TOCWOC – A Civil War Blog

I hope everyone enjoys their Memorial Day today. Just remember it’s for the ones who didn’t make it back. The official birthplace of Memorial Day is Waterloo, New York. The village was credited with being the birthplace because it observed the day on May 5, 1866, and each year thereafter, and because it is likely […]

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Christian B. Keller. Chancellorsville and the Germans: Nativism, Ethnicity, and Civil War Memory. New York: Fordham University Press; First Edition (May 15, 2007). 244 pp., 4 maps, notes, index. ISBN: 978-0823226504 $65.00 (Hardcover w/DJ). How serious a blow was the Battle of Chancellorsville to the collective German-American psyche? Christian B. Keller attempts to answer precisely […]

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Air Date: 042508 Subject: The Origins of Southern White Identity in the Slave Holding South Book: The Making of a Confederate: Walter Lenoir’s Civil War (New Narratives in American History) Guest: Professor William L. Barney Summary: Professor William L. Barney discusses his new book The Making of a Confederate, about a man whose family owns […]

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Cross posted at Touch The Elbow In an issue last week, buried in Section B of the Charleston Post and Courier was an article about Juneteenth, specifically that it looks very good that SC will soon be recognizing it – just not as a holiday. In previous posts at Touch The Elbow (here and here) […]

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In the great debate of Slavery Vs. State’s rights, there is a new recruit on the field. One who immensely researched letters, diaries, and journals from soldiers on the front line to get, straight from their own mouths, what they as individuals were fighting over. Chandra Manning’s What This Cruel War was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, […]

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Kevin Levin at Civil War Memory has a bitter screed about people going to Antietam and enjoying themselves, damn it. It’s a battlefield! People died! Platitudes are being uttered! What do you see when you go to a national battlefield? If the NPS is operating it, you can bet its really clean. And tasteful. In […]

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Books Purchased: July 1-July 31: Richard S. Shue. Morning at Willoughby Run: The Opening Battle at Gettysburg, July 1, 1863. Thomas Publications (PA); Revised edition (January 1995). I don’t know too much about this one other than that it depicts the fighting between Heth’s Division and Buford’s Cavalry Division, with the later arrival of the […]

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