In this morning’s Washington Post, film reviewer Anne Hornaday writes about her own family’s connection to a name that recently has “bubble(d) up into the zeitgeist”: Ota Benga.
Benga was an African pygmy who, in 1904, was brought to the United States from the Congo, where his family had been massacred and he had been captured [...]

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Having written an earlier post on the writer George Tucker, I thought I’d share this interesting little bit from his oeuvre. (More interesting than his 1827 novel A Voyage to the Moon; with Some Account of the Manners and Customs, Science and Philosophy, of the People of Morosofia, and Other Lunarians? Well, no. But still.)
In [...]

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I’ve been editing our entry on George Tucker this week. Tucker was the Bermuda-born cousin of the more famous jurist St. George Tucker, and he served three terms in the U.S. House of Representatives before being invited by Thomas Jefferson to join the faculty of the newly opened University of Virginia in 1825. Tucker was [...]

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One would do well to be skeptical of Sigmund Freud’s historical writings. So I don’t suggest this passage from his biography of Thomas Woodrow Wilson (written in 1939, published in 1967) to be anything but kind of funny:
The University of Virginia was then, as it has been since its foundation by Thomas Jefferson, a distinguished [...]

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Some historians are particularly good at sketching characters. Case in point: David S. Reynolds, author of the just-released Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson. (Read a review.)
Here he distinguishes the two Virginians, Monroe and Madison:
Whereas Madison (the smallest president in American history) stood five feet five and weighed only a hundred pounds, Monroe [...]

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How do we remember war?
According to Kent Gramm, the worst thing you can do is present war—in this instance, the Civil War—in terms that might make it attractive. (Or fun. Or honorable.) That would open you up to his accusation that you are living in a world of “fantasy, myth, and entertainment.”
According to Stephen Cushman, [...]

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I’m still thinking about the historian Kent Gramm’s comments about myth-making and the Civil War. Re-reading that post, I notice that one word especially jumps out—buff, as in, “As a Civil War buff, [Gramm] explains, you can vicariously march with the indomitable veterans of Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia . . .”
It’s unclear whether Gramm [...]

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In the previous post, I was pleased to quote a fine historian quoting a fine historian arguing that our idea of the Civil War as a “beautiful” war is “fantasy, myth, and entertainment.” It is, in other words, the work of retrospection, as opposed to history. This may be true. But last night I was [...]

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Via Mark Grimsley:
In the introduction to a recent book on Civil War combat, historian Kent Gramm opens with a surprising comment: “One of the most harmful consequences of the Civil War results from our very interest in the war, and our attraction to it.” As a Civil War buff, he explains, you can vicariously march [...]

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Driving to work this morning, I got behind that car—the one wallpapered in bumper stickers: End the War, Give Peace a Chance, et alia. And I’m programmed to assume that such sentiments are simply a product of the sixties. They’re not, of course, and I was reminded of this while editing our entry about, of [...]

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