The Civil War Podcast

This is an interesting solution to the Confederate statue question: One community sold a monument to a private investor, and made a tidy profit on it! The likenesses of Confederate slaveowners being sold on the auction block is an ironic turn of events. Now, one city has settled on an unusual answer: Sell the statue […]

While not strictly Civil War related, this book – reviewed here in the NY Times – shows the legacy of at least one die-hard secessionist upon his daughters. This sounds like a fascinating family history. These are just snapshots of a densely braided biography spanning eight decades, not counting the Lumpkins’ forebears and the rediscovery […]

There’s a new novel about Harriet Tubman. Tubman’s daring raids into Confederate territory to rescue slaves and scout for Union armies are the perfect fodder for an adventure novel. I’ll have to see if I can pick this one up at some point! A historian and novelist, Cobbs dramatizes events from late May and early […]

Happy Confederate defeat day! Admittedly, it took another two years before the capitulation was complete, but the seeds of that Union victory were sown on July 4th, 1863. Lee began his retreat to Virginia after Gettysburg, and Grant wrapped up the siege of Vicksburg. While the two forces at Gettysburg spent the Fourth of July […]

The Washington Post has offered a comparison of Lincoln’s speeches with Trump’s. It’s depressing reading – as one commenter puts it, “We’re comparing apples and feces, here.” – but maybe skip the Trump parts and revel in the beautiful humanity of Lincoln’s words. I particularly liked this quote about immigrants. As a Canadian living in […]

As they watch modern day Washington with a wary eye, Impeachment proponents can find some aspirational reading in a new book about Andrew Johnson’s proceedings. The Guardian reviews it here. Implicit or not, parallels abound with current American life. Johnson’s “Swing Around the Circle” railroad trip featured rallies at which his language was (at best) […]

As with a few of their other holdings, the Lincoln Presidential Library’s new Bible acquisition is of dubious connection to the man. He may have thumbed through it once or two, but an eighteen pound Bible is not really a book that lends itself to light reading. (Pun intended. Also, eighteen pounds?!) A Bible given […]

Another local story, this one dedicating a local square in the name of a USCT soldier. This article added an interesting point about slave names that I’d never considered before. But when enlistment opened for men of color in Cape Girardeau, the Army wants you to have a first name and a last name. And […]

NYTimes columnist Charles M Blow weighs in on the current Reparations debate. This is a topic that I admit flummoxes me: I see the point of paying reparations, but it’s a difficult thing to plan and implement. It’s a valuable debate to have, regardless. Source: Opinion | Reparations: Reasonable and Right – The New York […]

The writer Ta-Nehisi Coates testified for Congress on a bill that discusses reparations for slavery. Mitch McConnell weighed in with the following quote, which would be a lot less cynical if he didn’t use “We”. A politician who devoted himself to undermining the entire African American presidency he namechecks isn’t one to claim that efforts […]