Dead Confederates, A Civil War Era Blog

Items that don’t warrant posts on their own, but are worth mentioning.

• The Galveston Historical Foundation will host another Battle of Galveston weekend on January 13-15, 2012. The program includes lectures, tours and a reenactment of the battle on the Strand. Looks to be a full weekend with lots to do. Thoughts on the 2011 event here.
• The other day, a person (or persons) unknown affixed homemade plaques honoring Barbara Johns, Mildred and Richard Loving, and a leader of a slave insurrection named Gabriel to several Confederate monuments around Richmond. The act prompted the predictable huffing and puffing about “vandalism” and “defacement,” but lost in the self-righteous posturing is the fact that whoever did this went to considerable trouble to clamp the plaques onto the fences around the monuments in a way that avoided damaging them (below). Regardless of what one thinks of the activist’s message, that’s something that ought to be acknowledged. (h/t Kevin)
  
  
• As expected, the Texas SCV is suing to overturn the state’s rejection of a special license plate honoring Confederate soldiers promoting the SCV. The constitutional basis for their legal argument is built, in part, on one of the “Reconstruction Amendments” passed immediately after the Civil War, specifically the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment. Irony is alive and well.
• Over at Past in the Present, Michael Lynch has a funny take-down of The History Channel, and its line-up, which includes a new spin-off called Cajun Pawn Stars. (No, really.) Or as the channel’s general manager calls it, “vérité documentaries on people doing history today.” Asshats.
• Finally, posts may be less frequent here over the next few months, as I recently signed a contract for a book on local maritime history. This particular story has been a research interest of mine for many years, and I’ll be glad to see it come to a tangible result. But to make that happen, I’m under a deadline. Tick-tock, tick-tock.

Anything else? Put it in the comments.

_____________
Image: Top: Glass-plate image of Confederate reenactors at Battle of Galveston weekend, 2011, via Galveston Historical Foundation. Middle: Clamps used to affix homemade plaques to the fence around Confederate monuments in Richmond, via http://www.wtvr.com.