1-Year Anniversary Grape & Canister

1-Year Anniversary Special Offer

To celebrate my 1-year anniversary this week on Substack I am offering a special discount for those of you interested in upgrading to a paid subscription. A paid subscription will give you access to all of this site’s content and it will go far in making it possible for me to continue delivering the kind of content you have come to expect.

In addition to the other benefits, paid subscribers will be able to take part in our upcoming book group meeting on March 26 at 7pm. We will be discussing Clint Smith’s recent book, How the Word is Passed. Paid subscribers will receive a zoom link to the meeting a few days in advance. You can decide if you would like to attend.

I am also going to introduce a new feature called Office Hours for paid subscribers, which will give you a chance to ask questions and meet fellow subscribers. I may even put together a brief presentation for discussion to get things going. Let me know what you think of this idea.

In the News

The Navy has announced that the guided missile ship USS Chancellorsville will be renamed to honor Robert Smalls. The ship was named to honor one of Robert E. Lee’s most impressive victories during the Civil War. Robert Small is certainly worthy of this honor, but I am also reminded of the men who gave their lives defending the United States in this battle. Perhaps the ship could have been re-honored in recognition of their sacrifice.

I am really looking forward to this new biography of Phillis Wheatley by David Waldstreicher. From the review:

As for his own book, he said he hopes it helps restore Black Americans to their complicated place at the heart of the founding, while countering reductive claims that the Revolution was either a noble freedom struggle or hypocrisy all the way down.

More, please.

University of Pennsylvania law professor Kermit Roosevelt III believes that the passage of the first Reconstruction Act on March 2, 1867 should be acknowledged as America’s true founding. I don’t know if I agree with this, but it is certainly worth reading.

Milledgeville, Georgia is considering removing its Confederate monument. The city’s Civil War history runs deep.

Boston’s “Embrace”

I finally had a chance to see the latest addition to Boston’s monument landscape. This new piece of public art celebrates Martin Luther King, Jr. and his wife Coretta Scott King, who met as students in Boston in the 1950s. The Embrace is based on a photograph of the two hugging after after it was announced that King had won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.

I was not disappointed despite the many negative reviews that I’ve read over the past few weeks.

New to the Civil War Memory Library

Devery S. Anderson, A Slow, Calculated Lynching: The Story of Clyde Kennard (The University Press of Mississippi, 2023).

Christopher A. Graham, Faith, Race, and the Lost Cause: Confessions of a Southern Church (University Press of Virginia, 2023).

Videos

Here is James Cobb discussing his new book about the great historian C. Vann Woodward.