Today’s “This Day” post mentions the demise of James M. Ambler, a Virginia-born Navy surgeon who reluctantly volunteered for service with an Arctic expedition aboard the Jeannette, a ship commanded by George W. De Long. The ship became imprisoned by ice late in 1879, and Ambler did well to keep the crew not only alive [...]

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Last week, Andrew Sullivan’s mega-popular blog The Dish posted an excerpt of a short essay by Lewis McCrary about Civil War reenacting. McCrary (pro-reenacting) was responding to a long lecture (pdf) given by Harvard president and Civil War historian Drew Gilpin Faust (anti-reenacting). I, in turn, responded to McCrary’s response by writing an e-mail to [...]

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The problem with reenacting, I wrote earlier today, is that you’re supposed to enjoy it. You’re supposed to enjoy doing it and to enjoy watching it. And for an exercise designed to bring one closer to war, this doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Turns out that this was precisely the critique some critics [...]

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From a story on the Liljenquist Family Collection at the Library of Congress: The story starts 15 years ago in a Virginia park. The dad, Tom Liljenquist, has two boys in tow, about 5 and 3 years old, and the younger one plucks an object from the sandstone bed of a quiet creek. It’s a Civil [...]

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The above video considers the idea of slave reenacting at Colonial Williamsburg. A few years ago, I wrote about my own questions and skepticism regarding such historical interpretation, and like the folks who made the video, I came away more or less convinced. (Via Kevin Levin)

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The other day, alert reader Marc Anderson noticed the phrase “Petty Auger” in one of Landon Carter’s diary entries. “I’m assuming the transcriber was not familiar with near the same name ‘periauger’? … the boat,” Anderson wrote, referring to the fact that the word means dugout canoe, such as what is being constructed by the [...]

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Perhaps, like me, you have only just opened your copy of The Civil War: The First Year Told by Those Who Lived It (Library of America), then you are behind. It’s June and we’re already halfway through the first year—which means that a speech given by Henry A. Wise in Richmond on June 1, 1861, [...]

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A faithful reader and commenter on our Facebook page made mention to a “noble cause”; he was referring either to the National D-Day Memorial or to World War II itself. I’m not sure, but either way it got me to thinking about Paul Fussell’s book

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This is an excerpt of a longer online conversation. The first excerpt is here. To read the whole thing, click on the links at the end. Dear Brendan, To give Band of Brothers credit, it does present instances of American soldiers killing prisoners. And yet even there the moralizing is heavy-handed. There is always the [...]

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Today’s “This Day” post reminded me that a couple years ago, I engaged University of Virginia professor Ed Lengel in an online conversation about his book To Conquer Hell, about the World War I battle of the Meuse-Argonne. I’ll reprint two parts, and you can click on the rest at the end of this post [...]

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ABC News reports on Loving v. Virginia in 1967.

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If you’re like my wife, then after reading today’s “This Day” post, you’ll give me kind of a queer look and say, “That’s a little dark.” And it is. I know. But to really understand the first English colony called Virginia—by which I mean the one on Roanoke—then you need to wrap your head around [...]

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The other day a friend passed along a link to the “6 Civil War Myths Everyone Believes (That Are Total B.S.)” Yes, it’s from Cracked magazine, but it doesn’t present itself as parody; it’s not even funny. Instead, it’s smug and know-it-all-y with a dash of foul language intended (I assume) to signal some mad [...]

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Today’s “This Day” post celebrates the second marriage of Lizinka Campbell Brown, or “my wife, the widow Mrs. Brown,” as General Ewell called her. Husband No. 1, James Percy Brown, committed suicide in 1844, but as you might expect, there is more to the story. This comes from Campbell Brown’s Civil War (2001) by Terry [...]

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Today’s “This Day” post raises the question of whether John H. Winder—who was in charge of the Confederate prison system that included Andersonville—was a war criminal. He died before the surrender, but his subordinate, Henry Wirz, did hang. Our entry on Winder does an evenhanded job, I think, of considering this prickly question: Historians, meanwhile, [...]

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Turns out that May 24, 1900, is a popular date among some Republicans who are sensitive to charges that they are insensitive when it comes to race. I point you to the Internet meme in which far-right activists post a time line of ignominious moments in the history of the Democratic Party. May 24 is [...]

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In an earlier post, the historian Henry Wiencek argued against the proposition that emancipation in 1865 was “an economic calamity” for Southern slaveholders. But this would only be true, Wiencek wrote, if the planters had bought each one of their slaves. Losing such a significant investment might, indeed, be calamitous. Except that they hadn’t needed [...]

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In looking for newspaper reports ahead of the big secession referendum, I ran across this, from the Richmond Enquirer (May 10, 1861): Catholicism and Slavery Both to be Destroyed. Like Popery, Slavery is incompatible with the spirit of the age, or in other words, with liberty and civilization. Their progress is at an end, and [...]

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The idea of this post is juxtaposition. (It’s also about burying the lede, so please read the whole thing!) First, there’s the image above, from 1863, of a former slave who enlisted in the United States Army. (No black Confederate, this guy. Go figure.) And then there’s this, from The Commercial Appeal of Memphis, Tennessee: [...]

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With the Brown v. Board and Plessy v. Ferguson anniversaries back to back this week, I thought it appropriate to highlight this interview that Thurgood Marshall gave Mike Wallace back in … well, I don’t know when exactly. But it’s clearly after he successfully argued Brown but before he was appointed to the Supreme Court. [...]

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