The Civil War Podcast

As if the Lincoln Library needs more adversity in this troubled sesquicentennial, it seems one of their centerpieces is of questionable provenance.  Such a sham(e). The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield has long proclaimed that an 1850s-era stovepipe hat in the museum’s possession belonged to Lincoln. But this month, after Dave McKinney [...]

This one’s rather macabre, so if you have a sensitive constitution, don’t click through to the picture that accompanies the article. Shortly after the battle of Antietam, a farmer plowing his field dug up a dismembered arm.  For some reason, he and the doctor he consulted about it decided to pickle it rather than bury [...]

The Lincoln Museum in Springfield is deep in debt and feuding internally. A shame that this is happening during the sesquicentennial celebrations.  Here’s hoping they can get their act together and their debt paid off, and get on with being an informative and entertaining center of history. Just seven years old, the Abraham Lincoln Presidential [...]

Today is the anniversary of Lincoln’s death, the process of which started the night before at Ford’s Theater, and ended across the street at the Petersen House. This year, both events and locations have been commemorated in a newly expanded museum housed in the building adjoining the House Where Lincoln Died. Wait a minute, you [...]

If – like me – you’re planning a visit to DC during this 1862 sesquicentennial year, be sure to add the National Portrait Gallery to your must-sees.  In addition to an exhibition of Brady’s portraits of the Union generals, there’s a collection of Adalbert Volck etchings on display. A Volck lithograph was reproduced in the [...]

Civil War buffs in Washington, DC have another month and a half to partake in the Corcoran Gallery’s Shadows of History exhibition. The photographs capture a wide range of subjects, from geographical views, landscapes, and portraits of soldiers and officers at rest, to the death and destruction in the aftermath of battles. Photographs by George [...]

“Free Jazz” is a phrase that doesn’t much stir my enthusiasm, and I admit I’m not quite sure what to make of this, but it’s an interesting news item to note, and besides – I’m sure there are readers for whom “Free Jazz” inspires the same kind of heart-throbs that “fluffy kittens” or “Tecumseh Sherman” [...]

Another artifact donation in the news, though unlike the Jim Lane portrait, this one was probably a wrench to give away. A Danville museum was just given a sketchbook belonging to a POW, which contains some excellently rendered landscape scenes and portraits of his fellow prisoners. http://www.wtvr.com/news/wdbj7-civil-war-sketchbook-returns-to-danville-20120201,0,1236021.story

National Geographic offers a small photo gallery of the newly restored and displayed Hunley. If you’ve read any of the previous Hunley posts, you’ve probably seen most of these pictures, but the first is pretty revealing: The fully “restored” (it looks extra crumbly) sub with a restorer or museum staffer next to it. It’s bad [...]

The most depressing thing about the current economic crisis is that governments are tackling the crisis through austerity measures and cutbacks. When you see websites like this one, you’re reminded of what was accomplished when the WPA assigned the country odd jobs (in a literal sense) and gifted its results upon later generations. The ethnomusicology [...]