Road Trip Through History: Fort Sumter

My Own True Love and I are spending a long weekend in Charleston, South Carolina.  For me, it’s a vacation/work sandwich.  Yesterday we bopped around together doing history-buff stuff.*  Today he heads off for twenty-four hours with his grandson’s Cub Scout troop aboard the USS Yorktown while I settle in for a day of reading…

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City of Sedition

I keep thinking I’ll take a break from the American Civil War, but it just keeps shoving itself in my face. And so I keep shoving it in yours. I recently finished an extraordinary book. It had me writing notes to myself in the margins: “check what [someone else] has to say, “compare to X”,…

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Contrabands

Over the course of the last year I became familiar with the use of the term “contrabands” to describe escaped slaves in the American Civil War.  Like many terms of the period, it seemed self-explanatory, in an ugly way.  A symptom of the racism that was fundamental in the Union as well as in the…

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