Maine at War: October 2020
Here’s what our friend Brian Swartz was up to in October at his blog, Maine at War: October 7, 2020: D-Day on the Rappahannock Fifth Maine Infantry soldiers haul their own landing craft to the Rappahannock River shore before participating in the first planned cross-river amphibious assault in American history.
Read more...Echoes of the Reconstruction Era: The Political Violence of 1868
ECW welcomes back Patrick Young, author of The Reconstruction Era blog Over the last month I have been researching political violence during the lead-up to the Election of 1868. This is remembered today as the year that Ulysses S. Grant was elected president, but it was also the year of the first United States election […]
Read more...The Bluffs at Columbus, Kentucky
Emerging Civil War welcomes guest author Katy Berman The Columbus-Belmont State Park, located in western Kentucky, commemorates the Battle of Belmont, which was fought in Missouri. The great guns of Columbus were used to advantage during the fight, but Union and Confederate troops bloodied and alternately routed each other on Missouri’s shores. Today, Columbus contains […]
Read more...Thank You for Your Role in “The Great Task”
If you voted in this year’s election, I’d like to say “Thank you.” It doesn’t matter who you voted for—what matters is that you voted. It looks like participation is going to end up north of 65%, a modern record (and, by sheer volume, the largest raw number of voters ever, I think). The Founders […]
Read more...Hancock’s Response To The 1880 Election Results
As I’m writing this on the evening to November 4 to be published in the morning of the 5th, the modern presidential election remains undecided. I’ve spent the day keeping an eye on projections and results until my head was ready to burst. Fortunately, work required me to take a drive, a little hike, and […]
Read more...Exploring the Franklin Battlefield
I had the good fortune back in September to visit the Franklin Civil War Roundtable in Tennessee. (As I mentioned in an earlier post, they tossed a great question my way during the Q&A that gave me something fun to think about.) My host for the trip was the roundtable’s founder and president, Greg Wade, […]
Read more...“Praise the Lord and Admiral Porter”: Running the Vicksburg Batteries
“We still live,” wrote Lieutenant Elias Smith of the USS Lafayette. “The whole gunboat fleet passed the Vicksburg batteries on Thursday night [April 16, 1863], without receiving material damage. All praise to the Lord and Admiral Porter.” As far as he knew, no Union lives had been lost; about a dozen were wounded, two seriously […]
Read more...“This Momentous Day”: Presidential Elections & Process in 19th Century New York City
These last few weeks I’ve been reading George Templeton Strong’s diaries. The New York lawyer recorded a variety of topics in his extensive volumes; election days and politics often made the pages. Instead of getting into the details of each election, here’s a focused look at a little history of voter turn-out and reporting election […]
Read more...The 1858 New Orleans Mayoral Election
This article was co-written with Michael Kraemer, a PhD student at The Ohio State University In 1803, the United States bought the Louisiana Territory from Napoléon Bonaparte. It contained many independent Native American nations, as well as New Orleans, which controlled the export of goods from the Mississippi River. Throughout the next several decades, Protestant […]
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