Me and the General Lee
The leaders of the Civil War shouldn’t be honored, but they should be remembered.
Tagged: The Civil War
U.S. Grant, Artistic Genius…
“Grant arrived at his operational vision through perceptual speed and a ‘gift of historic imagination,’ that enabled him to ‘take in at a glance the whole field of war, to form a correct opinion of every suggested and possible…campaign, their logical order and sequence, their relative value, and the interdependence of one upon the other.'”
Gettysburg’s Headlines, Day Two (Don’t Worry, Be Happy)
On July 3, the New York Times announced its possession of “VERY IMPORTANT NEWS: Further Particulars of the Battle Near Gettysburg on Wednesday.” The item that follows isn’t what the reader of a contemporary...
Gettysburg’s Headlines, Day One (The Fog of War)
At the beginning of July, 1863, Union newspapers were abuzz with reports of Lee’s invasion. Headlines in the New York Times fell under the bold-print category “REBEL INVASION”: “Important Intelligence Regarding the Movements of...
Compensated Emancipation Was Tried — But Didn’t Work
Ta-Nehisi Coates takes the time to respond, with historical data, to the those who would claim the Civil War could have been avoided through a program of compensated emancipation. He’s certainly right that this...
What Makes a War?
In his writing on the Civil War and American slavery, Ta-Nehisi Coates frequently refers to a “war” on the slaves and/or America’s black populace. (The violence done to slaves — or at least the...
Elsewhere, Yonder and Hereabouts
At Forbes I have three posts for your consideration: First, a meditation on the Civil War, tragedy, and justice with a tie-in to the war on drugs riffing off of a post by Ta-Nehisi...
Foote’s Civil War, Volume II: Tragedy and Just Causes
I finished Volume II of Foote’s Civil War over the last two days of Passover, and returned to the internet this morning to find two posts at Ta-Nehisi Coates’ blog with the title and...
The Glorious Cause
Below, J. L. Wall suggests that Rooster Cogburn’s character arc in True Grit is basically redemptive. I’m interested in an alternative hypothesis: What if Cogburn’s heroism is entirely consistent with his history as a...
“Disunion”
That’s the title of The New York Times’ series on The Civil War, which is highly recommended. Here’s a great entry on Virginia, the (relatively) urbanized and cosmopolitan “North of the South” during the...
Birth of a Nation
I encourage everyone to read this fantastic New York Times article on how competing regional and ethnic mythologies contributed to The Civil War. No surprise here: The Yankees started it!
