Reminder
On Sunday July 9 at 7PM I will be hosting a discussion about the movie GLORY for all paid subscribers. I plan on sharing a brief presentation about the movie and how it stacks up against the history and then will open it up for questions and discussion. This should be a lot of fun. [A zoom link will be emailed a few days in advance.]
News
I haven’t read the study referenced in this report, but I get the sense that the research team did not include a historian.
A new study outlines how white people’s migration during and after the Civil War, from the Confederate South to the West, bolstered white supremacy and institutional racism in non-slave states, helping create the vast racial disparities that exist today nationwide.
It’s as if white supremacy was invented by the Confederacy.
The first capital of the Confederacy has renamed high schools that honor Confederate leaders. Now city officials in Montgomery, Alabama want to rename streets.
Interesting story about the attempt to arrest Judah P. Benjamin, who served as the Confederacy’s secretary of state.
Two years after the Civil War’s guns went silent, the former Union General George H. Sharpe navigated London’s bone-biting cold and snowy rail lines to reach the U.S. diplomatic mission at 54 Portland Place. His orders from Washington were both secret and explosive: Capture the former secretary of state of the Confederacy, Judah Philip Benjamin, who’d found exile, and a lucrative law practice, in Victorian England.
Lawmakers in Virginia hope to rename Arlington House, The Robert E. Lee Memorial on the grounds of Arlington National Cemetery. This is not the first time that state legislators have attempted to rename Lee’s former home, but support for the bill now has increased support.
Three years after the state of Mississippi voted to change its state flag, a Republican lawmaker now wants to return to the Confederate-themed flag. Part of her justification is the claim that the original Confederate battle flag was designed by a Black Confederate soldiers. You can’t make this stuff up.
Videos
Today, the phrase “40 acres and a mule” represents the broken promises the U.S. government has made to Black American farmers, contributing to a vast racial wealth gap. CBS Reports explores the ways in which Black Americans are trying to reclaim their land, connect to their ancestry, and generate wealth that can be passed on for generations to come.
Historian Tim Smith from the Adams County Historical Society shares some of the most popular myths about the battle of Gettysburg.
A new statue of a Black Union soldiers was just unveiled in Pulaski, Tennessee—the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan.
Books
Joseph McGill Jr. Sleeping with the Ancestors: How I followed the Footprints of Slavery (Hachette Books, 2023).
Barbara Boyle Torrey and Clara Myrick Green, Between Freedom and Equality: The History of an African American Family in Washington, D.C. (Georgetown University Press, 2023).
Otis
(It’s an oldie, but is still one of my favorites.)
(KML, am I doing this right? I am on Substack new, only - so far - to subscribe to you.)
In a nice string of coincidences I was on Quora tonite, just now, and I was hit with the thought: was Judah Benjamin the only CSA bigwig to profit from the CSA experience? I.e., by escaping to London with all the Confederate treasury he could carry.
Then I stumbled across Kevin Levin's mention of General Sharpe going to London to hunt Benjamin down.
So I searched further and immediately hit this Jewish website, Tablet, with an article published just three days ago: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/history/articles/hunt-for-judah-p-benjamin-jewish-confederate-spy. Thanks, Kevin!!
(It's been this kind of a peak day. Started with my wife and myself marching in Emerita Pelosi's group in the San Francisco Pride Parade; her last career was in Nancy's office. We also met her special guest, Senate candidate Adam Schiff...and the state LtGov was thrilled to finally meet...my wife! Then just before this Benjamin find, my surfing discovered a feminist friend of ours, Mary Eastwood, had coauthored a seminal paper with Pauli Murray on gender bias in 1971, later used by RBG arguing her first Supremes case, which she won.) (Sorry if this was too too outa line.)
The report you reference in the first paragraph was done by a group of economists, I am positive you are correct about the lack of a historian among the researchers. It uses census data primarily to document movement of people across the United States primarily during the second half of the 19th and throughout the 20th century. It also uses voting pattern data to identify shifts in political attitude in geographic regions of the United States receiving large numbers of internal migrants. Their argument is that these shifts in voting patterns show a trend toward more conservative attitudes on the part of the American electorate. They are not just drawing conclusions about racial attitudes although I think the research group sees that as a significant point.
While I do think there is something to their research i think it can easily be overstated.