News from Around the South 9/12-9/19

News from Around the South 9/12-9/19

Alabama: Bedford statue still stirs controversy BIRMINGHAM, Alabama (Reuters) – Racist, murderer, or savior of the town? Nathan Bedford Forrest still stirs controversy in Selma, Alabama, where emotions are running high over plans to replace a monument honoring...
Book Review

Book Review

The Sharpshooter 1862-1864, by Charles Phillips Charles Phillips takes his reader back to the days of the Nueces massacre, an intense and violent conflict between the Confederate soldiers and the German Texans of August of 1862 in his novel The Sharpshooter:...
Losing Your Religion

Losing Your Religion

On Jan. 8, 1962, President John F. Kennedy wrote a letter celebrating the work of James Cardinal Gibbons, who died in 1921. Kennedy, who rarely discussed his Catholicism, did so while describing the Cardinal: “He nobly expresses the essential traditions of my...
How Technology Shaped the Civil War

How Technology Shaped the Civil War

* Secession not only spurred rapid improvements in warships and weapons, but also led to advances in communications and medicine By James Marten, Scientific American Any Civil War buff is familiar with the technological advances of that era: the carnage caused when...