The Grand Design: Strategy and the U.S. Civil War, Donald Stoker answers a question that few historians have asked: Did the leaders on either side of the Civil War...
Published: 4/4/12
A Tour of Reconstruction (2011)
Anna Dickinson got right to the point during her travels through the South in 1875. The landscape she encountered in North Carolina was “nothing but dreariness, dirt, poverty, brutishness, &...
Published: 4/2/12
Three Hundred Thousand More
Good afternoon! Today we bring you an 1862 song written by John S. Gibbons, to aid Lincoln’s call for 300,000 more Union troops. It first appeared in the New York...
Published: 3/30/12
Song of a Southern Prisoner to the Ladies of Baltimore
Happy Friday! We close Women’s History Month with this song, entitled “Southern Prisoner. Gives His Thanks to the Baltimore Ladies.” I left Winchester Court-house, all in the month of May,...
Published: 3/28/12
The Civil War in Georgia (2011)
In 1998 leaders of the Georgia Humanities Council and the University of Georgia Press convened a meeting of about a dozen librarians, historians, curators, and other scholars to discuss the...
Published: 3/27/12
Song of the Southern Women
Good morning! Today’s Women’s History Month tribute is a poem written by Julia Mildred. Entitled, “Song of the Southern Women,” it is one example of how women struggled to help...
Published: 3/27/12
Then and Now: Pope’s Canal to New Madrid
One-hundred and fifty years ago, Brigadier General John Pope faced a tactical dilemma on the Mississippi River. Confederate batteries at Island No. 10 blocked passage through a complex series of...
Published: 3/26/12
Women’s Work
Good afternoon! Today’s Women’s History Month tribute is a Harper’s Weekly image entitled “Filling Cartidges at the United States Arsenal at Watertown, Massachusetts.” It is a reminder that the war...