A CSA Library?

This spring will be remembered, by history junkies at least, for the opening of a major new institution, one named after a polarizing leader, devoted to a divisive period, subsidized by taxpayers and stationed in the South. I’m not talking about the presidential...

The Battle of Latta

If you want to get technical about it, the Civil War has been over for 148 years. Still, sporadic fighting breaks out occasionally — as it did in a South Carolina school district over the right to wear a Confederate flag to school. When the encyclopedia of student...
Mitchel Thompson's War

Mitchel Thompson's War

On Aug. 1, 1860, an article in the Chicago Tribune proclaimed, “Great doings in Warren County.” The reporter recounted the immense surge in political support for the Republican presidential candidate, Abraham Lincoln, in the northwest farm regions. At a flagpole...
Surveying Emancipation

Surveying Emancipation

President Lincoln’s issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation on Jan. 1, 1863 lent new urgency to the question of “what shall we do with the Negroes.” What had been only a possibility a few months before — the freeing of more than 3 million slaves still behind...