You Can Only Pick One. . . .
There are two CW events in Galveston coming up this Sunday afternoon that are worth noting. Unfortunately, they’re both happening at 2 p.m. that day.
The first is the re-dedication of Galveston’s Confederate memorial statue, “Dignified Resignation” (right, in 2010) on the grounds of the former county courthouse. The original dedication was held on June 3 1912, exactly 100 years before. The monument was recently cleaned and restored to its original bronze finish, and it looks great. I’ve long liked this particular monument, partly because it has a strong maritime component to it, and partly because it’s an original piece, not the more typical (even clichéd) styles so common to courthouse squares across the country. The primary speaker will be Dr. Judy Bernard, Chairman of District V of the Texas Division of the UDC.
The other event is Don Willett’s talk, “Overview: The Battle of Galveston,” at Menard Hall, 33rd Street and Avenue O. I’ve heard Prof. Willett speak before, but not on this particular subject, and I’m curious to hear what he has to say. Additionally, since I’m going to be doing a talk in that same series in a few weeks, it will probably be a wise move for me to attend the Battle of Galveston talk to see in advance how those are structured.
Kinda wish I didn’t have to pick one or the other, though.
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Dead Confederates, A Civil War Era Blog 
And is it just me, or is there some sort of weird irony that the supplier for many of those clichéd Confederate Veteran Monuments (see the link) is the Monumental Bronze Co. of Bridgeport, Connecticut?
Not if you keep in mind that Confederates are grey, Yankees are blue, and money is green.
You can also travel to the upcoming UCV convention on a railroad named after the site of an infamous prison camp for Confederate PoWs, or wear a uniform ordered from the non-seceding state of Kentucky.
It’s all good. 😉
Seriously, I highly recommend spending some time with the Confederate Veteran magazine, linked under “Resources” in the right-hand column. It’s incredibly instructive, not so much as history per se, but as a means of seeing how real Confederates (as opposed to make-believe Confederates today) wanted to depict themselves and their history int he decades after the war.
Thanks for the tip Andy – I’m certain that if some of todays “secessionists” were to read that magazine, they would call real Confederate veterans “soft”.
That’s largely true, but then the make-believe Confederates of today (or True Southrons™ as I sometimes call them) are an awfully small group. They really are not representative of those SCV and UDC members I’ve known over the years, much less Southerners as a whole.