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Full-Text Articles in History
Complicating The Civil War Narrative: The Lincoln Lyceum Lecture, Savannah Labbe
Complicating The Civil War Narrative: The Lincoln Lyceum Lecture, Savannah Labbe
The Gettysburg Compiler: On the Front Lines of History
On October 3rd, the 2018 Lincoln Prize-winning author and historian, Edward Ayers, gave a talk on his most recent book, The Thin Light of Freedom: The Civil War and Emancipation in the Heart of America. Ayers began the process of writing this book in 1991 while driving through the Shenandoah Valley and wondering how places so naturally beautiful could go to war with each other so quickly. In his book, he attempts to answer that question by looking at how the Civil War was experienced on the ground by normal, everyday people. He does this by following two communities …
To Liberty, Honor, And…Cufflinks?: The Grand Army Of The Republic, Savannah Labbe
To Liberty, Honor, And…Cufflinks?: The Grand Army Of The Republic, Savannah Labbe
The Gettysburg Compiler: On the Front Lines of History
Borne of the Civil War, one fraternal organization quickly assumed such great authority that it re-shaped cultural prescriptions of manhood, dictated the northern public’s memory of the war, and even influenced presidential elections. This organization, the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), was formed in Illinois in 1866 by veteran Benjamin Franklin Stephenson and its number of posts in the United States quickly increased. In order to be a member, one simply had to be a Union veteran. By the 1890s, there were 7,000 GAR posts around the country; approximately 1.3 million men, half of all Union veterans, were group …
Finding Meaning In The Flag: The Kkk Era, Olivia Ortman
Finding Meaning In The Flag: The Kkk Era, Olivia Ortman
The Gettysburg Compiler: On the Front Lines of History
In 1972, black Vietnam soldier, Frank J. Francis sat down for an interview with Forward, an African American newspaper in New Jersey. The purpose of the interview was for Francis to share his experiences with racism in the army. At one point, Francis began talking about the Confederate flag. He told his interviewer, “If anyone is familiar with the South, then one knows that throughout the South black people have been and are still being terrorized by such organizations as the KKK or the White Citizens’ Councils, extreme anti-black, racist organizations. These people use the Confederate flag as a …
Between The World And Them, Jeffrey L. Lauck
Between The World And Them, Jeffrey L. Lauck
The Gettysburg Compiler: On the Front Lines of History
The first time I learned the story of the Bryan family and their Gettysburg farm was when I read Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me. For Coates, there was something poetic about the fact that the climax of the Civil War’s bloodiest and most well-known battle—a moment forever enshrined in Confederate memory thanks to the likes of William Faulknerand Ted Turner—occurred on land owned by a free black man and his family. Pickett’s Charge—the greatest symbol of Confederate martial honor in the Civil War canon—had been repulsed on property that represented so much of what its participants fought …
Competing Memory Camp Colt’S Place In Gettysburg History, Anika N. Jensen
Competing Memory Camp Colt’S Place In Gettysburg History, Anika N. Jensen
The Gettysburg Compiler: On the Front Lines of History
I recently came face-to-face with the issue of relevance in my research on Camp Colt for a public history class, and in studying the tankers’ noble intentions—preserving democracy, stemming German militarization, progressing American innovation—on an equally noble battlefield, I came to an troubling impasse: should America’s first tank school, which operated on the same ground where men fell in droves during Pickett’s Charge roughly fifty years prior, be recognized to the same degree as the Battle of Gettysburg? Is there a way to justify discussing Eisenhower’s command over the fledgling tank corps, which never saw combat, in the same light …
Reviving The Past: The Battle Flag In The Confederate Memorial Period, Olivia Ortman
Reviving The Past: The Battle Flag In The Confederate Memorial Period, Olivia Ortman
The Gettysburg Compiler: On the Front Lines of History
In the years immediately following the Civil War, the Confederate battle flag mostly disappeared from public view. In their diaries, Southerners wrote about hiding flags and other Confederate symbols for fear of Union retaliation. In most cases, Southerners intuitively understood that these symbols were now taboo, but occasionally, they stated that Union troops explicitly forbade displays of the battle flag. Some Southerners did still flaunt the flag as a means of defiance against Union troops, as mentioned in my last post, but most people quietly tucked it away. A mere five years after the war ended, though, the flag …