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+12 +1
If War Is Hell, Then Coffee Has Offered U.S. Soldiers Some Salvation
"Nobody can soldier without coffee," a Union cavalryman wrote in 1865. Hidden Kitchens looks at three American wars through the lens of coffee: the Civil War, Vietnam and Afghanistan.
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+3 +1
Henry Wirz and Andersonville Prison
State University of New York at Buffalo professor Carole Emberton teaches a class about Andersonville Prison, the Confederate Civil War military prison where 13,000 Union soldiers died, and the trial of its commander, Henry Wirz. She also spoke about the halt of the prisoner exchange program towards the end of the war and how the Wirz trial was used as a precedent for later war crimes proceedings.
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+4 +1
Cultural Heritage and Confederate Monuments
University of Georgia professor Scott Nesbit teaches a class on historic preservation and the debate over southern cultural heritage sites, such as Confederate monuments and markers.
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+4 +1
Return of the Confederate Veteran
Historians spoke about the return of Confederate veterans across the South after the end of the Civil War. They spoke at “Reconstruction and the Legacy of the War,” the 2016 summer conference hosted by the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College.
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+4 +1
Radicalization of Reconstruction
Historians talk about the ways society was fundamentally different after the Civil War.
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+29 +1
The Slave Who Stole the Confederate Codes—and a Rebel Warship
When three Confederate officers decided to go ashore for a night in Charleston, they left their gunboat in the hands of an enslaved pilot. It was a critical mistake. By Christopher Dickey.
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+4 +2
What We Owe the White House Slaves: $83 Million
The slaves who built the White House got no pay—but their owners got up to $60 a year. So here’s what America really owes the builders’ descendants. By Michael Daly.
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+4 +1
The War Comes to Galveston
Commander James Alden was by all accounts a resourceful and clever naval officer, talents he put to use in June 1861 as he and his ship helped establish the sprawling Union blockade against Confederate ports.
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+5 +1
Hail, Columbia!
As Union soldiers went off to war, the national figure most often urging them on in political cartoons and political stump speeches wasn’t Uncle Sam, but Columbia.
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+13 +1
America’s Birthday Under Fire
July 4, 1861 dawned on a divided America, and the holiday itself became a battleground.
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+18 +1
Lincoln’s Rhetorical Fireworks
When the Confederacy opened fire on Fort Sumter in April 1861, Abraham Lincoln responded within hours, ordering a naval blockade of Southern ports and calling for 75,000 volunteers to “maintain the honor, the integrity, and the existence of our National Union.”
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+7 +1
The Dogs (and Bears, and Camels) of War
As Union and Confederate soldiers left the comforts of home for the grim realities of war, many brought along family pets or adopted stray or wild animals, which quickly took on semi-official roles.
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+3 +1
Evangelicals, Republicans and the Civil War
We often hear the phrase “the party of Lincoln” ascribed to the Republican Party....A less well-known feature of the party’s early years was its grounding in the evangelical Christianity of the Second Great Awakening.
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+13 +1
Review: ‘Mercy Street,’ a Civil War Hospital Drama on PBS
This six-episode Civil War series shares Downton Abbey's style: genteel melodrama, talky, sentimental and lightly comic, with the occasional action sequence (an escape, a bomb plot) to spice things up.
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+21 +2
When ‘Taking Our Country Back’ Led to a Massacre
In the aftermath of the Civil War, devotees of the Lost Cause wanted to take back America, and proceeded to slaughter African Americans. By Calvin Schermerhorn.
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+25 +1
Underground Railroad’ Lays Bare Horrors of Slavery and Its Toxic Legacy
In his dynamic new novel, Colson Whitehead takes the Underground Railroad — the loosely interlocking network of black and white activists who helped slaves escape to freedom in the decades before the Civil War — and turns it from a metaphor into an actual train that ferries fugitives northward.
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+6 +1
Disunion: Olmsted’s Southern Landscapes
Frederick Law Olmsted is rightly remembered as an eminent landscape architect, but in 1861 it was his work as a journalist and an administrator that brought him acclaim.
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+9 +1
Disunion: The U.S. Capitol at War
When Thomas U. Walter returned to Washington at the beginning of July 1861, he found an appalling mess. For 10 years he had served as the architect in charge of building the new Senate and House wings of the United States Capitol and the cast iron dome that would crown the rotunda.
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+10 +1
Disunion: Strange Waters
The Civil War famously pitted brother against brother, but it also pitted comrade against comrade....This kind of thing was not, however, characteristic of naval leaders in the Civil War.
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+5 +1
Confederate Defeat and Southern Honor
Author and historian David Silkenat looks at the Confederate defeat at the end of the Civil War and the idea of Southern 'honor.'
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