Category: Social History
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Review: Trading With The Enemy: The Covert Economy During the Civil War
Trading with the Enemy The Covert Economy During the American Civil War Philip Leigh Westholme Publishing 2014 248 pages 6 x 9 hardback 20 b/w illus., map $26.00 My post on “Bagdad, Back Door to the Confederacy” garnered a comment from author Philip Leigh about other trading arrangements, especially those between the United States and […]
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Reply to Spengler
David P. Goldman is something of a polymath – scholar, investment banker, musicologist, and pundit. In the latter capacity, under the handle Spengler, he has written on a variety of subjects, including the Civil War. There, unfortunately, he comes off as being rather uninformed. Indeed one is tempted to use the characterization of Noam Chomsky […]
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Short Takes
The Wall Street Journal has a very interesting article that covers several Civil War topics – primarily that the bills for a war keep coming in long after the guns go silent, but also that there are still widows from that conflict drawing pensions right here in NC, not to mention theirs was a real […]
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Short Takes
It’s Black History Month, so let’s take a look at the African-American volunteers from Connecticut. It shows the two views of black soldiery. One legislator opined that the authorizing legislation was the most disgraceful bill ever introduced into the Connecticut Legislature,” Democratic Rep. William W. Eaton of Hartford said he “would rather let loose the wild […]
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From Around the Web
Better late than, you know…. the Pennsylvania Patriot & Union retracts an 1863 editorial panning the Gettysburg Address. Most of us would love to own a real Civil War cannon, but it’s probably still ill-advised to fire it at your neighbor, even if it’s only loaded with wadding. Dr. Howard Markel at PBS takes a […]
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Who’s a Cracker?
There’s been a good deal of discussion lately about the origins and meaning of the word “cracker” because of its use in the high profile Zimmerman murder case in Florida. Just before being shot Trayvon Martin complained about a “creepy-ass cracker” following him, and considerable ink has been spilled about whether this was a racial […]
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Nancy Harts, Salmon Chase
I was in LaGrange, GA, last weekend for a family get-together and checked out their web page. Turns out LaGrange was home to one of the Civil War’s most colorful and unusual militia companies, the all-female Nancy Harts. Named after a heroine of the Revolutionary War, the group elected two local women as officers. The […]