Blog
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...
Published: 3/23/12
A Slave and A Spy
Good afternoon! Today’s Women’s History Month tribute is of Mary Touvestre. Touvestre, a former slave, worked for one of the Confederate engineers transforming the USS Merrimack into the CSS Virginia....
Published: 3/21/12
The Reconstruction of Mark Twain (2010)
As his title and subtitle suggest, Joe Fulton has constructed a conversion narrative for Mark Twain in which he manages to offer a variety of fresh insights into a life...
Published: 3/21/12
“I will not attempt to hamper you with any minute instructions.”
On March 21, 1862, Major General Henry W. Halleck, commanding Federal forces in the Western Theater, sent this message to Major General John Pope, then commanding forces at New Madrid,...
Published: 3/20/12
Southern Belle or Female Rebel?
Good morning! In honor of Women’s History Month we thought we would share this Harper’s Weekly image (shown to the left). Along with the front page illustration the authors of...
Published: 3/20/12
The Infamous “Woman Order” of Occupied New Orleans
Good afternoon! Earlier today, we shared an image of a Baltimore woman flaunting her Confederate sympathies which drew parallels to the actions of the women of Union-occupied New Orleans. Therefore,...
Published: 3/19/12
Patriotic Mail
Good afternoon! Our Women’s History Month celebration continues with an image of one of the era’s patriotic envelopes. Used to both boost morale and support the war effort, envelopes like...
Published: 3/16/12
The Wild Rose of the South
Good afternoon! Today’s Women’s History Month tribute is of Rose O’Neal Greenhow—also known as “Wild Rose”—the famed Confederate spy. Born in Maryland in 1817, little is known of her early...
Published: 3/16/12
The Monitor, The Merrimack, and Me
Last week, I packed up my husband and my dog and headed north to Norfolk and Newport News, Virginia. We were bound for the Civil War Navy Conference at the...
Published: 3/15/12
A Lady and A Diary from Dixie
Good morning! Our Women’s History Month celebration continues with this tribute to Mary Boykin Chesnut. Mary Boykin Chesnut is perhaps the best known female diarist of the Civil War. Born...
Published: 3/15/12
How I tried and failed to escape the Civil War
My interest in the Civil War should have been a wonderful accident of birth and geography. I was born, raised, studied, and worked around key sites in that event’s...
Published: 3/14/12
Abraham Lincoln and the Structure of Reason (2010)
Original ideas about Abraham Lincoln are uncommon. Given the ever-growing pile of Lincoln books and articles, not much remains unsaid or probably even unthought about the man. So on the...
Published: 3/14/12
Lincoln and the Border States (2011)
Hard as it might be to imagine, William C. Harris’s new book fills a significant gap in the historical literature on Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln and the Border States is the first...
Published: 3/12/12
The Women in Black
Last fall, J. David Hacker revealed that the number of Civil War dead is closer to 750,000 than the previously accepted number of 618,222. While not all of them were...