Showing results for "dwight hughes"
Under Fire — Feeling Something Warm: A Gunner on USS Congress in the Battle of Hampton Roads
The fearsome Rebel ironclad CSS Virginia (ex USS Merrimack, aka Merrimac) materialized in Hampton Roads, Virginia, that calm and clear Saturday morning, March 8, 1862. “The ‘Merrimac’ was steaming slowly towards us,” recalled Seaman Frederick H. Curtis of the wooden sailing frigate USS Congress, “and every eye on the vessel was on her. Not a […]
Read more...The Paradox of the Lost Cause: Part II
Emerging Civil War welcomes back guest contributor Adam Burke…[see Part I here] Slavery’s effects on Southern industry and manufacturing devastated the Confederacy’s military manpower capacity. The antebellum North enjoyed dramatic economic and population expansion. From 1840 to 1850, population growth in Northern free states was twenty percent larger than in southern slave states.[1] Immigration accounts […]
Read more...The Paradox of the Lost Cause: Part I
Emerging Civil War is pleased to welcome guest contributor Adam Burke… Tucked into the nook of a large brick building in historic Harpers Ferry is a conspicuous granite monolith. It stands along Potomac Street, a lesser traveled street one block north of High Street, the main thoroughfare of the town. However, travelers who want to […]
Read more...Unlike Anything that Ever Floated
Unlike Anything that Ever Floated: The Monitor and Virginia and the Battle of Hampton Roads, March 8 – 9, 1862 by Dwight Sturtevant Hughes Savas Beatie, 2021 192 pp.; 150 images; 10 maps ISBN: 978-1-61121-525-0 Click here to order * * * About the Book: “Ironclad against ironclad, we maneuvered […]
Read more...What We’ve Learned: “A Lot of History Every Month”
What have we learned since the 150th Anniversary of the Civil War? As it happens, those years correspond with my tenure as a contributing author to the Emerging Civil War blog starting in December 2014. Looking back over the posts, I have learned a lot of history along with the joys and challenges of composing […]
Read more...Ending The War: The Darkest Day
“The darkest day of my life,” wrote Lieutenant William Whittle in his journal entry for August 2, 1865. “The past is gone for naught—the future is dark as the blackest night. Oh! God protect and comfort us I pray.” The Confederate commerce raider CSS Shenandoah was booming along eight hundred miles west of Northern California, […]
Read more...Primary Sources: Through a Telescope Backwards
Perhaps no experience is more fulfilling for a historian than becoming immersed in contemporary first-person chronicles, viewing dramatic happenings through the eyes of those who lived them. Thankfully, our Civil War ancestors were avid and literate recorders of that fascinating era. We are blessed with an embarrassment of riches in diaries, letters, newspapers, memoirs, articles, […]
Read more...From the ECW Archives: Queen of Delphine, Part II
(Continuing the story from Part I of Lillias Nichols as prisoner of war and her captors aboard the CSS Shenandoah.) New Year’s Day 1865 continued clear and balmy. All sails were set with just enough breeze to fill them, the first really fine weather they had experienced since entering the Indian Ocean. Mrs. Nichols’s canaries […]
Read more...From the ECW Archives: Queen of the Delphine, Part I
A warship at sea was an exclusively male domain and sailors were a superstitious lot. Having a woman on board was unlucky as well as a confounded nuisance. In December 1864, one New England lady found herself a prisoner of war in the Indian Ocean—about as far from familiar battlefields as it is possible to be. […]
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