Canister!
Small stories that don’t merit full-length blog posts of their own:
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Via Michael Lynch at Past in the Present, Glenn Beck’s favorite historian, David Barton (right), is upset that the Spielberg’s vision of the 16th president is a bit of a potty-mouth. What a dumbfuck.
- Speaking of that film, you’re probably sick of reading academic historians’ nit-picky critiques of it. (I know Keith Harris sure is.) But if you can stand to read just one more, make it Jared Frederick’s review. And if you want a copy of the final shooting script, you can download it here (PDF).
- If you’re ever on Jeopardy! and the $1,000 answer is, “this author can work Marx, Engels, Hitler, Lincoln and states’ rights into a single sentence,” the correct response is, “who is Donnie Kennedy?“
- The pissing match over display of Confederate flags at the Haywood County, North Carolina courthouse continues. There’s not a thing about this story that’s novel, except that the heritage crowd figured out a clever (if petty) legalistic solution to the ban on anything other than official government flags, by putting up a Mississippi state flag, that contains the Confederate Battle Flag as part of its design. Also, the North Dakota state flag is patterned after a 19th century U.S. Army regimental color. Just throwin’ that out there.
- The public school district in Hays County, Texas, voted this week to bar the Confederate flag from its campuses, extending a ban that had been in place since 2001 at Jack C. Hays High School. The high school’s teams will, for now, continue to be known as the Rebels, the school mascot will remain “Colonel Jack,” and the school fight song will still be “Dixie.” As with the flag dispute in Haywood County, there’s not much unusual to this story, either, except to note that the namesake of both the county and the high school, John Coffee “Jack” Hays (1817-83), was a famous Texas Ranger who sat out the Civil War quietly in California. The school’s Confederate imagery, like that of Dixie State College off Utah, is mostly an artificial construct.
- The Virginia Flaggers took a road trip to Sharpsburg recently to volunteer in placing luninarias in remembrance of those killed there in September 1862. They made a point to attend the memorial service with their big flags, unlike the other 1,400 or so volunteers, because otherwise someone might not have noticed that they were, you know, Virginia Flaggers.
- The world’s oldest person has died. Again. Have you ever noticed that they always seem to cark within a few months of claiming the title? This cannot possibly be a coincidence.
- Over at To the Sound of the Guns, Craig Swain flags a story from Ohio where the Sons of Union Veterans is fighting the proposed sale of two 3-inch Ordnance Rifles from the Civil War, that have been part of a memorial since 1927.
- Congratulations to Mads Madsen, who’s been posting his colorizations of CW images to Civil War Talk for a while now, and is finally getting some well-deserved public recognition. A lot of efforts at colorizing images yield genuinely garish results, but Madsen’s work is notable for its restraint and realism.
- As South Carolina’s governor names U.S. Representative Tim Scott to succeed Jim DeMint in the Senate, Cotton Boll Conspiracy gives us a look back to the last time a Southern state sent an African American to the upper house of Congress, back in the seventies — the eighteen-seventies.
- The Civil War Trust recently unveiled a page on Civil War Navies. Good on them; this is the sort of thing you don’t realize was sorely missing until you actually see it.
- This coming April, the SCV will raise the “World’s Biggest Third National” Confederate flag in Tampa. The event will be sponsored by the Jubal A Early Camp No. 556, even though the owner of the flag site, Marion Lambert, is a member of the new Judah P. Benjamin Camp, which sort of seceded from the Early Camp, and, well, it’s complicated.
- The lead story in Friday morning’s online edition of the Houston Chronicle was one announcing the end of the world. Brilliant, but also a tacit acknowledgement that it’s really The Onion’s world, and we just live in it.
Got any others? Put ’em in the comments below.
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Dead Confederates, A Civil War Era Blog 
Being named the oldest-person in the world appears to be, literally, the kiss of death. As you noted, whoever receives the title is dead a short time later. If it were me, I would simply refuse the award, thereby ensuring many more decades of life.
Someone really ought to investigate this macabre phenomenon.
The movie could have been just as good without the profanity. But as I’ve said, what I like most about the film is that it portrayed Lincoln in some very human moments, like slapping his son and arguing with his wife. Of course, this doesn’t mean I enjoy seeing domestic strife but Abraham Lincoln deserves to be a regular guy, too.
Knowing that Lincoln couldn’t resist telling bawdy, colorful jokes, I would not be surprised at all to know he used words like shit and fuck. But I understand it’s hard to see historic figures we’ve put on pedestals engaging in lewd behavior.
Like David Barton, I’m also an evangelical Chrsitian. I believe that Lincoln was also affected by Christ in his lifetime. So was Private John Gleichmann, who served in Company A of the 136th Indiana Infantry. On May 29, 1864, he lamented that “the godlessnes is great, cursing and whoring cries to heaven. Men from our company, yes even married ones, have gone to whore houses and paid 5 and 6 dollars a night… The Christian is tested here.”
And Corporal James G. Crawford of the 80th Illinois wrote to his parents in 1864 of the desperate need for “good Books or useful papers” or else his fellow soldiers “will be supplied with this worthless yellow backed ‘Literature’ so plentiful in every camp.”
When I was in college, I went to hear David Barton speak on campus. I have also met other people from his organization, Wallbuilders. Like them, I am very encouraged when I read stories of personal faith from 150 or 200 years ago. Unfortunately, they haven’t provided me a satisfactory answer yet on how people of such Godliness could have tolerated enslaving Africans and destroying their lives and families or wiping out Native Americans and taking their land.
Bummer felt that Andy and Brook’s battle with the loons, should not be of little note, but bear honorable mention. Sure was an eye-opener to the new blogger and definitely caused the “old guy” to reexamine his mind set on many levels of society.
Bummer
What’s wrong with Abraham Lincoln Vampire Slayer?
I thought the concept was historically accurate even if the story line was a little vapid.
Why is it we always refer to the Oldest Living person and never the oldest DEAD GUY?
I see the (so called) Largest Confederate Flag flying almost every day at the intersections of Highways I-75 and I-4 in Florida.
Sometimes I’m proud of my Southern Michigan heritage and other times I’m ashamed of what the southern states did to their fellow man for the sake of a few extra dollars. The more I think about it the more it makes me sick. The Constitution of the United States never gaves states the right to commit crimes against humanity.
For Shame. Strike your colors, ya loosers.