Showing results for "tombstone"
Saving History Saturday: One Community’s Effort to Honor a USCT Hero
Tucked away in the historic village of Sandwich, Massachusetts, is a worn-down headstone. This is no ordinary gravesite, though. In fact, it is the resting place of a Civil War hero – Sandwich’s only known African American Union soldier. While enslaved in Louisiana, Pvt. Joseph Wilson joined the 1st Louisiana Native Guard (US) in September […]
Read more...A Conversation with CVBT’s New Executive Director (part two)
(part two of four) I’m chatting this week with my good friend, Terry Rensel, who’s been hired as the new executive director of the Central Virginia Battlefields Trust (CVBT). CVBT, one of the country’s premier regional preservation organizations, focuses on battlefields around Fredericksburg, Virginia. Chris Mackowski: Just the other day, I had a conversation with […]
Read more...Fort Monroe: History & Personal Reflections
Emerging Civil War welcomes guest author Michael Nelson. The Fort’s Story I spent nearly two years working at Fort Monroe National Monument as a communications assistant in the Casemate Museum. The museum covers over 400 years of history at Fort Monroe, too much for anyone to know in full. Still, I had to know a […]
Read more...Where Valor Proudly Sleeps (part one)
(part one of two) We’ve spent a lot of time and attention on Turning Points of the Civil War lately. Our first book in the Engaging the Civil War Series, published in cooperation with Southern Illinois University Press, tied into this year’s Symposium, so it’s been turning points, turning points, turning points. But there’s a […]
Read more...Remembering Sergeant Carney
One hundred and eighteen years ago today—May 23, 1900—William H. Carney received the Medal of Honor for actions in July 1863 during the Civil War. President William McKinley, who issued the Medal in the name of Congress (hence the oft-used misnomer “Congressional Medal of Honor”) was himself a Civil War veteran, having enlisted in the […]
Read more...The 114th PA at Chancellorsville, Overlooked in Plain Sight
The Chancellorsville monument to the 114th Pennsylvania Infantry is arguably the battlefield’s most visible monument—and, ironically, the least accessible. The granite tablet sits next to the eastbound lane of Route Three, facing the forest rather than the road, maintaining both a high profile and public anonymity. I’ve had to bushwhack here from the open ground […]
Read more...General Grant Loses a Resourceful Subordinate, Mentor, Role Model, and Friend
“During the war father was saddened often over the death of many who had been associates either at West Point or in the army,” Frederick Dent Grant wrote in 1899, “but I think his greatest grief, and perhaps his greatest disappoint [sic], were occasioned by the accidental death of General Smith.” On the night of […]
Read more...Battlefield Markers & Monuments: Johnson Island & McPherson’s Grave
Emerging Civil War welcomes back Frank Jastrzembski to share about a recent trip and his musings on historical graveyard markers. My wife reluctantly agreed to go on another of my weekend cemetery hunts. Only a few weeks before, we had taken another couple to visit Brevet Brigadier-General Orland Smith’s grave in Green Lawn Cemetery after […]
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