Some Wednesday Readings - March 12, 2025

Britain: Multiculturalism contra justice – Sam Bidwell at The Critic Magazine. 

Shrouded Veterans: Destitute Cavalryman Plagiarizes Mark Twain – Frank Jastrzembski at Emerging Civil War.

 

Hermitess and Green Man – Paul Kingsnorth at The Abbey of Misrule.

 

Time Keeps on Slippin’ – Joe Duke at Front Porch Republic.

 

What’s a Trade War and How Did We End Up in One? – Tim Challies.

 

We’re All George Smiley Now – Ana Siljak at Mere Orthodoxy.

 

After Romanian Election Mess, The West’s Foundation is Crumbling – Matt Taibbi at Racket News.

 

25 years on: how Somerset House became a center for contemporary art – Martin Bailey at The Art Newspaper.

 

March 11: The Telegram That Won the War – Lincoln Demotes McClellan – Jason Clark at This Is the Day. 

 

Photograph: Somerset House in London by Robert Bye via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Writing a Bibliography - for a Novel

It’s been two weeks since I read a book about the Civil War, and it feels strange. My draft novel is done, at least for now. It’s not so much a novel about the Civil War as it is a novel of the Civil War. 

If you grew up in the South, or even if you didn’t, what happened in the years 1861-1865 affected you, even when you didn’t know it. Both my maternal and paternal grandparents were children of Civil War veterans. They experienced the war in very different ways, both in the fighting and in civilian life. 

 

My mother’s grandparents were Franco-German immigrants who settled in New Orleans and descendants of the Acadians expelled from Canada after the French and Indian War who settled in what we called “the river parishes” – the stretch of territory along the Mississippi River between New Orleans and Baton Rouge. The men generally fought for the Confederacy; after 1862, the women, children, and elderly men discovered life under Union occupation. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Photograph by Thomas Kelley via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Some Wednesday Readings

 

What the Latest Farm Census Says About the Changing Ag Landscape – Lisa Held at Civil Eats.

 

On the Way to the Tavern: el Camino de Santiago – Br. Raphael Arteaga at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

Yale Civil War Memorial – Patrick Young at The Reconstruction Era.

"My Dearest Julia" by Ulysses S. Grant

A favorite place to visit in St. Louis is Whitehaven, the home of Ulysses S. Grant (1822-1885) and his wife Julia Dent Grant (1826-1902). It’s operated by the National Park Service in near southwest St. Louis County. It sits across a road from Grant’s Farm, for decades the country estate of the Augustus Busch family (they of Anheuser-Busch fame). Today, Grant’s Farm is a popular attraction for families, with a petting zoo, views of the Clydesdale horses (in stables and adjacent pastures), and even a train that travels around the property. My regular biking trail, named Grant’s Trail, runs right alongside the pastures, the farm parking lot, and Whitehaven.  

Hardscrabble Farm, which Grant operated as a farmer for a short period, is on the Grant’s Farm property, including the log cabin farmhouse. The Dent family had owned about 800 acres in the area and farmed it with the help of slaves. Grant’s Ohio family was not happy at all with their son marrying into a slave owning family in a slave state.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Why We Celebrate Thanksgiving

We celebrate Thanksgiving Day because of Henry VIII, the Gunpowder Plot, the 1619 landing of 38 English colonists in Virginia (without slaves), the Pilgrims, the end of the American Revolution, the beginning of the American Republic, the Civil War, and the need to stimulate the economy in the late 1930s. And it might have been called Evacuation Day.  

Thanksgiving as we know it today in the United States evolved over a period of some 400 years. The idea of thanksgiving observances goes back to the Protestant Reformation in England under Henry VIII, consolidating a rather large number of thanksgiving holidays during the Roman Catholic period. Special days of Thanksgiving would be called for military victories and for deliverance from such events as the Gunpowder Plot of 1606.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Top photograph: Union soldiers celebrate the first national Thanksgiving Day in 1863.

"Portraits of Conflict: A Photographic History of Mississippi in the Civil War"

Beginning in 1990 and continuing for the next two decades, the University of Arkansas Press published a series of photographic histories of the Civil War. The volumes were developed by state, using states where a considerable portion of the war was fought. The university press included volumes on Louisiana, Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Missouri, South Carolina, Texas, North Carolina, and Georgia.  

Each volume is structured the same: an overall introduction to what happened to the state and its people during the war, followed by chapters on specific battles, armies, or state events. The emphasis is on the photographs, with each making extensive use of individual portraits of generals and other officers as well as enlisted men. 

 

Each chapter begins with a narrative, and the photographs follow. An explanatory text accompanies each portrait, explaining who the person was, where they served, what battle or battles they fought, and whether they lived, survived with injuries, or died. 

 

The volume on Mississippi is entitled Portraits of Conflict: A Photographic History of Mississippi in the Civil War. It was the third volume in the series, published in 1993. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.