The Civil War Podcast

I went looking for some Civil War music on YouTube, and was tickled to discover this video: An 8-minute excerpt from Johnny Cash’s 1960s variety show, in which he sings and spoken-words his way through a medley of Civil War songs and speeches. Sadly, he doesn’t introduce the last song with “Hullo! I’m Johnny Reb!” [...]

A search for Henry Kyd Douglas’ I Rode with Stonewall shows – to my surprise – that the memoir is still under copyright. As a secondary result, I found this reenactor’s performance of some of the book’s anecdotes. The youngest member of Stonewall’s staff is looking pretty long in the tooth these days, but it’s [...]

This Christmas, I treated myself to a few wonderful items from the PBS online store‘s bumper sale. (Caveat emptor: They will spam you endlessly if you buy anything. Spam is the pledge break of the digital age.) Ken Burns box set, his excellent Lewis & Clark series, American Experience’s Abraham & Mary Lincoln series (also [...]

God, I love nerds. The speaker in this video is fantastic: Speaks for 11 minutes without notes, with a great deal of enthusiasm, and even with a stereotypical “retainer lisp” on Thaddeus Lowe’s involvement in the war, covering everything from the technology to the chronology of the Balloon Corps. A terrific little introduction to a [...]

You don’t look a day over 202. In honour of The Bin Yin’s (no, not that one) 203rd birthday, enjoy this behind-the-scenes look at the Smithsonian’s collection of Lincolniana.

In reading that discussion in The Atlantic, a few of the commenters mentioned Douglas Blackmon’s Slavery By Another Name, which chronicles the virtual enslavement of blacks in the South after the war. The reviews are all along the lines of, “excellent, but exhausting” (with tons of depressing statistics), so I’m glad to see that it’s [...]

One of those old movies I was wishing for in the last post! Smithsonian Magazine uncovered this film of a bunch of aged Southern vets demonstrating what’s left of their Rebel Yells for a crowd in the 1930s. The individual yells don’t do much on their own (one old fellow, in particular, looks winded by [...]

Those of us who have seen the Ken Burns series (and I presume that’s all of us) know about these videos, but that doesn’t make them any less of a treat to watch: The 1938 reunion of Civil War veterans at Gettysburg. I’d love to see all the original film from this event. The clips [...]

A documentary from the History Channel that I overlooked this year: A fancified take on the battle of Gettysburg, with bloody cinematic illustration and some pretty appalling acting. It had some promise, but tended to concentrate and linger upon some moments (Amos Humiston, for one, is a long time dying) while entirely ignoring others. If [...]

Again from The AV Club’s Newswire, more casting news on the instantly-awesome-and-highly-anticipated Steven Spielberg Lincoln movie: Jared Harris will be playing U.S. Grant. I was a huge fan of Harris’ late father, Richard, and Jared did a fantastic job on Mad Men. I am curious to hear his American accent, though, because the closest he [...]