The Civil War Podcast

More favourite figures behaving in regrettable ways! It’s like a deeply unpleasant theme week… There’s little to glean here for anyone who knows the story already, but due to the quick cancellation of the order, the fact that Grant once tried to expel the entire Jewish population of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Mississippi. In truth, the [...]

Thanks to Google’s Books service, I went from a quick consultation of this book to reading a good portion of it online. The first few chapters are available in their entirety – as the book progresses more and more are left out, but it’s enough to gauge the readability, and this one’s very readable. Like [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

I first read Grant’s Memoirs as a teenager, and remember them as being both engaging and accessible. As one who was (and is, to this day) easily put off by the flowery, verbose prose common to novels from the Victorian era, it was refreshing to read Grant’s simple and conversational writing. You feel you’re getting [...]