Canister!
Short items that don’t warrant full posts of their own.
- The New York Public Library has released a massive collection of non-copyrighted images online, in high-resolution, free for anyone to download. Included in this are many Civil War period images, including original sketches prepared for Frank Leslie’s Illustration Newspaper (above, “Capture of a Contrabandist on Lake Pontchartrain,” by Francis H. Schell).
- At least two dozen people attended Saturday’s big Confederate flag rally in Columbia, South Carolina. Can you feel the momentum?
- Speaking of Columbia, it didn’t get much attention at the time, but the criminal case against Bree Newsome, the activist who took down the Confederate flag in front of the State House last summer, was dismissed back on December 10.
- The trailer for Free State of Jones is out, and it looks exciting. It’s based on Vicki Bynum’s book, and I can’t wait to see it. Matthew McConaughey even looks like the real Newt Knight.
- Over at Defending the Heritage, the vindication of the South through Facebook memes continues apace. This week, it’s a melacholy image of Confederate soldiers, huddling for warmth around a campfire during the “last desperate days” of the war. Of course, it’s actually part of a painting by Winslow Homer of U.S. cavalrymen, with the more obvious Federal uniforms cropped out of the image. More specifically, it depicts the camp of the First Division of the Second Corps of the Army of the Potomac, in the Spring of 1862. Details, details. Full-resolution image here.
- Did the South’s rapid rise out of decades of grinding poverty in the last fifty years contribute to the high incidence of heart disease prevalent across the region today? Researchers from Ohio State think maybe it did.
- In election news, it looks like the white nationalists are going all-in for Donald Trump in Iowa.
- The six-part PBS miniseries Mercy Street, set in a military hospital in Alexandria, Virginia, starts next Sunday.
- In Savannah, archaeologists and the Corps of Engineers made the difficult decision to return 135 tons of redundant artifacts from the recovery of C.S.S. Georgia to the river, where they can be retrieved at a later date. Another 142 tons has already gone to the conservation lab at Texas A&M University; that’s more than the mass of two M1A1 Abrams tanks. It’s not an ideal solution, but given the tremendous volume of material involved, it may be the only practical solution.
- Next weekend the Virginia Flaggers will be headed to Lexington to celebrate Lee-Jackson Day. They’ve toned down their chest-thumping about their boycott of city businesses — you know, the one they don’t themselves observe — which is probably just as well, considering that city tax revenues from restaurants were up almost 16% over the previous year, coming in at a over a million dollars. You can download the full financial report here; the revenue figures are on p. 23.
Got any more? Put ’em in the comments.
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Dead Confederates, A Civil War Era Blog 
Thanks for pointing me to the movie – I didn’t know the story of the Free State of Jones, very fascinating, I’ll have to check out the book you mentioned!
Whats with the Union Jack. Did I miss something? Do these people want to secede and become part of the British Commonwealth or is this a tribute to the commerce raiders built by the Brits?
Who knows?
Did you catch the “Rednecks for Obama” flag? That’s, um, interesting.
FWIW, this rally seems to have gotten practically zero media attention.
Yeah, I caught the Obama image I can’t figure it out. It looks like it is paired with the CBF on one piece of cloth, even when I try to put myself in their mindset it still doesn’t make any sense.
It made a little stir in 2008, for obvious reasons.
I remember seeing two men holding a banner for “Rednecks for Obama” in town for the first Presidential Debate between Obama & McCain, but I don’t recall a confederate flag. There was a big write up about them in the local paper. One of them is a retired Missouri State trooper who said he is sick of Republican policies destroying the middle class. The other man only had one arm. I can’t recall much more about them.
Hello,
Just wanted to say that I really enjoy your blog. I came across it after reading Kevin and Brooks blogs. I’m no history expert at all. I actually went to school for wildlife biology, but I have found many similarities in how historians and biologists operate. Peer review is a big one. Anyway the research you do, especially on the BCS myth, is fascinating. Keep up the good work!
Thanks. You wrote:
The subject is different, but the basic principles of all academic disciplines are the same.
May I suggest another item not warranting a full post?
Mississippi governor, Phil Bryant, lauded his initiative to change the state seal in 2014 during his inaugural address, but he never mentioned the controversy surrounding the state flag.
I think I see an elephant in the room.
——————————————————–
“… Through passage of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act we have
guaranteed the people their God-given and constitutional right to
express their religious beliefs without government interference or
persecution.
We have emphasized this freedom through the redesign of our state
seal, and reaffirmed our national motto, “In God we Trust. …”
http://www.miamiherald.com/news/business/technology/article54286275.html
——————————————————–
Hello Andy,
I have been binge reading your blog for a few days now, when I came upon your post on ‘Gettysburg: Armoured Warfare” and it got me wondering, have you ever heard of the upcoming multiplayer first/third person Civil War melee/shooters Battle Cry of Freedom and War of Rights?
“I have been binge reading your blog for a few days now. . . .”
Have fun in detox. 😉
“Have you ever heard of the upcoming multiplayer first/third person Civil War melee/shooters Battle Cry of Freedom and War of Rights?”
I have seen the Kickstarter videos for “War of Rights,” and it’s very impressive-looking. There have been first-person shooters set in the CW before, but they didn’t appeal very well to me conceptually because that mode of play doesn’t fit very well with the massed infantry tactics of the period. Campfire Games seems to recognize that, and it will be interesting to see both (1) how they strike that balance, and (2) whether that plays well with gamers. That latter is probably the biggest challenge, because the first-person shooter market has some 800-pounder gorillas, including the GTA series and the new Star Wars game.
(Full disclosure — I’m not really a FPS fan myself, being more of a Total War guy.)
But man — just look at that virtual world — it’s beautiful:
Battle Cry of Freedom:
I am sure the two games will succeed (assuming the games are any good) as evidenced by that the DLC expansion to Mount and Blade: Warband, called Napoleonic Wars was quite successful. There is certainly a niche for the multiplayer historical shooter, since I don’t think there has been a major first/third person game that has really tackled it.
Napoleonic Wars as it happens are the same developers for Battle Cry of Freedom. War of Rights is certainly a looker, but thus far I prefer BCoF because it features cavalry and useable artillery (plus the ability to play fifes and drums is rather cool :P) as well as BCoF’s less strict clan system (which is important on my end).
But we shall see. It’s just good that we are getting two games set in a time period that does not feature heavily in the video game world.
“At least two dozen people attended Saturday’s big Confederate flag rally in Columbia, South Carolina. Can you feel the momentum?”
I was in Columbia to walk around the State House grounds, something I’d never really taken the time to do, and I saw this rally, and the pro-life rally on the other side of the capitol, as well as the smaller Confederate flag rally beside the soldiers’ monument. The linked picture must be either before the flag rally got going, or after it broke up, because I estimated about 100-125 people there, with a grand total of 2 counter protesters. That’s not a huge rally, but certainly larger than the linked image would lead one to believe.
Perhaps. I was going by the picture available at the time I wrote the post. Pictures posted since then do seem to show more people.
Thank you, Mr. Hall, for tipping me to the trailer for Free State of Jones — I so admire the Jenkins and Stauffer book about Newt so much (not so much the book on which the film is based — nevertheless it looks terrific).
Thanks so much for the link to the NYPL digital images and the drawings from Frank Leslie’s. Wonderful things!
Glad to see you back, don’t be a stranger!