AbsurdBeats

Updated thru June 22, 2015

I’m not much of an American history buff in general nor of the Civil War in particular. It’s terrifically important, but my interests are directed elsewhere.

Nonetheless, I have been soaking up the various posts and conversations at Ta-Nehisi Coates’s joint on the Civil War and have become convinced that at some point I should spend some serious time digging in this bloody dirt.

To that end, I’ve compiled a list of all of TNC’s posts to date (and which I will erratically update and annotate) on the Civil War.

Finally, check out Xin Jeisan’s blog TNC’s Civil War Research Circle, which includes much of this material as well as other CW sources, as well as TNC regular Andy Hall’s most excellent blog, Dead Confederates.

*UPDATE* Given how long this page is, I decided to move the list of posts for the Effete Liberal Book Club and the list of books and articles TNC has mentioned to it’s own page: TNC’s CW: Books & Book Club—right up there next to “TNC’s Civil War.”

*UPDATE2* TNC veered into 20th c European history beginning in the Fall of 2013, with his musings on history and horror consequently expanding. I’ve included some (not all) of those posts, but may at some point start a separate page to take those into account.

Happy (?) reading:

Warming up. . .

• About that John Brown analogy, 10.2.08: how to think about those who act radically on behalf of freedom; John Brown; terrorism; slavery
• Naming parks after Klan founders, 12.15.08: quote from Publius on renaming a Tennessee park after Nathan Bedford Forrest
• The Tragedy and Betrayal of Booker T. Washington, 3.31.09: on thinking that post-Reconstruction [Southern] whites didn’t have a problem with the existence of black people, just their proximity—and how that was wrong;

Now we’re in it:

• Capitol Men, 4.22.09: Philip Dray’s Capitol Men; Reconstruction; Robert Smalls—who plotted to steal a Confederate ship & bring it across Union lines; Robert Brown Elliot; Elias Hill
• The Civil War Wasn’t About Slavery, 4.27.09: Robert Brown Elliot debate w/Alexander Stephens over Civil Rights Act of 1875; excerpt from Stephens’s ‘Cornerstone Speech’
• Ill Visions, 4.28.09: on Adelbert Ames, Reconstruction-era governor of Mississippi and his quote about the blacks subjection to a ‘second slavery’; Blanche Bruce; Edwards Pierrepont’s refusal to send federal troops to secure franchise for black men
• Heritage Not Hate, 4.28.09: is flying/wearing/display of Confederate Flag racist; Alabama’s racial history; ‘not a racist’ arguments
• The Battle Flag, 4. 29.09: quote from Sporcupine on Confederate ‘Battle Flag’, that began to be flown in 1950s; flag about revolt & rejection, not just about race; Battle Flag distinct from [genteel] ‘Stars and Bars’; class heritage
• A Black Man on White People’s Money, 4.29.09: on Frederick Douglass replacing US Grant on fifty-dollar bill
• The Book List, 4.30.09: Stephen Hahn; Louis Harlan; Wells Tower; Capitol Men; reading Reconstruction; ‘since I’ve started blogging, I’ve had to take in so much information, and while it’s made me smarter, it’s also made me aware of–again–how much there is to know’
• Clarence Thomas Thinks He Has It Hard, 5.26.09: on black people not being passive or victims; Steven Hahn; black life in the 19th c; black radicals attack on black conservatives
• Personhood, 6.2.09: on the analogy between slavery and abortion, and why it doesn’t hold; Meghan McArdle; Alexander Stephens and his ‘Cornerstone’ speech
• Rambling About Reading, 6.5.09: on not judging the past by the present; Nation Under Our Feet; Battle Cry of Freedom
• John Brown, Abortion, and the Limits of Historical Analogy, 6.5.09: on the ubiquity of violence in 19th c political life; murder of George Tiller
• History Through the Veil, 6.8.09: on the disorientation of delving into the Civil War era; Dave Chapelle’s Jefferson skit; George Will and the ‘mood of Americans’ in the 1950s; Southern slant to Ken Burns’s Civil War?; Battle Cry of Freedom
• For the Slavery\Civil War\Reconstruction Buff in You, 6.9.09: on the US not yet coming to terms with how much the antebellum Southern economy depending upon slavery; the absurdity of stating CW not about slavery; David Blight lectures (w/link)
• Don’t Marry a Writer, 6.11.09: on being obsessed with the Civil War; US Grant as badass
• Bottom Rail on Top, 6.17.09: on just finishing Battle Cry of Freedom
• Nathan Bedford Forrest Has Beautiful Eyes, 6.17.09: on shredding myths regarding the slave trade; Guns, Germs, & Steel and history’s winners and losers; no noble victimhood, no cosmic justice; the South as a slave society; Jefferson Davis on slavery and state sovereignty;  Lost Cause mythology and its own version of noble victimhood
• One Last Thought on Forrest, 6.17.09: on the pain and possibility in history, being on the wrong side of history; DoctorJay’s Trainspotting quote; Robert Hayden’s poem ‘Middle Passage’
• One Last Civil War Thought For the Day, 6.17.09: Jourdan Anderson’s letter to his ex-master in Tennessee declining to work for him
• Thank Him for Taking the Pistol From You, 6.18.09: more on the Jourdan Anderson letter, its authenticity, and the complications of the relationships between masters and slaves; the WPA oral history project, Remembering Slavery
• Rambling About the Language of Slaves, 6.19.09: on beautiful language, language from the streets, the language of ex-slaves; David Blight lecture (w/link); freedman Bailey Wyatt at Union League meeting
• Senate Apologizes for Slavery, 6.19.09: not much to say, other than to note it
• In Every Black Man’s Eyes–Death to the Rebel, 6.23.09: on growing up thrilling to black militancy; Drew Faust’s The Republic of Suffering; Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard; black soldier response to Forrest’s Fort Pillow massacre; how the fact of black soldiers demolished rationale for slavery;  enough w/Confederate heroes—how about Ida B Wells and the rest?
• Leaving the Lost Cause to Others, 6.24.09: reflecting on the photo from the previous post, of black soldiers, and what it meant to Confederates soldiers to see those black soldiers charging them; did those Confederates truly believe blacks were subhuman?
• Homecoming, 6.24.09: on an old engraving showing black soldiers reuniting with their families, and how powerful an image that is to those raised on their own tragedy; Noah Andre Trudeau, Like Men of War: Black Troops in the Civil War 1862-1865; Drew Faust
• The Lincoln Connection, 7.2.09: on Lincoln (and Obama) and idealism in politics; Lincoln’s stance on behalf of dignity, in spite of own racism; black homophobia; politics as the art of the possible; the notion in the US that the problems of the majority are due to the problems w/the minority
• A People’s History of the Civil War, 7.6.09: on the influence of Howard Zinn and radical histories; increased skepticism of (same) polemical history
• Obsessed With The Accidental War for the Freedom of Black People, 7.6.09: numerous questions & comments about ACW:  expectations of black soldiers, Andre Cailloux’s ‘return’ from the dead, great quote from Reb Jeb Stuart on Union father-in-law, on Glory and Gods and Generals
• Dumb Question Time, 7.9.09: what’s so important in CW about marching and forming a line and staying in ranks?
• Civil War Booklist, 7.10.09: seven book recommendations on the CW: 1.) Ida: A Sword Among Lions–Paula Giddings; 2.) Up From History–Robert J. Norrell; 3.) Capitol Men–Phillip Dray; 4.) A Nation Under Our Feet–Steven Hahn; 5.) Battle Cry Of Freedom–James McPherson; 6.) This Republic Of Suffering–Drew Gilpin Faust; 7) Like Men Of War: Black Troops In The Civil War 1862-1865–Noah Andre Trudeau; also other books worth reading, incl. Foner’s; request for (nonfiction) recommendations on the South after the war
• The War Inside the Civil War, 7.14.09: on NB Forrest’s massacre of black soldiers and Fort Pillow, and the context for it; Noah Andre Trudeau’s Like Men Of War; the two wars: bet. North and South and bet. slaves (and freedman) and masters; the various motivations for black soldiers
• Civil War\Slavery Readings, 7.14.09: on reading  Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass long ago; any good bios of Douglass?
• The Year of Lincoln, 7.15.09: on Kiko House’s index of posts on Lincoln (w/link); need to read Lincoln bio, likely either Lincoln and His Generals or With Malice Toward None rather than Team of Rivals
• The Myth of Black Confederate Soldiers, 7.15.09: on the insistence that blacks fought for the Confederacy, and the [primary document] evidence against this; quote from the Mississippi Document of Secession (w/link)
• The War Against Spousal Aggression, 7.16.09: Kenyatta’s complaints about CW reading everywhere; North And South magazine; A Grand Army Of Black Men; Cannons: An Introduction To Civil War Artillery; general obsessiveness about a topic
• If You Got a Racist Mind, 7.17.09: on Pat Buchanan’s rant that no black soldiers died at Vicksburg (w/link to rant); Southern diarist Kate Stone unable to conceive that black soldiers could beat white [Texan!] soldiers at battle of Milliken’s Bend
• The Civil War Report, 7.30.09: Stonewall Jackson vs. Jourdan Anderson is far more interesting than Henry Louis Gates vs. James Crowley; disappointment in lack of good books on black Union and possible reasons for this; Bruce Levine’s  Confederate Emancipation and the Confederate debate (and delusions) over using colored troops
• Confederate Emancipation and Gay Marriage, 7.31.09: on Patrick Cleburne’s too-little, too-late pitch to the Confederacy to use black soldiers; Bruce Levine on how the slaves themselves forced Confederates to reconsider position;  the delusion that blacks would be happy to fight to remain slaves—a kind of ‘conversion therapy’
• In the Name of White Divinity, 8.5.09: on knowledge of the Bible and understanding people in ACW era; the stupidity of converting slaves to Christianity and believing they wouldn’t make own uses of its message; Niebuhr; Bacevich; that in the early 19th c some Americans made themselves into gods [w/godlike powers over other people]; on the lengths people will go to to hang on to supremacy
• Only Built for Civil War Nerds, 8.7.09: Bruce Levine’s lecture on Confederate Emancipation (w/video)
• The Day They Drove Old Dixie Down, 8.7.09: on traveling to Virginia, and asking for suggestions
• The South Rises Again, 8.12.09: taking the family to Virginia, following obsession
• “No Men Ever Fought More Bravely To Keep Themselves in Bondage”, 8.17.2009: satire on Of Battlefields And Bibliophiles blog (w/link)
• Virginia [pt I, Petersburg], 8.17.09: on negotiating family and ACW obsession; stopping at the Crater, site of Union debacle and mass death of black troops; so many monuments by Sons or Daughters of the Confederacy and their support of Lost Cause; no monuments to black soldiers; film at visitor’s center on Fall of Petersburg–what if told from slaves’ perspectives?
• Virginia [pt II, Richmond], 8.17.09: long excerpt from chaplain Garland White’s letter, as cited in A Grand Army Of Black Men, source of family reunion story; Aaron MacGruder’s ‘reserve the right to be a nigger’; getting angry at all the ways black people and black history overlooked;  can’t love The Band’s “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”, any more than a Sioux would likely love The Died With Their Boots On;
  
• Virginia [pt III, Shirley on the James], 8.19.09: on finishing Edmund Morgan’s American Slavery, American Freedom; on majesty of the Shirley Plantation on the James; on the kids’ interest in the Plantation; black and white relations, sexual and otherwise, then and now, New York and Virginia; Wal-Mart and America and getting what you want; what did in white supremacy, and is there just another kind of supremacy today; no one is clean
• In the Mail Today, 8.19.09: Daniel Walker Howe’s What God Hath Wrought; on other readings—The Glorious Cause, Empire of Liberty; trying to get a handle on CW imagery
• Virginia, [pt IV, The Wilderness], 8.21.09: on the overwhelm of Virginia, and how it even got to Kenyatta; visiting a cemetery of Union colored troops;  not much to see, too much to feel; Grant not overly impressed with Lee
• The Wit and Witticism of Slaves, 8.21.09: Weevils In The Wheat: Interviews With Virginia’s Ex-Slaves—not for everyone, but a key reminder that slavery dynamic, not static, and not the same experience for all; quotes from Jimmie Green, Mildred Graves, and Robert Ellet
• A Little More on Virginia, 8.25.09: Kevin Levin responds to TNC’s Virginia posts on his blog Civil War Memory (w/link), notes that National Park CW presentations have changed, although not enough; Drew Gilpin Faust’s This Republic Of Suffering better than Battle Cry of Freedom in incorporating black soldier experiences
  
• You Lie Pt. 3, 9.10.09: partisan politics nothing new—consider Preston Brook’s caning of Sumner on the Senate floor, and his later demurral to a duel challenge from Anson Burlingame
• The Civilized World, 9.10.09: Robert Middlekauf’s The Glorious Cause notes that most of Europe thought the English barbarians & the English thought of Americans what whites thought of blacks
• And South Carolina Shall Rise Again, 9.11.09: Thomas Schaller on SC politics vis-a-vis the rest of the country, teeing off on NYTimes discussion (w/link);  ‘how patriotism has been coopted by people who claim the Confederate flag’ while black leaders dismissed as un-American

Not a Civil War post, exactly (Sending This One Out to Patrick J Buchanan, 10.22.2009), but Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings singing ‘This Land is Your Land’. Good to listen to while perusing.

Okay, to continue:

• The Magical Negro Extended, 12.8.09: on a commenter who suggested that white people go for the Magical Negro in order to assuage white guilt and feel reassured about themselves;  “absolution on the cheap” and how problematic that can be; history is both inescapeable monster and balm in terms of understanding ourselves
• With a Little Help From My Historian Friends, 12.29.09: Robert Middlekauff’s The Glorious Cause isn’t doing it for TNC,; still, “I struggled through American Slavery, American Freedom, and by the end, I was really glad I had”, so should he keep going?
• A Shocking Reversal, 12.30.09: based on reader comments, decided to stick with Middlekauff; gave 5 additional recommendations for understanding American history: Taylor, Wood, Cronon, McPherson, and Morgan
• WalMart and the Civil War [Atlantic article, linked in post] January 2010: recalls previous trip to Virginia and how trying to track down historic sites made him “slightly mad”; prospect of WalMart building on historically significant land (the Wilderness) may make the effort to find history even harder
• From New Market Road to the Wilderness, 1.5.10: references and excerpts article, above, then elaborates a bit on his passion for the Civil War; includes video of historian Frank Smith’s work on US Colored Troops and smacking down notion of black Confederates
• Classic Material, 1.6.10: excerpts from Weevils in the Wheat on slavery, salvation, & freedom
• Southern Road, 1.12.10: TNC’s trip to Virginia
• Again With the Black Confederates, 1.20.10: no South w/o slavery, as labor & property
• Your Chance to Go To School On TNC, 1.25.10: on Blight’s contention about economics of slavery & need for expansion—how does this work?
• The Big Machine, 2.5.10: trying to make sense of systemic racism, individual valor & vice (as w system of food production & sale  and indiv diet)
• There Are No Desperadoes. There Will Be No Rosewood., 2.25.10: former Confederate-cum-Republican James Longstreet, Mandela, and justice oft denied
• Maryland Embraces the Secesh, 3.19.10: Maryland’s northern- and southerness
• Civil War Fact Check, 3.22.10: is story of Mary Touvestre, freed slave & Union spy, true?
• I Just Got Grant’s Memoirs in the Mail, 3.31.10: along w Selected Letters
• An Absurdist Take on “Both Sides” [I particularly like this title], 4.2.10: on C Lane’s comparing radicalism of white supremacists w that of escaped slaves
• The Victors Write History, 4.4.10: really (from Cynic)? what about the losers?
• Proud of Being Ignorant, 4.7.10: VA Gov McDonnell’s decides to honor Confederates
• Proud of Being Wise, 4.7.10: McDonnell’s reconsideration, & forthright recognition of slavery as cause of Civil War
• One Last Thought on McDonnell and Confederate History, 4.9.10: emails and comments from Lost Causers on slavery & Civil War
• Haley Barbour Doubles Down, 4.12.10: on Barbour’s take on McDonnell & his sense that slavery not worth mentioning
• The Ghost of Bobby Lee, 4.13.10: RE Lee against slavery? not so much; to whom & how we claim ancestors
• When You Don’t Honor the Confederacy, The Terrorists Win, 4.14.10: honoring Confederate History Month
• Heroic Memory, 4.14.10: E Pryor’s take on RE Lee, slavery, & honor; Cynic on flawed heroes
• Honoring CHM: One Drop, 4.14.10: letter of Union Colonel to raise money for education of freed slaves
• “There Are Always More of Them Before They Are Counted“, 4.15.10: on Grant’s writing style
• Honoring CHM: One War. Three Sides. 4.16.10: the South, the North, African-Americans; Big Jack recruiting, fighting, and dying in USCT
• The Wit and Wisdom of U.S. Grant, 4.16.10: no, Twain did not write Grant’s memoirs
• Honoring CHM, 4.16.10: vid [broken link] for USCT soldier Big Jack
• Honoring CHM: One Drop Cont., 4.16.10: more on the photo “Emancipated Slaves” & abolitionist propaganda
• Commemorating CHM: Grant on the Early Days of the Lost Cause, 4.21.10: Grant comparing how Mexican’s remember Mex-Am war to that of Confederates & Civil War
• Commemorating CHM: White Supremacy Killed Lincoln, 4.21.10: on PBS’ The Assassination Of Abraham Lincoln; disconnecting his murder  & Booth from the Civil War
• One of Those Days, 4.22.10: Booth not just crazy man, & Grant should be taught more in Am Lit courses
• Commemorating CHM: The Jourdan Anderson Edition, 4.22.10: Jourdan Anderson’s awesome letter to his ex-master declining to return
• Commemorating CHM: “They Too Needed Emancipation”, 4.23.10: on the pain of stripping oneself of illusion regarding one’s own (treasured) history
• Commemorating CHM: Remixing the Flag of Treason, 4.26.10: on the meanings & uses of the Confederate flag
• Commemorating CHM: The Fourth Side, 4.27.10: M Storey’s note on Southern Unionists
• Civil War Nerdism, 4.27.10: 3 more books on the Civil War
• Grant on Slavery, 4.28.10: how did Grant come to be anti-slavery?
• Going to School on TNC: Fredericksburg, 5.1.10: questions about military tech & tactics
• ‘Ifs’ Defeated the Confederates at Shiloh, 5.3.10: Grant scoffing at ‘ifs’ & Confederate losses
• Commemorating CHM: Terrorism, 5.3.10: Confederates, KKK, & lynching; ‘Pitchfork’ Ben Stillman’s defense of lynching on floor of US Senate
• CHM Epilogue: Cassius Clay, 5.5.10: Clay as southern aristocrat & anti-slavery crusader
• CHM Epilogue: The Spotswood Rice Edition, 5.10.10: USCT soldier Rice’s letters to his enslaved children, ex-[master] mistress
• The Wit and Wisdom of U.S. Grant, 5.25.10: Grant’s writing on the Vicksburg campaign
• The Superior Military Genius of Jefferson Davis, 5.27.10: Grant on commander Braxton Bragg of Army of Tennessee, Jefferson Davis, and (Grant’s friend & ex-Confed) James Longstreet
• Sacrifice, 5.31.10: excerpt from Dobak’s book, on USCT Cpt James Rogers, the Emancipation Proclamation, and exchanging a master’s white child for a soldier’s black one
• How Did Ulysses Grant Become a Caricature? (guest post Cynic), 6.1.10: on the influence of the William Dunning’s interpretation of Grant as corrupt buffoon; later revisions of Grant
• Crowdsourcing the Civil War, 6.1.10: what to read to learn about the Civil War?
• Rolling Through Jordan, 6.1.10: on frustrations w Genovese’s Roll, Jordan, Roll
• Especially the Blacks and the Irish, 6.2.10: quote from slaver on need to keep slaves & Irish separate; on necessity of primary docs, of history more generally to understand oppression (all around)
• Especially the Blacks and the Irish, cont., 6.2.10: images of black people & Irish as simians and savages
• Ulysses Grant, Trouble Man, 6.5.10: Grant is just freakin’ great
• Uncle Billy’s Racism, 6.10.10: on Sherman’s racism, and how to judge historical figures
• Talk to Me Like I’m Stupid: Hunting in the Late Antebellum Era, 6.10.10: how’d folks hunt prior to adoption of shotgun?
• The Civil War as Revenge of the Nerds, 6.13.10: Shelby Foote is a helluva storyteller & great at drawing personalities, helps in understanding [Southern] racists
• Because There Are No Racists, 6.14.10: ‘favoring blacks’ charge 150+ yrs old
• The Miscengenation Ball, 6.14.10: playing on white fears of black people also 150+ yrs old, e.g. ‘Black Republicans’ will force all to miscegenate!
• The Cablinasian in Us All, 6.21.10: TNC looks at own history, finds ‘mulatto’ ancestors, sighs at idiocy of this ‘race business’
• This is a Man’s War, 6.21.10: introductory thoughts on positive effects of Civil War on women
• The Battle of Nashville, 6.23.10: is Grant fair to Thomas’s generalship?
• Slaves Who Likes Slavery, 6.24.10: on Clara Davis, in 1937, nostalgic for slavery & Old South
• Walking the Blood, 6.25.10: more on TNC’s ancestry, the Smacks of the Eastern Shor of MD
• Conversating Forward, 6.25.10: reconsidering take on Clara Davis, and how to think about slavery & understanding enslaved people
• These Are Our Overstated Years, 6.28.10: on Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca & how to make sense of societies w hard rules
• The Civil War on Tape, 6.28.10: listening to Foote different experience than reading him: want to slow way down
• These Are the Last Days of U.S. Grant, 6.29.10: on feeling melancholy at finishing Grant’s memoirs, and the sadness of Grant’s end
• Advice from the Pros, 6.29.10: notes from an historian on how to make sense of narratives, primary documents
• Primary Sources, 7.2.10: Loewen & Sebesta’s collect all kinds of primary pro-Confederacy & pro-slavery docs for their book
• U.S. Grant on the Move, 7.6.10: Grant’s slow rise in polls
• Bullets in the Dining Room Table and Such (guest post Sarah Mayeux), 7.26.10: on non-Southerners [not] understanding the South
• No Power in the Verse Can Stop Me, 7.26.10: on the slave Isabella’s transformation into Sojourner Truth & how fits classic storyline of heroes
• Pleading the Belly (Sarah Mayeux), 7.27.10: want to understand history? dive right in w primary docs
• What Cotton Hath Wrought, 7.30.10: on the high economic stakes of slavery—for everyone
• Race, Forgetting, and the Law (Sarah Mayeux), 7.31.10: on Pascoe’s book & role of forgetting in racial laws
• You Are Not Harriet Tubman, 8.4.10: do not misuse fight against slavery in arguments against abortion (Kain vs. Sullivan)
• One Envies the Distinguished Dust (guest post Alyssa Rosenberg), 8.4.10: on E Dickinson’s & TW Higginson, and latter’s role in Civil War
• You Are Not Harriet Tubman, Cont., 8.4.10: Kain kinda/not really recants; careful w your analogies, jack
• Reporting to the Generalissimo’s Tent (guest post Andy Hall), 8.9.10: Hall introducing himself
• Small Truth Papering Over a Big Lie (Andy Hall), 8.9.10: Confederate apologists try to say that [ancestors’] lack of ownership of slaves meant not implicated in slavery, which is bullshit
• ‘He Died Without a Struggle’ (Andy Hall), 8.9.10: excerpt from Post’s book: letter of soldier regarding death of brother on battlefield
• Susie King Taylor (Andy Hall), 8.10.10: about ex-slave, w excerpt from her bio
• ‘Reb Considers Grant’ (Andy Hall), 8.10.10: poem found by S. Thomas Summers
• ‘We Have Received Provocation Enough’ (Andy Hall), 8.11.10: seizure of free blacks by Army of Northern Virginia widespread & countenanced by Confederate command structure
• A Soldier Looks at Politics (Andy Hall), 8.11.10: letter from USCT officer Charles C Cone
• ‘They Lay As Thick As Autumn Leaves’ (Andy Hall), 8.12.10: letter from General AS Williams
• ‘Union Soldier Recounts the Burning of Atlanta’ (Andy Hall), 8.12.10: poem found by S. Thomas Summers
• Arlington, Bobby Lee, and the ‘Peculiar Institution’ (Andy Hall), 8.13.10: on Freeman’s bio of Lee & selective editing to make him seem actively anti-slavery; Pryor’s elaboration of Lee’s history with slaves
• The Great Lie (Andy Hall), 8.13.10: poem by Tim Lewis
• ‘We Are All Officers Now’ (Andy Hall), 8.13.10: bit from Giles’s bio, saying so long
• Andrew Jackson’s America, 8.20.10: Howe on Jackson and Indian removal, any white sympathy for Cherokee paled beside desire for their land
• Endorsement Deals, 8.20.10: read Howe’s book!
• What Feminism Hath Wrought, 8.31.10: Howe, abolition, Grimke sisters, & women’s rights
• ‘I Wish I Had a Field For My Energies. . .’ 9.7.10: Faust’s Mothers & considerations of Confederate Julie Le Grands desires
• What Hath Ladyhood Wrought, 9.15.10: excerpts from Faust’s Mothers: conflicts bet upholding [white] womanhood & aiding Confederacy
• The Business of War, 9.15.10: Dr Jay comment & Faust on inability/unwillingess of Confederates to organize basic institutions of govt
• Compassion, 9.17.10: on Faust’s Mothers, beautiful writing, and understanding pro-Confederate/slavery sentiment
• The End of Confederate History Month, 9.24.10: VA Gov McDonnell changing Confederate History Month to Civil War in Virginia month
• Stolen Legacy, 9.27.10: Sons of Confederate Veterans respond to McDonnell; opening up Civil War history in South
• ‘Northeastern Intellectual’, 10.5.10: a SCV dismisses TNC as one
• Found Art, 10.5.10: photo of bumper sticker w Confederate Battle Flag & slogan “Fighting terrorism since 1861”
• Why Are Black People So Forgiving? 10.6.10: black people in US don’t really have many other options
• Especially the Johnnies and the Nazis, 10.11.10: link to piece about Tea Partier/Nazi re-enactor, & sanitized view of SS
• A Post That Does Not End Where It Starts, 10.13.10: more on Nazis, Confederate re-enactors, an SCV lecture on NB Forrest, and Tennessee
• A Civil War Compendium, 10.18.10: link to Xin Jeisan’s compendium of TNC’s Civil War posts
• An Intellectual Diary, 10.19.10: on looking over Xin Jeisan’s collection & realizing how TNC’s, and his commenters, thoughts have evolved
• Understanding Virginia’s History Textbook Lie (guest post Cynic), 10.20.10: on Joy Masoff’s terrible book on black Confederates & how influenced VA textbooks
• ‘If’s’ Defeated the Confederates at Shiloh, 10.21.10: Kevin Levin; black Confederates; Confederate General Patrick Cleburne; myths in proposed movie about Cleburne; Bruce Levine
• Valhalla, 10.28.10—Eric Foner interview (w/link); Lincoln and black equality; Grant and emancipation; Lee; admiration; slave republic
• Confronting Valhalla’s Humanity, 10.29.10: BJonthegrid; raw emotion; Confederate women’s letters; humanity and division
• Black Confederates, Cont., 11.1.10: Bruce Levine; Confederate death-bed conversions; Confederate congressmen as slave-owners, plantation owners
• Blacks Who Support Black Confederate Mythology, 11.1.10: black lay historians; Lost Cause; black Southerners; writing blacks out of Civil War; mass death; slavery; Valhalla
• E-mail of the Day, 11.1.10: hate mail; Battle Cry of Freedom; Southerners; Yankees
• Confederate Hair Tonic, 11.9.10: Walter Williams; Black Confederates; Virginia textbook; Carol Sheriff; scholarship; history as phrenology; charlatanism
• Many Thousands Gone, 11.16.10: recent panel discussion (w/link); Virginia conference on Sesquicentennial; Ira Berlin; Edna Medford
• “Ifs” Defeated the Confederates At Shiloh, 11.19.10: panel discussion from 1999 (w/link); questions re: path to victory for Confederacy; respect for Confederate flag; James Roark; William Cooper; Drew Faust
• Alternate History Cont., 11.20.10: Hank Williams Jr video; Lost Cause; Black peoples’ interest in Civil War
• “They Have Encouraged and Assisted Thousands of Our Slaves”, 11.29.10: New York Times, Sons of Confederate Veterans, Secession Ball, primary documents
• ‘Reparations’, 12.1.10: Steve King, ‘urban’, slavery reparations, Rush Limbaugh, ‘Lincolnism’
• Why We Fight, 12.1.10: Secession Ball, South Carolina, neo-Confederacy, Civil War (sesqui-)centennial declarations
• Why We Fight Cont., 12.1.10: James Loewen, James Sebesta, respect, Neo-Confederate Reader, primary documents
• Louis C.K. Does the Math on Slavery, 12.7.10: “That’s two 70-year old ladies living and dying back to back.” (w/clip); Eyes on the Prize on Stokely Carmichael’s yell ‘Black Power!’; treating Lincoln and Sherman as saviors; wild reception to black Union troops in Richmond
• ‘The Very Spot Where the First Sons of Africa Were Landed’, 12.9.10: understanding music metaphorically versus literally; Arcade Fire; Illmatic; trying to understand the whole of the ACW, from the  the enslaved to the slave-masters; letter from GWH, black sergeant, on changes in Union-controlled South, and former slaves whipping their former master; on the discombobulations of enslavement, war, and liberation
• To Be Made Whole Again, 12. 9.10:  on the photo of Contraband/Drummer Jackson, freedman in the Union Army; the need and desire for transformation; religion; Sam Cooke; Malcolm X; Make It Plain; Sonia Sanchez; Lincoln
• Toward a Complete General Lee, 12.10.10: on PBS’s American Experience: Robert E Lee and comparison to Ken Burns’s Civil War; problem with Civil War in asserting Lee against slavery, tho’ it does shred a lot of neo-confederate nonsense; American Experience calls Lee a ‘slavery apologist’, and makes clear that slavery the cause of the CW
• No One’s Saying You Invented Slavery, 12.13.10: on Daily Show’s Larry Wilmore’s exposure of Sons of Confederate Veterans bs (w/clip)
• The First Sons of Africa, Cont., 12.13.10: Andy Hall’s follow-up on GWH’s letter (from 12.9 post) and its legitimacy; GWH is George W. Hatton, from MD, likely born free; long discussion of Hatton’s time in the Army, w/many links
• Civility, 12.16.10: riff on EJ Dionne’s lament about present-day lack of civility—incivility long a part of American politics; 19th Dems referred to ‘Black Republican Party’ bent on miscegenation
• There Are Worlds, and There Are Worlds, 12.17.10: disinclination to watch AMC’s post-Confederacy series ‘Hell on Wheels’; would rather hear about Willy Parker, Moses, Ellen Craft, Robert Charles
• The Mission, 12.17.10: leads with DG Faust’s bit from Southern Stories on need to understand, not merely judge; want to understand not just the slave, but also the slave-master, as a human being; ‘there has to be something beyond evil’ which can be understood
• Progress, 12.20.10: quote from South Carolina newspaper The State insisting on the centrality of slavery to the secessionist cause, demonstrating again that the South is not the same as the Neo-Confederate South
• The Stories We Love, 12.20.10: from Cynic, on the theme of civilian deaths in the ACW, and particularly on the movie-trope of the Confederate done wrong as a way to consider ‘complexity’ of the vanquished soldier; TNC notes possibilities of Southern aesthetic, incl. stories of George Thomas and Shadrach Minkins;  notion of ACW as war between equals, ‘brother against brother’ transforms Confederate soldier into brave veteran
• The Mission, Cont., 12.20.10: excerpt from DG Faust, on Thorton Stringfellow, slave-holding reverend, and his version of slavery as a civilizing mission; most 19th c whites believe blacks to be inferior; emancipation a first step away from this now-outdated view; Howell Cobb’s “If slaves seem good soldiers, then our whole theory of slavery is wrong.”
• No Excuses, 12.21.10: on Haley Barbour, the White Citizens Councils, and the Klan; advantage of internet is ability to read what Confederates themselves said about slavery; James McPherson on the radio (w/link), noting that at outset of war 60% of SC’s population was enslaved
• Standing Athwart History, Cont., 12.22.10: more on Barbour and his ignorance of MS’s history, incl. Fannie Lou Hamer, Medgar Evers, Michael Schwerner, James Cheney, & Andrew Goodman; white supremacist coup in 1876 against Aldebert Ames; ‘Mississippi Appendectomy’ (i.e., forced sterilization)
• Beyond Debunking, 12.22.10: on the Secession Ball and NAACP’s protest of it; better to reclaim history, incl. that of Robert Smalls and his flight to the Union in the Confederate CSS Planter
• The Republic of Winston, 12.23.10: on a Confederate re-enactors re-creation (in Feb) in AL of Jefferson Davis’s swearing in, as a means to honor their ancestors; let’s consider the real history, as the primary documents are easily available online (w/links); sadder still given that AL also includes a Union history; better than protesting Secession Balls, offer re-enactments of USCT & 1st Alabama Calvary
• ‘I Never Did Buy Nothing On Time’, 12.23.10: holidays a time of celebration and sorrow for slaves, as many feared the settlement of slave-masters’ debts meant families would be split up; 3 audio clips of freedman and ex-slave Fountain Hughes
• Crisis of the Public Intellectual, 12.23.10: on turning down MSNBC offer to discuss Haley Barbour; sense that cable discussions rigged against complexity; Chris Matthew hosting debate between Sons of Confederate Veterans’s Thomas Hiter and Eugene Robinson; yet reluctance to appear as pundit may contribute to general lousiness of these discussions
• Confronting the Ghost of History, 12.23.10: more props to VA Governor Bob McDonnell in efforts to preserve slave and freedmen’s cemetery, how unlike some other GOP governor. . .
• It’s Not That You’re Racist. . ., 12.24.10: Cornell law professor William Jacobson going after Matt Yglesias for Yglesia’s criticisms of Barbour; consider who Barbour honors w/his display of the Confederate flag: white supremacist secessionists and slave-holders; who knows if Barbour is a racist, but he is clearly and willfully ignorant; conservative evasions in discussions of race; if universities employ guys like Jacobson, what hope for cable news?
• Concision and the Public Intellectual, 12.28.10: taking off from Chomsky’s criticism of the sound-bite nature of t.v. discussions, wondering how to get beyond the cliches about brave-soldiers-for-a-bad-cause in considering ACW; was Mohammad Atta brave? kamikazes? how to make sense?
• Affection, 12.28.10: more on Jacobson, who complains that saying Barbour harbors ‘affection’ for a white supremacist organization is code for calling him a racist; TNC recounts trip to small-town Tennessee and their affection for their Confederate forbears; ignorance itself is dangerous, even without malice
• Talk to Me Like I’m Stupid: Agrarianism, Marxism, and Slavery, 12.29.10: was sympathy for the South ever expressed in Marxian terms? Gilpin Faust a better read than Genovese; Roll Jordan, Roll; I’ll Take My Stand
• “My Whole Desire Was To Choose Him for My Companion”, 12.29.10: long letter of appeal to the Freedman’s Bureau, by Carrie Hall, a white woman married to a black man, Sandy Alexander Hall
• “He’s All I Do Want”, 12.30.10: excerpt from Martha Hodes’s book White Women, Black Men; while this particular story may not be true, but provokes thought about interracial relationships in the 19th c and into Jim Crow; thoughts on PBS Pinchback and his parents
• The Debatable Effects of Boycotting, 12.30.10: on SC’s NAACP urging a boycott of South Carolina until Confederate flag removed from State House grounds; better to encourage people to engage history, to give something to fight for rather than always against
• Taking the History Out of ‘Huck Finn’ (guest post Jamelle Bouie), 1.4.2011: feeds into worst impulses to sanitize American history; Mark Twain
• A Nation of Cowards, 1.6.2011: taking off on J Bouie’s post, musing that, as Elizabeth Brown Pryor noted regarding the whitewashing Lee’s slaveholding, cleaning up after Twain a kind of moral failing on our part, that we can’t handle the truth, that it’s not good enough for us
• Grappling With Genosha, 1.14.2011: after quoting himself (from ‘The Big Machine, 2.5.2010), reconsiders, wonders if one can really understand the slave society w/o understanding its presumptions of the order of society itself
• Argument by Analogy, 1.14.2011: whatever the similarities of the Old South to feudalism, were not the same; analogy is a tool of historical interpretation, not the interpretation itself
• George W. Hatton, Soldier (Andy Hall), 1.18.2011: long piece on George Hatton, who served in the USCT; includes a letter regarding in the whipping of slaver William Henry Clapton; many links
• Do Civil War Reenactments Help or Hinder? (Andy Hall), 1.18.2011: on the recent reenactment of a slave auction in St. Louis, as organized by Angela da Silva; includes video
• George W. Hatton, Politician (Andy Hall), 1.19.2011: more information on Hatton, his campaign for Horace Greeley in the 1872 election; many links
• Death In 19th Century America, 1.19.2011: on reading The Children of Pride, collection of letters by slaveholding family, many questions regarding connections between death, technology, labor, medicine, humanism; have to go beyond facts of slaveholding, have to see what life was like
• The Other Decoration Day Speech (Andy Hall), 1.19.2011: on the short speech by Frederick Douglass, at an 1871 remembrance at Arlington National Cemetery; can’t pretend that each side of CW was equally noble
• The Answer is Huge, 1.20.2011:  on listening to an audio (w/link) of the diaries of Southerner Mary Chestnut, and her comment on Isaac (A huge creature, really a magnificent specimen of a colored gentleman); the presumptions of that time, when slavery woven into everything;  have to push deeper and not be stopped by the racism, if want to understand
• George W. Hatton’s Long Road (Andy Hall), 1.20.2011: finishing out the story of Hatton, his move to Kentucky to lead an A.M.E. church, his continuing involvement in politics, eventual return to Maryland
• ‘Else You Will Be Dealt With According to Mob Law’ (Andy Hall), 1.20.2011: shredding the argument that secession could have been peaceful, given the threats to anyone with suspected abolitionist sympathies; letter to an A. Neumann, advising him to leave ‘else you will. . .’; Southron types today have nothing to say about such threats
• The Literary Heroism of U.S. Grant, 1.20.2011: long excerpt from Grant’s memoirs, with dismissal of the legitimacy of secession, lamentation on the lack of preparation for war by Pres. Buchanan; Grants notes that once slavery became profitable, no way it would disappear; his musings on why Southerners, most of whom did not own slaves, nonetheless joined the secessionists
• Simple Images, Complex Realities, (Andy Hall) 1.21.2011: on so-called black Confederates and photo taken  Dr. R.A. Gwynne at  Confederate reunions; on African-American men at Confederate reunions generally; on the misuses of history, esp. “presentism”
• The Scrapbook of American Slavery (Andy Hall) 1.21.2011: on Harriet Beecher Stowe and the evidence behind Uncle Tom’s Cabin
• The Unbearable Whiteness of Pro-Lifers and Pundits, 1.24.2011: on Rick Santorum’s calling out Obama for being pro-choice, since, as a black man, he ought to know that abortion = slavery; slaves were known to be human; just damned malignant laziness to equate abortion and slavery
• ‘In a Brighter, Better, More Enduring World. . .’, 1.26.2011: on the letter 19th c Georgian plantantion owner Charles Colcock  Jones sent to his son, and what it reveals about the slave-holding mind; Children of Pride
• Movies I Should Be Interested In, 1.27.2011: on yet another Confederate-sympathizing movie; enough with Mary Surrat—worse that Lincoln was murdered; how about a movie on Robert Smalls or Prince Rivers
• Greeted as Liberators, 1.31.2011: more on Santorum and Klein and slavery analogies; Laura Spicer; Jourdan Anderson; on limiting historical debate to fit within present political fight
• A Final Word, 1.31.2011: Obama’s pro-choice stance a disgrace to Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass; link to speaker’s corner posts on slavery and abortion; done with this idiocy
• Miscegenation Ball, 2.1.2011: long quote from Jamelle Bouie on the process of becoming white; on past considerations of the “Irish race,” “Italian race”, etc.; misplaced focus on the sex part of miscegenation, really about maintaining power and control for a particular group of whites; sexual openness result not cause of fall of white supremacy
• Time on the Cross, 2.3.2011: from Kevin Levin, long bit on Venezuelan artist Stanley Bermudez’s artwork based on Confederate flag imagery, and the piece’s removal from an art show at his college, Gainesville State
• ‘Give Us Slavery or Give Us Death’, 2.7.2011: from Manisha Sinha’s Times piece on Calhounites role in pushing South Carolina toward war; once again, primary sources point overwhelmingly toward the primary role of slavery as a cause for the Civil War
• ‘The Trees Are in Agony’, 2.7.2011: letter from Georgia slaveholder James Caldecott Jones on a late-summer storm; can see in the skill of the writing all that would be lost; on all the contradictions of the Old South
• Way They Reminisce Over You, 2.7.2011: on the very close friendships between women in the antebellum period; homosociality generally; Tennyson mourning his friend Arthur Hallam
• Reading Women, 2.10.2011: shout-out to historian Anya Jabour and her article “Albums of Affection”, on the autograph albums of young white Southern women about to move into married plantation life; premonitions of doom, esp. regarding pregnancy and the possibility of sexual diseases transmitted between slave houses and the marital bed; on the conflicts of the trapped white woman, both alienated from and invested in the slave society; Mary Kelly’s “Reading Women/Women Reading” and the radicalism of 19th c black women;  Sarah Mapps Douglas and the Female Literacy Society; Jabour’s “Grown Girls, Highly Cultivated”, on the Wirt family and the patriarch’s need to turn his smart, high-spirited daughters into “ladies”, much to their detriment
• The Past Ain’t Even Past, 2.11.2011: on the attempt by the SCV to have Mississippi authorize Nathan Bedford Forrest license plates; copy of ad from Forrest’s slave-trading days; how about a statue of Fannie Lou Hamer?
• Evidence of a Spurious Origin, 2.14.2011: on the case of Paul du Chaillu, a Western explorer who apparently passed as white, before falling under suspicion; that white supremacy not just God’s plan, but upheld by science
• The Beauty Myth, 2.14.2011: on the explicit exclusion of black women from Southern ladyhood; excerpt from Mary Cathryn Cain’s “The Art and Politics of Looking White”; whiteness = beauty = moral cleanliness; admonitions against cosmetics and for avoiding the sun; reinforcing that colorism is itself a manifestation of white supremacy
• Presidents’ Day, 2.21.2011: on Oney Judge, personal slave to Martha Washington, who escaped, and the failed attempts to bring/woo her back
• Talk to Me Like I’m Stupid: Revolutionary Ireland, 3.1.2011: on Frederick Douglass’s visit to Ireland, and the conflicting sympathies of the Irish and Irish-Americans on slavery, abolition, and the Civil War; Daniel O’Connell
• This is Excellent News for Bobby Lee, 3.4.2011: on the recent changes in the South, as against the SCV folks, including Barbour’s opposition to Forrest license plates; congratulate the country at large for the work we have done
• Talk to Me Like I’m Stupid: Victorian Fashion, 3.7.2011: on connections between the bound society as depicted by Jane Austen and antebellum America, and, oh yeah, the art and anthropology of fashion
• Barbour on the Late Unpleasantness, 3.28.2011: good on Haley Barbour for noting that slavery was at the center of secession
• Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, 3.29.2011: on Tennyson’s “In Memoriam”, and trying to get a feel for the antebellum South
• No One Man Should Have All That Power, 3.31.2011: on Jane Austen, aristocracy, and the similarities of the social order of her world to that of the antebellum South—especially in the fear of losing power and status
• ‘More or Less Dangerously Wounded’, 3.31.2011: on R. Randall Couch’s article, “The Public Masked Balls of New Orleans” [after the Louisiana Purchase] and how it scandalized Americans; musing on how societies organize themselves
• The Bad Old Man, 4.6.2011: Jubal Early, Confederate hagiographer, started out as an anti-secessionist; noting the link between South Carolina as the first state of secession and the fact that in 1860 blacks were in the majority
• ‘Slave, Thou Hast Slain Me’, 4.8.2011: on King Lear and understanding, that is, asking “Why would someone feel like that?” “How could it be that I could come to feel like that?” and why slavemasters were so afraid of slave rebellion, given their rarity; the example of the slavemaster afraid of the slave who was poisoning he and his family
• The Myths We Need, 4.12.2011: on The Takeaway‘s terrible show (w/Nelson Winbush and George Armstrong) about black Confederates and all of the available information debunking this myth, w/brief riff on Tony Horwitz (audio and links to sources included)
• Lies Damn Near Everyone Told Me, 4.13.2011: on The Takeaway‘s second take (w/Kevin Levin) on black Confederates—glad they did it, but the “teach-the-controversy” approach gives too much credit to Confederate apologists (audio and links to sources included)
• The Rock of Chickamauga Gets His Due, 4.13.2011: on Kevin Levin’s piece on Virginia’s Civil War History Month proclamation, and how slavery is placed at the center; props given to William Harvey Carney and George Henry Thomas
• Myths Cont: A Response from Professor Gates, 4.14.2011: Henry Louis Gates’s note to TNC clarifying his views on black Confederate soldiers; no additional comment from TNC
• The Age of Awesome, 4.15.2011: excerpts from Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence; like Austen, this helps to understand slavery—just can’t quite explain how
• Black Confederates Cont., 4.18.2011: more on Kevin Levin’s interview on The Takeaway and the role of academics in the debate; excerpt from Jaime Amanda Martinez’s entry in the Encyclopedia Virginia on black Confederates
• You Are Now Rocking With the Best, 4.19.2011: on The Age of Innocence, and how Wharton and Austen help TNC understand a bounded society
• The Age of Awesome, 4.22.2011: on listening to an interview with Wharton biographer Hermione Lee; not wanting to provide a cheat-sheet of counter-ACW-not-about-slavery-arguments; “Paint us a complete picture and the correctives will flow naturally”; Newland Archer neither tragic nor wrong
• What This Cruel War Was Over, 4.25.2011: excerpt from Kevin Levin’s review of Gary Gallagher’s The Union War, and Gallagher’s take on Chandra Manning’s What This Cruel War Was Over; “What caused the Civil War” is not the same question as “Why Union soldiers fought”; schedule for Effete Liberal Book Club
• A Couple of Thoughts on Melville, 4.26.2011: Moby Dick; the irony of attributing the whale’s attempts to thwart the whaler’s goal of killing it to treachery; Robert Hayden’s poem in which he takes the view of Cinque’s captors and his efforts to free himself are similarly seen as murderous and no more than the actions of a “surly brute”
• The Civil War Isn’t Tragic, 4.26.2011: on Robert Zimmerman’s podcast [link incl] on the Civil War, and the accepted common ground that the Civil War was a tragedy; the Civil War vanquished slavery and gave birth to modern America—how can this be tragic? and we do celebrate other wars, e.g., The American Revolutionary War
• The Civil War Isn’t Tragic Cont., 4.26.2011: TNC glad the Civil War happened, doubts that anything short of war would have led to the abolition of slavery, or any sort of compromise was feasible; readers may not agree, but this is (also) about putting yourself in someone else’s—a descendant of slaves—shoes and trying to understand
• Talk to Me Like I’m Stupid: Locke’s State of Slavery and War, 4.27.11: figuring out Locke’s views of liberty, slavery, and war
• The Civil War Isn’t Tragic, Cont., 4.28.11: JL Wall’s rebuttal (via blog posts on Foote) to TNC’s point about non-tragedy
• Talk to Me Like I’m Stupid: A Census of American Slavery, 4.29.11: [how to find] sources?
• The Revenge Flick, 5.3.11: on Tarantino’s Django film
• Jubal Early’s Revenge, 5.3.11: film/westerns & romanticizing ex-Confederates
• The Union War, 5.3.11: Foner’s dislike of Gallagher’s book
• The Lens of History, 5.4.11: excerpts on history & the military from interview w DG Faust
• I Feel Like a Black Republican, 5.4.11: Yglesias’s take on Lincoln’s politics re: slavery
• Lincoln on Radicalism, 5.4.11: Lincoln notes that whatever their faults, Radicals facing same way as him
• Vs. Bad Guys, 5.6.11: Hayes on killing bin Laden; how radicals move the rest
• 50 Cent vs. The Confederate Flag, 5.6.11 [broken links]: unreality of hearing Red Shirts defense of Confederates to descendant of black South Carolinian
• Deep Questions, 5.11.11: on Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter
• ‘A Professoriate of All Believers’, 5.12.11: Cynic on Barton’s bad history
• Jesse James, 5.12.11: on MacPherson’s Scourge, and James’s Confederate connection (w more by Foner)
• Lincoln in Love, 5.14.11: long Lincoln letter on marriage proposal turned down
• The Scientific Revolution, 5.16.11: “what does natural selection mean for a bonded society?”
• The Scientific Revolution, Cont., 5.16.11: clarification & elaboration on last thread
• Black Confederates Revealed, 5.16.11: on the Gibson’s journey from black to white
• The Walkers, 5.18.11: link to interview w TNC, and how came to  & changed by Civil War project
• In Defense of Slavery, 5.20.11: on Fitzhugh’s book & quasi-Marxist sensibilities
• In Defense of Slavery, 5.23.11: Fitzhugh on ‘market professionals’; admiration for his aggression; Detroit, & inescapability of exploitation?
• In Defense of Slavery, Cont., 5.24.11: Fitzhugh dangerously provocative
• In Defense of White Slavery, 5.25.11: on the consistency of Fitzhugh’s racism, and who counts as white
• In Defense of Slavery, 5.26.11: long excerpt from letter about England’s poor, only way to deal w poverty enslavement
• ‘If White Slavery Be Wrong, the Bible Cannot Be True’, 5.27.11: Fitzhugh’s logic drives him to support slavery in general
• The First Memorial Day, 5.30.11: Blight on the first Memorial Day, in Charleston in 1865
• In Defense of Slavery, 5.31.11: Stephenson’s defense seems weak compared to Fitzhugh’s
• The Canon of White Supremacy, 6.1.11: on Civil War literature, Hayden’s “Middle Passage”, Fitzhugh
• Confederate Nostalgia in Germany, 6.2.11: German reenactors of Civil War tend toward Confederates
• Civil War Sentimentalism, 6.7.11: JM Lundberg on Burns and Foote
• The Convenient Suspension of Disbelief, 6.13.11: JL Wall interview w Foote, & Foote’s admiration for the Confederacy & NB Forrest, and his ‘white romanticism’
• The Reading List, 6.13.11: 3 more books, w quote from A Hamilton
• The Great Trauma of Your Generation, 6.15.11: Cynic’s comment on Foote’s own military experiences & shame at not fighting in WWII; letter from reader on father’s shame (?) at also having missed fighting
• Directed Readings, 6.16.11: beginning Wedgewood’s 30 Years War
• The Thirty Years’ War, 6.20.11: appreciating Wedgewood’s writing, as well as that of VP of Confederacy
• The Nation-State Rising, 6.22.11: pairing Wedgewood w M Anderson’s lectures, understanding how to enforce rules absent a state
• Steal This Diploma, 6.27.11: on listening to audio books; suggestions?
• Scribbling Women, 6.27.11: Austen; women freer in pre-industrialized West than elsewhere in world?
• ‘The Hajnal Line’, 6.28.11: different patterns of marriage east & west of line and effects on women’s status
• Talk to Me Like I’m Stupid: Nazi Germany and Nationhood, 7.6.2011: Prompted by readings on CV Wedgewood & 17th c Germany; possible connections bet 30 Years War & Naziism
• It’s Like They’re Proud of Being Ignorant, 7.8.2011: on the Family Leader marriage pledge and assertions that black families stronger under slavery; Michele Bachmann
• Not So Proud to Be Ignorant, 7.11.2011: on the change to marriage pledge to avoid ‘misunderstanding’ on slavery & marriage; nope, just wrong
• The Thirty Years War, 7.12.2011: Wedgewood’s sketch of King Gustavus Adophus of Sweden; good historical writing
• The Warlords of History, 7.18.2011: on the civil war, Gustavus Adolphus, Wallenstein, and the devastation of war, w/thoughts on admiration for Confederate military leaders Lee & Jackson
• ‘The German Myth’, 7.18.2011: Wedgewood on the German Lost Cause & attempts to create German nation-state, pre-Nazi
• Wallenstein is Dead, 7.22.2011: Wedgewood on the barbarity of the 30 Years War; contrasting misery of mid-17th c Europe to images of Africa as the ‘dark continent’; humans, everywhere
• Wallenstein is Dead, Cont.,  7.23.2011: further thoughts on the (non-)tragedy of the ACW, other wars; asks for recommendations on further reading
• Vs. Hippy Punching, 7.28.2011: on TNC’s NYTimes piece on the Emancipation Proclamation and leftists; many left-critics of Lincoln, incl Douglass welcomed the EP
• ‘I Claim Not to Have Controlled Events’, 7.28.11: on the anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation; Annie Davis letter to Lincoln; compromise in politics & real-world effects; EP as act of belligerence against Confederacy; Foner’s take on Lincoln’s evolution toward emancipation
• Controlled Aggression, 7.29.11: on Fanny Kemble [on abolition] and wielding the blade instead of the axe to make a point
• Finishing the Thirty Years War, 7.30.11: contrasting Wedgewood’s view that the 30YW ‘solved no problem’ and that the ACW did—slavery; Blight on the monetary value of slaves
• Fanny Kemble: Black Don’t Crack, 8.1.11: Kemble’s views on the appearance & attractiveness of black people; anti-black racism in Europe, pre-Atlantic slave trade
• For the Volk, 8.3.11: request for further suggestions on reading European & German history
• TNC Endorses. . ., 8.3.11: Lisa Farrington’s Creating Their Own Image; Euro views of Africans, pre-Atlantic slave trade; Prester John & St Maurice as Christian warriors
• Rules for Radicals, Cont., 8.4.11: on the evolution of views of leaders Mandela, X, Lincoln, and role of adversaries in shaping views
• A Modest Proposal, Cont, 8.5.11: can’t talk about gentrification & race today w/o understanding history of race, incl slavery
• A Quick Word on Gettysburg, 8.11.11: on the simplification of the ACW & missing black people; dominance of Southern male romantic view (Faulkner, Foote); visitor center at Gettysburg clear war about slavery
• The Civil War Isn’t Tragic, Cont., 8.16.11: long post; must grapple w/ McPherson’s This Mighty Scourge; ACW not just about factional interests, but existence of slave society (not just slavery)
• Imagining a Slave Society, 8.17.11: renters & official privileges of homeownership; trying to get in head of those of would lose if current system changed
• The Civil War Isn’t Tragic, Cont., 8.17.11: reconsidering ACW from Ygelsias’s economic perspective & compensated emancipation—and why failed; slavery not just economic, but whole society; Jourdan Anderson
• The Negro Work Ethic, 8.19.11: Fanny Kemble, slavery, and hard work; ‘lazy white Southerner’ stereotype; again, slavery an entire society
• Affirmative Action for Colonial White People, 8.22.11: Morgan’s American Slavery, American Freedom, and laws taking away property from black slaves while allowing white servants to keep gifted property
• Tragic, 8.23.11: on David Blight’s  American Oracle & MLK’s connecting civil rights to ACW; short vid w/Blight
• ‘That Older and Real Terror’, 8.25.11: Mark Twain, noting horror not just of French Revolution, but life before the revolution; lack of monuments to the Long War
• Two Quotes on My Mind, 8.26.11: one claiming blacks had no part in own emancipation, Lincoln’s directly rebutting this; Lincoln’s ability to cast radical views in hard, conservative terms
• Old Time Religion, 8.29.11: long excerpt on Mary Livermore visiting Aunt Aggy after the war and her view that in violence & death, justice was done; ACW as only time black rage given white sanction; Foner, Blight, & TNC on (non?) tragedy of ACW; death in freedom better than slavery
• Black Confederates at Harvard, 9.2.11: Kevin Levin on Harvard profs espousing myth of Black Confederates & misuse of historical material
• Civil War Memory, 9.2.11: Long letter from Kentucky man on continued, if indirect, influence of ACW & white supremacism in his state
• Morning Reading, 9.3.11: George Lewis Ruffian on Frederick Douglass, and self-teaching
• Black Confederates at Harvard, Cont., 9.4.11: More assertions, incl that of John Stauffer, on Black Confederates; again, need to interrogate sources
• Oh, My People, 9.5.11: vid of black man participating as Confederate in reenactment
• The Slave Society Defined: 9.6.11: Taking David Blight’s definition of slave society as a start: where relationship of owner to labor defined by labor; more than this
• Feeling It, 9.6.11: Why discussion of slavery not just intellectual, but also personal pursuit; long excerpt from Blight
• Whitney Houston Meets the Civil War, 9.6.11: Whitney sings “The Battle Hymn”
• ‘What I Want Is To Advance’, 9.7.11: on US Grant; need for good biography of him
• The Glory of the Coming of the Lord, 9.8.11: On the origins and reverberations of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”
• The Civil War Isn’t Tragic, Cont., 9.12.11: Long excerpt from ex-slave and abolitionist William Parker’s memoirs; violent resistance to Fugitive Slave Law
• Our First Black President, 9.12.11: On first president of Howard U, Mordecai Wyatt Johnson, son of two ex-slaves
• History and Progressives, 9.19.11: Pushing back against Corey Robin, and why study ACW
• Frederick Douglass, American Lion, 9.27.11: On Douglass’s third autobiography, description of plantation, work as purifying force
• ‘To Understand, A Man Must Stand Under’, 9.27.11: Douglass as slave who would not be broken; his beautiful writing on his planned escape
• Frederick Douglass: ‘A Woman’s Rights Man’, 9.30.11: Abolitionism, suffrage, and the 15th Amendment; differing views of Douglass and Elizabeth Cady Stanton
• ‘The Sun Of My Day Is Nearing the Horizon’, 10.1.11: Douglass ending his memoir; best TNC has read
• Herman Cain is No Booker T. Washington, 10.2.11: On facile comparisons of Cain to Washington; similarities bet Washington & Douglass
• Awesome Racist Geography, 10.7.11: “Runaway Negro Creek” is pretty cool. . .
• ‘Woman’ as Political Fiction, 10.8.11: On the problems & promise of universalizing in politics; Christine Stansell
• American Othello, 10.11.11: White male control of women  & unease w thought of black male control of white women
• Patriotism, 10.17.11: Thoughts while walking the Mall in DC; stretching back
• The Great Schism, 10.18.11: Long post on broken alliance bet abolitionists & suffragists
• Slavery Revenge Flicks, 10.18.11: Not looking forward to Django Unchained
• Coming Attractions, 10.18.11: Preview of Atlantic‘s December ACW issue
• All the Sable Ladies, 10.19.11: Tensions for black women who want rights of men & to be a lady; thoughts of Anna Julia Cooper, Nannie Helen Burroughs, Fannie Barrier Williams
• ‘The Invincible’, 10.19.11: Ad for Susan B Anthony ‘The Invincible’ on need for bread, not ballot
• Another Black Confederate Debunking, 10.18.11: debunking myth of Silas Chandler as Black Confederate
• The Gathering of My Name, 11.3.11: Family history of TNC & surprises therein
• The Politically Correct Confederacy, 11.4.11: On AMC’s Hell on Wheels
• But I Voted for Shirley Chisholm, 11.14.11: Occupy sign ‘Women is the nigger of the world’; historical resonances
• Shirley Chisholm, Cont., 11.15.11: On too-facile historical comparisons
• Shirley Chisholm, Cont., 11.16.11: On George Eliot, literature, analogies, & uses of different perspectives in understanding history
• ‘I Have Since Heard of His Death’, 11.18.11: Douglass on his escape attempts, feelings for former master Thomas Auld, feelings on hearing of his death
• George Eliot’s Spellcraft, 11.21.11: On Eliot’s beautiful writing, and US Grant’s
• Why Do So Few Blacks Study the Civil War, (11.30.11) :  TNC’s article in the Atlantic’s ACW issue
• The Hard Student, 12.2.11: George L Ruffin on Frederick Douglass, crucial need for black intellectual advance
• The Declining Significance of the Lost Cause, 12.5.11: Kevin Levin on Newt Gingrich’s The Battle of the Crater; sympathy for black soldiers some kind of progress
• The Civil War Isn’t Tragic, 12.6.11: Recapping TNC’s argument, w links to past posts
• The Civil War on Morning Edition, 12.8.11: Interview on NPR on Atlantic’s ACW issue, w link
• Rick Perry and the Politics of Resentment, 12.8.11: Perry unashamed to be Christian, changing rights & privileges, going back to Calhoun
• The Civil War, Book 1, 12.8.11: TNC contracted for book on ACW, Tremble for My Country
• The Civil War, Book 2, 12.8.11: TNC had started 3 ACW novels; difficulty of getting past notion of degraded slaves; nonfic book based on Christiana Riot
• The Civil War Isn’t Tragic: The Source, 12.9.11: Interview w Eric Foner
• The Past Ain’t Even the Past, 12.12.11: Present-day Fuqua School’s attempt to desegregate; US Grant on slaver’s leading country to war; connections bet ACW & now
• John Calhoun Has Awesome Hair, 12.12.11: Pic of Calhoun’s mane
• A Muscular Empathy, 12.14.11: Musing on Forbes “if Iwere a poor black kid” piece & belief that one would be better than other mediocrities; would have been Douglass, or slaver Bobby Carter who freed his slaves
• Into the Canon: Middlemarch, 12.16.11: Philosophy as fiction; many excerpts
• Hitchens and the War, 12.19.11: On virtues coexistence w vice, eg, Jefferson
• Reflections, 12.21.11: Pushback from black scholars on TNC’s Atlantic ACW piece & words on Af-Am Civil War Memorial and Museum; some criticism on point, others not
• The Banality of Racism, 1.3.12: Libertarianism, racism, and white supremacy of ‘State’s rights’ on matters of race, back to Calhoun & nullification
• The Messenger, 1.3.12: Ron Paul, Lost Causers, Farrakhan, & need for savior
• Saviorism, 1.4.12: Dissents on previous post, w vid of Paul on ACW; Glenn Greenwald & ‘slaughtering Muslim children’
• Civil War Counterfactuals, 1.12.12: vid of Ron Paul on ACW; Howard Zinn’s facile take on avoidability of ACW & Lincoln
• A Quick Follow-Up on Howard Zinn, 1.12.12: Zinn opened up TNC’s world; many partisans of Black Confederates not Lost Causers, but leftists
• The Greatest Fix You’ll Ever Need, 1.12.12: Cynic, reimagining Faulkner
• Into the Canon: De Tocqueville, 1.13.12: History as progress, need to self-educate
• Into the Canon: Democracy in America, 1.16.12: Tocqueville’s take on localism best defense of States rights; Tocq still in history, not outside of it
• The Irony of American History, 1.21.12: vid w Ron Paul in front of Confederate flag, on ACW
• Crowd-Sourcing American History, 1.22.12: vid w Ron Paul on non-need for ACW; against Comfortable History; trying to drill down into facts, evidence, arguments on ante-bellum America, w questions
• Today, 1.23.12: Correction on economic value of slaves; [mostly just an open thread]
• Compensation, 1.23.12: Laziness of Paul’s view on ACW, media response to it; Lincoln, slavery, secessionist moves prior to Lincoln’s election; Booth on Lincoln
• Compensation, 1.23.12: Economics of slavery; changing views of slavery among slavers; why no compensated emancipation
• Into the Canon: De Tocqueville, 1.25.12: Compensation could only have worked w coercion, i.e., war; did slavery bring American govt to ruin?
• Compensation, 1.26.12: On Ron Paul’s claim that slavery could have been phased out w/o violence; evidence suggests otherwise
• Compensation, 1.30.12: Can’t just thrill to Paul’s anti-war & anti-war-on-drugs stance w/o taking account of uncomfortable history; connections bet slavery & contemporary criminal justice system
• Into the Canon: De Tocqueville, 2.2.12: On Tocqueville’s attempts to justify democracy
• The Atlantic’s Civil War, 2.7.12: The Atlantic’s Civil War issue, w pullout of Yoni Applebaum piece
• ‘Black People Deserve Better Than This‘, 2.13.12: Fmr Gov Douglas Wilder’s disappearance from plans to build a museum on slavery
• Writing is a Practical Skill, 2.20.12: Riffing on Yglesias piece to discuss US Grant’s memoirs
• Mark Twain and Grant’s Memoirs, 2.20.12: Grant’s lived experiences affected his writing
• The Walkers, 3.6.12: First glimpse of TNC’s fiction project (link), audio about Sarah Walker
• Young World, 3.7.12: Repost of audio on his novel [different excerpt?]
• The Enduring Power of the Lost Cause, 3.9.12: Lost-Causism in the movie John Carter
• American History is for Snobs, 3.12.12: Sarah Palin on slavery and the Civil War
• The Anti-Semitism of Ulysses S. Grant, 3.16.12: Grant’s attempt to expel Jews from Tennessee in General Orders No. 11, reversal by Lincoln, and Grant’s attempts to atone for order
• Our Man at Yale, 4.4.12: Vid of panel on ACW, w TNC
• De Tocqueville’s Critique of the Welfare State, 4. 10.12: Don’t be afraid to be challenged by Tocqueville’s perspective on & criticisms of democracy, welfare
• De Tocqueville on the Merits of ‘an Adroit Despotism’, 4.14.12: Democracy has merit, but it’s not perfect
• Tocqueville and the Tyrannical Majority, 4.16.12: Reconciling belief in American democracy w fact of African-American history
• Into the Canon: Tocqueville and the Despotic Majority, 4.27.12: On the complexities of majoritarian democracy & the slowness of change
• Into the Canon: Tocqueville Among the Sprawl, 5.2.12: On the development of the American landscape
• Talk to Me Like I’m Stupid: Tocqueville and the South, 5.4.12: Tocqueville’s writings on “the three races” of America is thin
• The World Is a Ghetto, 5.11.12: On the unattainable dream of a place w no racism
• The Midwife of American Freedom, 5.17.12: Rereading Morgan, and the connection of American slavery and American freedom; how to understand slavery as war
• White Resentment, Obama, and Appalachia, 5.23.12: Can’t bracket off discussions of race & racism from history
• Civil Warring, 6.4.12: Clip from interview w Times on the ACW; not being glib about costs of war
• Some Thoughts on Democratic Norms, 6.25.12: Riffing off a Fallows’s piece on norms, legitimacy, and anti-democratic measures; race and (dis)enfranchisement
• More on Democratic Norms, 6.27.12: Can race be bracketed off from politics in US; more Fallows
• Racism Against White People, 7.6.12: McPherson noting that some Southern whites argued they were a different race from Northern whites
• American Exceptionalism in History, 7.6.12: “Nations Stumbling Towards Democracy”—Civil War, American democracy, and democracy in the world
• Honoring the Fourth with the Confederate Flag, 7.10.12: The Confederate flag, slavery, race, & democracy
• Civic Virtue, 7.26.12: Civic virtue, Lincoln, C McDaniel’s The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery
• The Enduring Villiany of Little Napoleon, 8.6.12: The ineptitude of George McClellan
• We Are All Welfare Queens Now, 9.18.12: Lee Atwater, white supremacy, slavery, suppressing black political participation goes back to the founding of the US
• Inequality and the Marketplace of Ideas, 9.19.12: Following E Morgan, how slavery made American freedom possible; Henry “Box” Brown’s famous escape from slavery
• How to Write Like a Civil War General, 9.21.12: B Levine’s upcoming The Fall Of The House Of Dixie, and good historian’s ability to pull out a good quote
• The Long and Disreputable History of Repressing the Black Vote, 9.24.12: Current attempts to suppress black vote have long roots; JW Booth driven to assassination at thought
• Fear of a Black Avenger, 9.25.12: Precept of white supremacy is if black people get power, will immediately go after whites
• Was Nat Turner Right? 9.26.12: When does rebellion become terrorism; questions on war, tragedy, violence & its victims
• Was Nat Turner Right? 9.27.12: Questions on the role of Turner’s rebellion on the chances of emancipation, manumission, and countenancing violence & massacre
• Was Nat Turner Right? 9.28.12: Problems w sourcing Turner’s rebellion, esp. lack of sources from black people; expectations of freedom among 19th c black people
• Was Nat Turner Right? 10.1.12: Reports from various newspapers on Turner’s rebellion, & white expectations/warnings of genocide against black; the role of Virginia in the slave economy & society; slave society as a system of existential violence
• The Rage of the Privileged Class, 10.1.12: Can’t expect all black people to be MLK & disdain Turner—after all, MLK’s campaign of nonviolence met w violence
• The Hyperlinked Ballad of Jarm Logue, 10.10,12: Jarm Logue’s experience w violence of slavery made clear need to escape; leading “Jerry Rescue” in Syracuse; threat of former slaveowner’s wife to pay for himself or she’d sell his family
• A War of ‘All Against Them’: 10.10.12: Jarm Logue, Hobbes, & us ‘all’ vs them
• The Hyperlinked Ballad of Eliza Icewater, 10.16.12: excerpt from F Bordewich’s book on the escape of Eliza Icewater
• The South Rises Again, 10.19.12: on a visit to Fort Negley w/ACW historians
• The Past Ain’t Even Past, 10.19.12: vid of witness to Lincoln’s assassination
• On Family Values, 10.21.12: excerpt from Bordewich’s Bound for Canaan, letters of Harriet Newby to her husband
• Slavery Is a Love Song, 10.22.12: brief overview of Bordewich’s Bound for Canaan
• Slavery Is a Love Song, 10.31.12: on Robert Brown’s escape after his family is sold deeper south
• Slavery Is a Love Song, 11.2.12: on women escapees willingness to defend themselves against capture, and Harriet Tubman’s threats to any who’d expose them
• ’99 Problems’ but Mitt Ain’t One, 11.5.12: on astonishing changes from slavery to today
• Some Quick Thoughts on ‘Lincoln’, 11.29.12: brief review of ‘Lincoln’, TNC liked it
• Tony Kushner and the Origins of the Lost Cause, 11.29.12: on Kushner’s comments on the unwillingess to forgive the South
• Slightly Longer Thoughts on ‘Lincoln’, 11.30.12: longer review of ‘Lincoln’, great but flawed
• ‘Lincoln’ and Coming Attractions, 12.2.12: quick bit on further conversations
• Slavery Is a Love Song, 12.2.12: on Volokh Conspiracy response to editorial on Jefferson, claiming his ownership of slaves has no bearing on historical legacy; excerpt of Laura Spicer letter to sold-away husband
• The Myth of Jefferson as ‘a Man of His Times’, 12.2.12: two examples of pre-ACS voluntary manumission
• ‘Lincoln’ writer Tony Kushner Responds to Lost Cause Criticism, 12.3.12: Kushner’s full response
• Why Aren’t More Liberals Defending ‘Lincoln’? 12.3.12: discussion of film with AO Scott & Kate Masur
• ‘Lincoln’ as Radical Art, 12.4.12: AO Scott’s take on film
• Thomas Jefferson Was More Than a Man of His Times, 12.4.12: on Jefferson’s own writings on slavery; in favor of complexity—both/and not either/or
• The Appallingly Low Stand for Civil War Cinema, 12.4.12: Kate Masur’s response to AO Scott
• ‘Lincoln’ the Movie Needed More Lincoln the Man, 12.5.12: Tony Horwitz’s response to film
• Does ‘Lincoln’ Mean Hollywood Is Finally Catching Up With History? 12.6.12: TNC’s wrap-up of roundtable
• The Civil War Isn’t Tragic, 12.8.12: quote from USCT soldier Thomas Strother, from Death and the Civil War
• Thomas Jefferson and the Divinity of the Founding Fathers, 12.10.12: Jefferson’s unwillingness to follow Tadeusz Kosciuszko’s will and free his (TK’s) slaves
• Some Clarification on Thomas Jefferson, 12.11.12: complication’s on Jefferson fulfilling Kosciuszko’s will, w commentary from Annette Gordon-Reed & Henry Wiencek, & others
• The Django Wars, 12.13.12: right-wing freakout over movie
• Thomas Jefferson, Tadeusz Kosciuszko, and Slavery: Annette Gordon-Reed Responds, 12.17.12: A Gordon-Reed on TK’s will
• The Wholly Misunderstood Emancipation Proclamation, 1.2.13: Foner on the  EP, and emancipation as a process
• The Myth of Harriet Tubman, 1.3.13: Kate Larsen’s bio of HT, Bound for the Promised Land; black freedom movt not all benign
• The Hollywood America Deserves, 1.4.13: lack of good bios of Tubman, Smalls, etc., not unrelated to lack of black wealth
• Toward a More Badass History, 1.9.13: TNC uninterested in Django Unchained, vengeance (or movie collectibles)
• Martin Luther King Makes Everything Better, 1.11.13: repurposing MLK in favor of guns, b/c would have prevented slavery
• On the Radicalism of Leaving, 1.15,13: beginning Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns; leaving the South
• The American Case Against the Black Middle Class, 1.22.13: rave for Wilkerson’s TWOS
• The Language of Segregations Under Social Sanction, 2.1.13: connection of 20th c segregation to 19th c white supremacy & pro-slavery views
• A Flawed America in Context, 2.27.13: lessons on history, its largeness & complications; horror of racism amidst horrors of humanity (30 Years War)
• Humanism and Holocaust History, 4.8.13: civilization, the Holocaust, and racism
• Fine Old Cannibals, 4.8.13: clarification on Kalahari hunter-gatherers & civilization
• Why ‘Accidental Racist’ is Actually Just Racist, 4.9.13: on Brad Paisley/LL Cool J song; the South and history
• Against the Conversation on Race, 4.10.13: too much feelings, not enough history
• The Elusive ‘Good War’, 4.16.13: on Anthony Beevor’s The Second World War, violence, terror, and good/bad guys
• ‘It Seemed a Sheet of Sun’, 5.8.13: reading Beevor’s The Second World War, musing on what makes a ‘good war’
• A Rising Tide Lifts All Yachts, 6.14.13: on race- vs. class-based affirmative action; white supremacy baked into American history
• The Unromantic Slaughter of the Civil War, 6.20.13: responding to revisionist arguments in a Tony Horwitz piece on the ACW
• No, Lincoln Could Not Have ‘Bought the Slaves’, 6.20.13: rebutting arguments that compensation-for-emancipation could have worked, could have prevented ACW (re-post)
• The Guileless ‘Accidental Racism’ of Paula Deen, 6.24.13: ignorance, history, white supremacism, and Paula Deen
• Traveling Man, 7.2.13: Rousseau & slavery, social death, the Bible
• To Be Born on the Fourth of July, 7.4.13: essay by W. Caleb McDaniel, adapted from his book, on Garrison, the proslavery Constitution. Lincoln, democracy, revolution & reform in Europe
• English is a Dialect With an Army, 8.2.13: on language and power, inclusion, exclusion, and varied meanings
• Primo Levi’s Old Negro Spiritual, 8.7.13: on the resonance of the social death inherent in the Holocaust & the Middle Passage, the long relationship bet American Jews & black people
• The White Man’s Continent, 8.15.13: Eric Hobsbawm; on history, white, black, European, African, and human
• Of Baguettes and Black Families, 9.13.13: how the Af-Am family was created in slavery, and how it has developed throughout a history of white supremacy (which, btw, will out)
• Brad Paisley and the Politics of Offense and Offense-Taking, 9.20.13: on the difference between an offensive and an immoral act; the Confederate flag not merely offensive, but a symbol of an immoral society
• Obamacare and the Conscience of a Radical, 10.3.13: given that white supremacy baked into US’s founding, unsurprising that some whites would rather deny themselves than help black people
• Notes From the Blue Period, 10.6.13: fraud, violence, & the contempt for the weak in human history
• ‘Immorality’ and Obamacare, cont., 10.8.13: struggling with question of whether a win for some is better or worse than a win for all, e.g., enfranchisement of black men, but not  of women
• The Facts of a Dual Society, 10.8.13: TNC talk at Shorenstein Center, on long history of this duality
• What This Cruel War Was Over, 10.15.13: opposing Obama & govt using the the Confederate flag, a flag not just of slavery, but of treason
• The Auschwitz All Around Us, 10.15.13: on German reparations, the denial of German society, and parallels to the US
• ‘Who Are We—Humans, Jews, or Zionists?‘, 10.18.13: on the Havaara compromise bet Nazis & Zionists to send German Jews to Palestine & the messiness of state-making
• History’s Greatest Monsters, 10.18.13: on Zionism, slavery, & the belief would never be either victim or perpetrator
• ‘In a Starving, Bleeding, Captive Land’, 10.21.13: T Judt’s Postwar, putting Reconstruction into perspective
• The Selective Amnesia of Post-War Europe, 10.22.13: more on Postwar, uneven justice
• When Plunder Becomes a System of Governance, 10.25.13: Postwar, violence, and property
• On Telling President Obama to Go Back to Africa, 10.31.13: Ted Cruz’s father, Obama’s slave ancestors, black people among oldest ethnic groups in US
• ‘War and Welfare Went Hand in Hand’, 11.4.13: Postwar, reforms in Europe following the war; proposed post-Civil War reforms
• Delineating Evil, 11.10.13: Eric Hobsbawm, Judt, and making sense of relative evils of slavery, the gulag, and the Holocaust
• The Myth of Western Civilization, 12.31.13: Postwar, Snyder’s Bloodlands, the worst that can happen, history has no arc
• ‘Germans Are the Masters and Poles Are the Slaves’, 1.13.14: Bloodlands, those with the power to name (who is white, black, Jewish, etc); Nazi degradation of Poles
• Hitler on the Mississippi River, 1.16.14: Bloodlands, why does TNC talk so much about race; racism as major chord in Western history
• ‘With Complete Indifference to Life or Death‘, 1.24.14: Bloodlands, Applebaum’s Iron Curtain, seeing yourself in other victims, fighting back
• ‘To Europe—Yes, but Together With Our Dead’, 1.27.14: Bloodlands, Iron Curtain, genocide, slavery, and memory
• Other People’s Pathologies, 3.30.14: ongoing debate w J Chait; a long American history of racism, the long reach of slavery; can’t understand culture outside of history
• ‘He Hated Error More Than He Loved Truth’, 4.8.14:  notes on and links to various sources (incl Oakeshott) in thinking about white supremacy in US
• Cliven Bundy and the Tyranny All Around Us, 4.22.14: excerpt from AP series ‘Torn From The land’ about whites violently dispossessing blacks of land & property
• Cliven Bundy Wants to Tell You All About ‘the Negro’, 4.24.14: on T Glymph’s work re: white women’s roles in slavery & white supremacy and furthering destruction of black life
• Bill Clinton Was Racialized, Too, 5.8.14: notion that black people incapable of authorship, citizenship, has antebellum roots, and used to challenge those insufficiently supremacist (incl Lincoln by Douglas)
• Coming Soon: Why Reparations Makes Sense, 5.16.14: quotes from Deuteronomy, Locke, B Wyatt (freedman), forthcoming Atlantic article
• The Case for Reparations [article], June 2014: necessity of coming to grips with US moral debt to black Americans
• [Reparations] ‘So That’s Just One of my Losses’, 5.21.14: thoughts on Clyde Ross and living w/o law
• [Reparations] How to Comment on Reparations, 5.22.14: open comments on article
• [Reparations] The Case for Reparations: An Intellectual Odyssey, 5.22.14: how TNC evolved from anti- to pro-reparations position
• [Reparations] On Whose Shoulders the Research Stands, 5.23.14
• [Reparations] The Case for American History, 6.2.14: reply to Nat Review‘s Kevin Williamson’s anti-reparations article
• [Reparations] The Radical Practicality of Reparations, 6.4.14: reply to David Frum’s anti-reparations response
• [Reparations] Martin Luther King Makes the Case for Reparations, 6.12.14: vid of MLK
• [Reparations] How Racism Invented America, 6.23.14: narrated bib on sources (pt 1)
• [Reparations] Slavery Made America, 6.24.14: narrated bib on sources (pt 2)
• [Reparations] Home is Where the Hatred Is, 6.26.14: narrated bib on sources (pt 3)
• Reparations for Ferguson, 8.18.14: history of police control over black bodies
• The Case for Reparations: The TL;DR Version, 8.23.14: vid of speech to The City Club of Cleveland
• [Reparations] How to Steal Things, Exploit People, and Avoid All Responsibility, 10.5.14: narrated bib on sources (pt 4)
• The Old Jim Crow, 10.15.14: black people long criminalized for their blackness
• The Racist Housing Policies That Built Ferguson, 10.17.14: segregation, plunder, & reparations
• Charles Barkley and the Plague of ‘Unintelligent’ Blacks, 10.28.14: ‘respectability’ politics has long (failed) history to keep white violence at bay
• Barack Obama, Ferguson, and the Evidence of Things Unsaid, 11.26.14: violence as well as nonviolence works to achieve aims
• I Might Be Charlie, 1.14.15: on the need to grapple with one’s nation’s (unsavory) history
• The Foolish, Historically Illiterate, Incredible Response to Obama’s Prayer Breakfast Speech, 2.6.15: violence & Christianity have often gone together
• No Escape From History, 2.10.15: response to R Douthat on Christianity, Crusades; violence & American history
• What This Cruel War Was Over, 6.22.15: in light of killings at Charleston AME & debates over Confederate flag, a refresher on the meaning of the flag

n.b.1: TNC has a number of posts on Austen and Wharton, only some of which are included here; he does note that thinking about a “bounded society” helps him to understand slave society, but a number of the Wharton and even more, the Austen, posts are more about style or humor than anything else; still, at some point I may go back and add ’em.

n.b.2: I include the article “The Case for Reparations” (which includes references to antebellum period) and posts directly about it, but not those (largely in the fall of 2014) which are focused on 20th & 21st c experiences

Two (further) notes on this list: One, I tried to restrict it to explicit mentions of the Civil War and Reconstruction, and not to general questions of the South; it’s a fuzzy line, and some threads might be included or excluded which should not be. Two, I don’t delve into OTAN threads—even my obsessive archivalism has its limits.

*Note three: As I’m updating links after July 5, 2011, I’m reconsidering some of the choices I made earlier regarding exclusion of posts indirectly related to the ACW, specifically those regarding literature (e.g.g, George Eliot, Jane Austen) and events elsewhere in world history (e.g., Thirty Years War). Some had been included, some hadn’t, depending on how directly they were indirectly related, but I think I’m going to go with a more generous inclusion policy from this point forward. And if I ever get to it, I’ll go back over pre-July 5 posts and add indirectly-directly related posts back in.