William Stewart Simkins, the Klan and the Law School
On Friday, University of Texas at Austin President William Powers Jr. issued a statement calling on the university’s Board of Regents to change the name of Simkins Hall, a dorm for graduate and law...
View Article” . . . the complete absence of any other causes.”
Via Michael Rodgers, the South Carolina State achieves clarity on the issue — one issue, singular — behind that state’s secession, 150 years ago next Monday: The language of the S.C. Declaration is so...
View Article“The whole country, North and South, should thank Him for this step.”
A hundred fifty years (and a few days) ago, Major Robert Anderson quietly evacuated his command at Fort Moultrie, South Carolina, to Fort Sumter, an unfinished installation in Charleston Harbor. In...
View Article“Forced” to Fire the First Shot
One hundred fifty years ago, Captain George Sholter James of the South Carolina Artillery passed word to his subordinate, Lieutenant Henry Farley, to open fire on Fort Sumter, a half-mile away to the...
View ArticleThe Black Confederate Who Stole the Steamboat Planter
In my post about Robert Smalls and the “abduction” of the Confederate steamer Planter the other day, I overlooked the last two grafs of the Harper’s Weekly story which, line-for-line, may be the most...
View Article“. . . to be divided between Robert Smalls and his associates.”
“Prize money” is a concept very familiar to maritime history buffs, or those who’ve read a lot of Forester or O’Brian. The idea was simply to provide a monetary incentive to naval personnel not just...
View ArticleAye Candy: H. L. Hunley
Update: Apologies for the double-posting on this. After the first versions of these images went online over the weekend, Michael contacted me and pointed out that there was a more updated version of...
View ArticleAye Candy: David-Class Torpedo Boat
Test renders of a new work-in-progress, a Confederate David-class torpedo boat like those used at Charleston, 1863-65. (The rig that suspended the torpedo spar on the bow, in particular, is missing...
View ArticleInto Action Aboard a Monitor at Charleston
Crew members aboard U.S.S. Nahant, one of the last surviving Civil War monitors, pose on deck for a photograph during the Spanish-American War in 1898. The dents in the turret behind them were put...
View Article“I will pay more than any other person for No. 1 Negroes”
A follow-up to my post yesterday on Charleston, and what seemed to me at the time to be a purely gratuitous inclusion of Nathan Bedford Forrest in the section on slave traders. It turns out that, as a...
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