American Civil War

Music stands out as a crucial tool that was utilized in the course of the Civil Rights Movement. Activists and musicians united to write music that reflected events of the time. African American folk, gospel, and spiritual music was highly played during this period. The music paved the way for African Americans to achieve unity and also keep their morale high.

LEGISLATIVE RESOLUTION honoring Colonel Thomas J. Kelly posthumously upon the occasion of his designation as recipient of a Liberty Medal, the highest honor bestowed upon an individual by the New York State Senate.

WHEREAS, It is incumbent upon the people of the State of New York to recognize and acknowledge those within our midst who have made significant contributions to the quality of life therein; and
WHEREAS, Members of the Armed Services from the State of New York, who have served so valiantly and honorably in wars in which this country's freedom was at stake, as well as in the preservation of peace in peacetime, deserve a special salute from this Legislative Body; and
WHEREAS, This Legislative Body is justly proud to honor Colonel Thomas J. Kelly posthumously upon the occasion of his designation as recipient of a Liberty Medal, the highest honor bestowed upon an individual by the New York State Senate; and
WHEREAS, The New York State Senate Liberty Medal was established by resolution and is awarded to individuals who have merited special commendation for exceptional, heroic, or humanitarian acts on behalf of their fellow New Yorkers.

A BYU course paper where I examine how some more isolated areas of the would-be Confederacy fared better than the South as a whole during the economic plummet that devastated the region in the aftermath of the Civil War and years of Reconstruction.

I tried to put US and associated world history into 150 pages.  I try to focus on the US history that I assume may be unknown or not taught in a big way in our schools or broadcast on TV or is being censored.  I have been adding to this book over the years that I have been researching for  my other seven or eight US history books by this title.  Those other books are divided based on who was President of the United States starting with FDR and so far I am now working on the President Ford years, but have not finished it yet.

Historiography plays a vital factor in the collective memory of events throughout history. Classrooms across America discuss multiple factors surrounding the antebellum period, military conflict, and the postwar debate over rebuilding and re-entering southern states. The scholarship of historical events surrounding the Civil War creates a dialogue for future generations to analyze the portrayal of historical events. The American Civil War documentation is no different in how it created a memory of the events from 1861-1865. Much of the Civil War's historiography focuses on the causes of the Civil War and the effectiveness of Reconstruction. Historians have analyzed and critiqued this event for its political, social, religious, legal, cultural, medical, and military influence in the field of history. Interest in the Civil War has not lost its luster throughout history, and the field is continually expanding with new and exciting archival research interests for all historians in this much-documented field.

Confederate monuments figure prominently as epicenters of social conflict. These stone and metal constructs resonate with the tensions of modern America, giving concrete definition to the ideologies that divide us. Confederate monuments alone did not generate these feelings of aggravation, but they are far from innocent. Rather than serving as neutral objects of public remembrance, Confederate monuments articulate a narration of the past that forms the basis for a normative vision of the future. The story, told through the character of a religious mythos, carries implicit sacred convictions; thus, these spires and statues are inherently theological.

In Cut in Stone, Ryan Andrew Newson contends that we cannot fully understand or disrupt these statues without attending to the convictions that give them their power. With a careful overview of the historical contexts in which most Confederate monuments were constructed, Newson demonstrates that these "memorials" were part of a revisionary project intended to resist the social changes brought on by Reconstruction while maintaining a romanticized Southern identity. Confederate monuments thus reinforce a theology concerning the nature of sacrifice and the ultimacy of whiteness. Moreover, this underlying theology serves to conceal inherited collective wounds in the present.

If Confederate monuments are theologically weighted in their allure, then it stands to reason that they must also be contested at this level―precisely as sacred symbols. Newson responds to these inherently theological objects with suggestions for action that are sensitive to the varying contexts within which monuments reside, showing that while all Confederate monuments must come under scrutiny, some monuments should remain standing, but in redefined contexts. Cut in Stone represents the first detailed theological investigation of Confederate monuments, a resource for the larger collective task of determining how to memorialize problematic pasts and how to shape public space amidst contested memory.

when he entered into the army. Ordered immediately upon duty to Santa Fe, New Mexico, he staid there three years, seeing much hard service and consequent exposure in the Indian wars, which brought on a functional disorder of the heart, and obliged him to retire from active service for a brief period. Upon his restoration to health he was sent to Florida for six months, then to West Point, from thence to Kansas and Fort Riley, where he remained for four years. As Medical Director he was on the Sioux Expedition, and in the same capacity on Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains. Returning East with a somewhat disordered constitution, he nevertheless applied himself to severe study, but was eventually forced to take a trip to Europe for the recovery of his health. While in Europe he studied the army medical systems, visited laboratories, hospitals, museums, military camps and posts, thus unconsciously preparing himself for his present position, and upon his return with recovered health, after a year spent at Mackinaw in the service, he was appointed Professor of Anatomy and Physiology in the University of Maryland, at Baltimore, and also officiated as Surgeon at Baltimore Infirmary, and Lecturer on Clinical Surgery. Resigning his commission in the army, he remained in the University for about six months, when the rebellion having broken out he promptly offered his services to the Government, and accepted a subordinate position far below that to which his eminent abilities justly entitled him. Again in active service with General Patterson at Hagerstown, he was placed in charge of the General Hospital, afterward at Fredericksburg, and Baltimore with General Banks: at the latter place he organized an admirable hospital, and from thence he was sent to Wheeling, Virginia, as Medical Purveyor, and Inspector of Hospitals for Generals Rosecrans and Fremont. While here he made a capital report, and submitted plans for field hospitals which brought him prominently before the Government, and upon the dismissal of Surgeon-General Finley, he was selected to fill that important post upon the 25th of April, 1862, although the eightieth on the list of medical officers.

On the morning of May 24, 1861, a group of Union cadets marched into the city of Alexandria, Virginia. The cohort looked peculiar in their flamboyant Zouave uniforms with bright blue shirts and flashy red sashes. They were led by a dashing young colonel named Elmer Ephraim Ellsworth and charged with occupying the city. Noticing a Confederate flag flying high on the roof of a hotel called the Marshall House, Ellsworth and a few of his men entered the building, determined to bring it down. The trip up the stairs was easygoing and the flag was quickly retrieved without incident. But on the way down everything went wrong. The innkeeper, a Confederate sympathizer named James W. Jackson, appeared with a shotgun and fired, piercing Ellsworth's heart. As he stumbled backward he uttered his final words: "My God!" Almost immediately, Corporal Francis Brownell aimed his rifle directly at Jackson's forehead and shot his colonel's murderer. In the coming conflict scores of men and boys would be slaughtered in similar fashion causing Americans to rethink the grim and brutal realities of modern war. The deaths of Ellsworth and Jackson constituted the first official battle fatalities of the Civil War, but many more followed.

The progression in vernacular architecture which took place in the south following the conclusion of the Civil War varied extensively depending upon the industry in which the property holder made their living. This historic time of regrowth and reorganization in Georgia, may have only dispensed a minor impact upon the architecture of the home or a major one. Exploration of the widely divergent histories of two properties; Jarrell Plantation and the Hay House, built a decade before the start of the Civil War, circa 1850, in roughly the same location, Macon, Georgia, will consider their; construction, homeowner history, historic and current uses as well as the  evolution of the surrounding area.

A survey of the sexual landscape of the Spartanburg region in the post-war period must start with the history of livestock: cows, sheep, pigs, and horses. 1 Before the Civil War, large farm animals outnumbered people in this South Carolina county by almost four to one. Their history of the coming of war, the human pilgrimages across the state, and the emergence of the most violent Klan in the South would likely be very different from the history we have received from scholars who rely on human records. But I cannot provide that story. I jack facility with archaeological records, and would find working through the remains of nineteenth-century livestock a daunting and smelly task. Nevertheless I will risk anthropomorphism in an effort to describe the way in which these mute animals may give us another way into post-war Spartanburg-if not their perspective, then perhaps their place, in the reshaping of race, class, and gender boundaries in bloody Spartanburg.

The treatment of war wounds is an ancient art, constantly refined to reflect improvements in weapons technology, transportation, antiseptic practices, and surgical techniques. Throughout most of the history of warfare, more soldiers died from disease than combat wounds, and misconceptions regarding the best timing and mode of treatment for injuries often resulted in more harm than good. Since the 19th century, mortality from war wounds steadily decreased as surgeons on all sides of conflicts developed systems for rapidly moving the wounded from the battlefield to frontline hospitals where surgical care is delivered. We review the most important trends in US and Western military trauma management over two centuries, including the shift from primary to delayed closure in wound management, refinement of amputation techniques, advances in evacuation philosophy and technology, the development of antiseptic practices, and the use of antibiotics. We also discuss how the lessons of history are reflected in contemporary US practices in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Laboulaye, “le plus Américain de tous les Francais” , n’avait jamais visité les États-Unis, bien qu’il ait reçu beaucoup d’invitations officielles pour s’y rendre. En dépit de cette lacune, il était devenu à partir des années 1860s, sous le Second Empire, l’Américaniste le plus éminent de la France. Comment se fait-il donc que quelqu’un qui n’a jamais visité un pays aussi complexe et divers que les États-Unis ait pu devenir un jour son meilleur interprète en France? C’est ce paradoxe que cet essai se propose d'explorer.

“Laboulaye et les États-Unis,” Revue Française d'Histoire des Idées Politiques, 47:1 (May 2018), pp. 203-226 [in French], http://liseuse.harmattan.fr/978-2-343-14752-9
https://www.cairn.info/revue-francaise-d-histoire-des-idees-politiques.htm

When the United States emerged as a world power in the years before the Civil War, the men who presided over the nation’s triumphant territorial and economic expansion were largely southern slaveholders. As presidents, cabinet officers, and diplomats, slaveholding leaders controlled the main levers of foreign policy inside an increasingly powerful American state. This Vast Southern Empire explores the international vision and strategic operations of these southerners at the commanding heights of American politics. As Matthew Karp demonstrates, these leaders were nationalists, not separatists. The empire of their dreams was not an independent South but the entire United States, and only the election of Abraham Lincoln broke their grip on national power. Fortified by years at the helm of U.S. foreign affairs, slaveholding elites formed their own Confederacy―not only as a desperate effort to preserve their property but as a confident bid to shape the future of the Atlantic world.

Milton Bradley's games helped soldiers fight the boredom of camp life ilton Bradley was born November 8, 1836 in Vienna, Maine but spent most of his childhood in Lowell, Massachusetts. After completing high school, he attended the Lawrence Scientific School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1856, he secured a job at the Wason Manufacturing Company in Springfield. In 1858, Bradley became an independent mechanical draftsman. His most lucrative contracts came from the Khedive of Egypt who had hired Bradley to design and supervise the construction of a custom-made and luxuriant rail car. The Khedive presented Bradley with a Lithograph of the railcar in appreciation of his work. According to biographer James M. Schmidt, this inspired Bradley to learn how to create lithographs. In 1860, he established the first colorlithography shop in Western Massachusetts.

One of the paradoxes of war is that its exigencies often carve out social spaces for progressive reform, albeit hesitantly and even only briefly. Exemplifying this axiom is the most famous nineteenth-century American writer and reformer whom most people have never heard of: Mary Livermore. Livermore's and other women's military hospital service during the American Civil War occasioned a two-decades struggle to recognize their wartime work with pensions, as well as providing evidence of women's capacity for full citizenship in the woman suffrage movement. [Slide 2] Pension controversies during the Reconstruction era and the Gilded Age were not solely generated by service claims of particular individuals but by the claims of classes of people, like female nurses and other hospital workers, many of whom were volunteers rather than paid. The effort to secure pensions for nurses would only result in 1892 with passage of the Nurses Pension Act. Union women in military hospitals and their published accounts of wartime service reconfigured both the military medical space and the wartime narrative page. 1 Between the war and the passage of pension act, published accounts of female nurses' courage and competence relocated women's work from the private domestic sphere (attending to infirm family and neighbors) into a public sphere (nursing wounded and sick strangers in the wartime military hospital). From early in the war and afterward the legitimation of these women's work had been an aim of published accounts of their wartime service, from Louisa May Alcott's Hospital Sketches (first published periodically), Emma Edmonds's sensational Nurse and Spy in the Union Army, industrial-scale anthologist Frank Moore's Women of the War, and abolitionist and

Whatever Jefferson Davis’s reputation as a slave-holder and proponent of states’ rights, McPherson has done a service in resurrecting Davis’s reputation as commander-in-chief from overly critical historians, even if McPherson himself overinflates Davis by ignoring some of his arguably more severe errors, including the deficiencies in leadership Davis displayed in economic matters. Davis’s brand of centrally planned, wartime socialism grossly exacerbated the problems in feeding, clothing, and supplying the military the commander in chief faced by preventing the maintenance of a market price system, whereby desperately needed goods could be efficiently allocated to where they were most urgently needed. The learned reader expecting the same level of academic work on display in Tried by War will be disappointed by the lack of novelty, but Embattled Rebel will function well for any student looking for a polished introduction to Jefferson Davis and the problems facing the Confederacy during the war. What we can garner from McPherson’s work is that Davis was handed the reins to a Confederate military that suffered from woeful inadequacies in supplies and manpower, was handicapped by disobedient or overly tame generals, and faced with an un-navigable political situation, but still managed to hold at bay the largest, most powerful army the world had yet seen for over 4 years—no small feat, indeed.

Profiles Peter Gray Meek, the editor of Bellefonte, Pennsylvania's newspaper the Democratic Watchman during the Civil War. Meek stood out as an anti-war Democrat, or "Copperhead," in the Republican lion's den that was Bellefonte during the Civil War