Canister!
Small stories that don’t warrant full posts of their own:
- Rob Baker has been doing a great job of following the flag dispute in Ringgold, Georgia.
- To commemorate the 20th anniversary of its first webpage, Microsoft has recreated it here. Ah, memories.
- I see Gary Adams is still lifting entire, first-person passages off other peoples’ blogs and posting them to look like his own writing. Yes, this is the person who describes himself as running a “Civil War Roundtable.” Perish the thought.
- A diver off Jupiter, Florida discovered that Goliath Grouper are territorial and sometimes aggressive. Reminds me of one I encountered off Key Largo a few years ago.
- A priest in Poland says that he’s been getting text messages from Satan. I’m not entirely convinced that the Dark Lord has a 4G data plan, but if he does, it’s probably T-Mobile.
- Susannah Ural’s Don’t Hurry Me Down to Hades: The Civil War In The Words of Those Who Lived It is available for $1.99 on Kindle. Better jump on this one, because it may not last.
- If you ever want or need a digital map of the Roman Empire, here you go.
- Remember: the best defense against the Common Core standards is homeschooling.
- Blogger Championhilz tells a great story about the time the commander of a U.S. tinclad gunboat decided to go ashore in Mississippi for Sunday services.
- Brooks Simpson is running a poll on the location of the next big-ass flag in Virginia.
- The U.S. Fifth Circuit ruled that Texas can’t selectively prohibit the sale SCV specialty license plates. No real surprise there.
- Researchers believe they may have identified “Patient Zero,” the source of the devastating Ebola outbreak in West Africa.
- I put up the video above, of David Kloke’s reproduction locomotives Leviathan and York, because trains.
Got anything else? Put it in the comments below.
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Marching with H. K.
It’s the standard Edgerton performance, ending with his dramatic interpretation of “I Am Their Flag.” I hadn’t realized until today that Edgerton has added his own lines to the poem, including references to the Confederate Battle Flag being “the Christian Cross of Saint Andrew, the first Apostle of Jesus Christ.” That characterization would certainly be a revelation to the South Carolina secessionist who designed that flag in the first place, and those lines don’t appear in the original poem. They seem to be Edgerton’s own personal, Christianist embellishment, like Hathaway’s “there is no denying God’s hand in this…” assertion last year about a story that defied credibility on its face. Beware of false prophets, y’all.
But anyway. Edgerton apparently makes a good living assuring his patrons that slavery wasn’t so bad, that the violence against African Americans attributed to the Klan during Reconstruction was a Yankee false-flag operation, and that Jim Crow laws were a burden imposed on white southerners by the Supreme Court.
Entertainment for white people, as Kevin says. I’m pretty sure the white nationalists from the League of the South in Oxford yesterday got some laughs out of Edgerton’s show.
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“The passengers got the full benefit of the sparks, cinders and smoke”
On another forum we’ve been discussing the logistical challenges faced by the South during the war relating to railroads. My colleague David Bright argued — correctly, I think — that the fundamental problem was not just in the relatively limited amount of rail transport extant in the Confederacy at the beginning, but in the inability to expand or even properly maintain what they had at the start:
In my opinion, more serious were: insufficient rolling stock, lack of manpower in the CSA such that the railroads (and their supporting infrastructure — mines, foundries, etc) could not get the manpower they needed, and the inability to replace anything that was lost (rails, rolling stock, depots, etc).
Dave’s observation reminded me of a passage in a history of Houston by S. O. Young (1848-1926), who was a teenager during the war and who later wrote extensively on local history:
There were many difficulties to be overcome in the way of transportation and equally as great ones in obtaining money or credit to pay for construction. Just as the Harrisburg road got under good headway; the Houston and Texas Central got into the game. The first shovel of dirt for this road was thrown by that great railroad genius, Paul Bremond, in 1853. When he threw up that dirt he turned up more trouble for himself than generally falls to the lot of one man. Of course, he did not know this, but I am convinced that had he done so it would have made not the slightest change in his plans. His faith in himself and his confidence in his ability to accomplish whatever he started out to do, was something sublime. When it came to energy he had any engine on his road faded to a standstill. He was a wonderful man, and he did not hesitate, at times, to attempt the apparently impossible. When his first contractor got cold feet and threw up his job, Mr. Bremond promptly undertook to carry out the contract to build the road himself. There is where his troubles began.
Friday Night Concert: “Farragut’s Ball” with Dan Milner
In expectation of Tuesday’s sesquicentennial of the Battle of Mobile Bay. Have a good weekend, everyone.
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Eighth Arkansas Infantry Battle Flag
My colleague Rob Baker has been doing a good job in covering the dispute over the which Confederate flag to display at the historic depot in Ringgold, Georgia. For years, the city has flown a Hardee Flag, similar in design to those used by Pat Cleburne’s troops that fought around the depot in the Battle of Ringgold Gap in November 1863. The local Sons of Confederate Veterans camp is the plaintiff in a long-running legal battle to have the more familiar Confederate Battle Flag displayed, in reference to Confederate soldiers from that area generally who served in all theaters of the war.
As it happens, on Saturday I came face-to-face with the battle flag of the Eighth Arkansas Infantry at the Texas Civil War Museum in Fort Worth, which fought at Ringgold Gap as part of Cleburne’s force. I think this flag was probably present at the fight, as it was replaced with this color of the 1864 pattern, carrying a battle honor for Ringgold Gap. It was said that the Hardee pattern had “no artistic taste about it, but which could not be mistaken” for a U.S. flag, which was a serious problem with using the Confederacy’s First National flag on the battlefield.
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Remembering the First Battle of Adobe Walls
Adobe Walls
Saturday Oct 4
11:00 AM – 4:00 PM
EVENT DATE: OCTOBER 4, 2014
- Buses leave Amarillo Civic Center at 11am and Borger Phillips Building at 1pm for the Adobe Walls Battle Site.
- $50 per person (membership discounts do not apply)
- Reservations must be made in advance no later than August 15th by contacting Amy Mitchell at PPHM at 806-651-2242 or email amitchell-at-pphm.wtamu.edu.
Join the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum and Hutchinson County Historical Museum as we celebrate the sesquicentennial of the First Battle of Adobe Walls with an event on OCTOBER 4, 2014. This historically significant battle occurred on November 25th, 1864 and was the only Civil War battle fought in the Texas Panhandle. The battle site is located in present-day Hutchinson County on the Turkey Track Ranch.
The commemorative event will take place at the 1864 Adobe Walls Battle Site. Guests will be transported from the Amarillo Civic Center (at 11am) and the Borger Phillips Building (at 1pm) by bus. Participants will enjoy speeches from both sides of the battle including appearances by Kit Carson’s great-grandson and Kiowa and Comanche tribe members. Guest speakers include: Alvin Lynn, author of Kit Carson and the First Battle of Adobe Walls: A Tale of Two Journeys, Francie Whittenburg of the Turkey Track Ranch; Brett Cruse of the Texas Historical Commission; John Carson, great-grandson of Kit Carson; and James Coverdale, great-great nephew of Kiowa chief Dohasan.
No private guest vehicles will be allowed on-site and the reservation is non-refundable. Media will need to provide credentials at the gate for admission. An alternate location will be chosen in case of inclement weather.
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Uncle Billy’s Got His Eyes on You. . . .
Remarkably, not everyone seems happy about this public art installation. Imagine that.
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Richmond as Viewed from Church Hill, 1865
Tinkering around with a new zoomable image viewer tool. Built up from four separate images from the Library of Congress:
This should work well for maps, too.
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Friday Night Concert: Weird Al Yankovic’s “Word Crimes”
This may even better than the bluegrass barn dance cover by Postmodern Jukebox. Enjoy.
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Deep Sea Detectives: The Mystery of U-166
Given recent news items about the exploration of U-166 and her last victim, the passenger liner Robert E. Lee, folks might be interested in this old Deep Sea Detectives episode about the discovery and original study of those vessels:
U-166 was discovered in 2001 by two archaeologists from C&C Technologies, Rob Church and Dan Warren, going over data collected for a pipeline survey. I think it was Dan who first suggested the blurry shape might be U-166, which had never been found but was supposedly sunk many miles away. The boat’s hull is broken forward of the deck gun, and the two sections are some distance apart on the sea floor.
Once it had been determined that the wreck was indeed U-166, there was a lot of additional research done both in the U.S. and in Germany. Captain Kuhlmann’s widow was still living, and she had a trunk of his that had been sent to her after his loss that she had left intact. In it were photographs and film footage (below) of the boat during its working-up trials in the Baltic and passage to its forward operating base at L’Orient.
Digital reconstruction of U-171, another Type IXC U-boat that figures in this story, on Flickr here.
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Dead Confederates, A Civil War Era Blog 
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