Our visit to Lexington wasn’t all college services, matriculation, basketball, and Wildcat tchotckes. As it turns out, a fortuitous left hand turn plopped us into the middle of beautiful, charming Historic Lexington, where we saw the home of John Hunt Morgan, the Thunderbolt of the Confederacy, one of rebeldom’s dashing, glamorous, gallant, and ultimately ineffectual …
Thanks so much to my new friends at the Civil War Forum of Metropolitan New York, who invited me to speak at the monthly meeting last Wednesday evening at the Roger Smith Hotel on Lexington Avenue. It was terrific to meet so many people who were so well-read and so insightful about the Civil War. …
One hundred fifty years ago today, in the midst of secession and under threat of civil war, Abraham Lincoln took the oath of office as the sixteenth president of the United States. His inaugural address, a firm and passionate explanation of his policies and intentions, closed with some of the most beautiful and stirring phrases …
I am sorry to see that a couple hundred dead-enders met in Montgomery, Alabama on Saturday to celebrate the sesquicentennial of the inauguration of Jefferson Davis. I am sorry not because I object to grown-ups playing dress-up or even to people admiring aspects of the bravura Confederate spirit, but I do hate to see bad …
Somebody at Colonial Williamsburg, I’m flattered to say, likes me. Or perhaps to be more precise, like the Disunion Series, because I was extended an invitation to visit the the famous museum/educational center/resort and attend a conference entitled Storm on the Horizon: Slavery, Disunion, and the Roots of the Civil War. I had a terrific …
“The public mood is kept in a constant state of excitement by what are called telegrams. They are short and spicy and can easily be inserted into country newspapers.” –President James Buchanan, December 1860
In conjunction with the AHA annual meeting in Boston, the History News Network of George Mason University announced the sixth annual Cliopatria Awards for History Blogging on Friday. The award for Best Series of Posts went to Jamie Malanowski, David Blight, William Freehling, Adam Goodheart, and others, for Disunion, on the New York Times Opinionator …
The Washington Monthly has just published my review of Moneymakers: The Wicked Lives and Surprising Adventures of Three Notorious Counterfeiters, the new book by Ben Tarnoff about three American counterfeiters who plied their trade between 1750 and 1865. In reading this entertaining, educational history, I was struck by how useful the idea of counterfeiting is …
In my most recent column for the Disunion series in the New York Times, I tell the following story about a wedding that was held in Washington in December 1860 that was interrupted by a bombastic guest, Lawrence Keitt, buoyantly booming out the news that South Carolina had seceded from the union. Well, I was …
In Charleston last night, the 150th anniversary of the great slaveholders’ revolt that ended in America’s bloody Civil War was marked with a gala ball featuring dinner, dancing, and a theatrical reeanctment of the signing of the Ordinance of Secession. Protesters led by the NAACP gathered outside.