American Civil War

Music stands out as a crucial tool that was utilized in the course of the Civil Rights Movement. Activists and musicians united to write music that reflected events of the time. African American folk, gospel, and spiritual music was highly played during this period. The music paved the way for African Americans to achieve unity and also keep their morale high.

LEGISLATIVE RESOLUTION honoring Colonel Thomas J. Kelly posthumously upon the occasion of his designation as recipient of a Liberty Medal, the highest honor bestowed upon an individual by the New York State Senate.

WHEREAS, It is incumbent upon the people of the State of New York to recognize and acknowledge those within our midst who have made significant contributions to the quality of life therein; and
WHEREAS, Members of the Armed Services from the State of New York, who have served so valiantly and honorably in wars in which this country's freedom was at stake, as well as in the preservation of peace in peacetime, deserve a special salute from this Legislative Body; and
WHEREAS, This Legislative Body is justly proud to honor Colonel Thomas J. Kelly posthumously upon the occasion of his designation as recipient of a Liberty Medal, the highest honor bestowed upon an individual by the New York State Senate; and
WHEREAS, The New York State Senate Liberty Medal was established by resolution and is awarded to individuals who have merited special commendation for exceptional, heroic, or humanitarian acts on behalf of their fellow New Yorkers.

A BYU course paper where I examine how some more isolated areas of the would-be Confederacy fared better than the South as a whole during the economic plummet that devastated the region in the aftermath of the Civil War and years of Reconstruction.

I tried to put US and associated world history into 150 pages.  I try to focus on the US history that I assume may be unknown or not taught in a big way in our schools or broadcast on TV or is being censored.  I have been adding to this book over the years that I have been researching for  my other seven or eight US history books by this title.  Those other books are divided based on who was President of the United States starting with FDR and so far I am now working on the President Ford years, but have not finished it yet.

Confederate monuments figure prominently as epicenters of social conflict. These stone and metal constructs resonate with the tensions of modern America, giving concrete definition to the ideologies that divide us. Confederate monuments alone did not generate these feelings of aggravation, but they are far from innocent. Rather than serving as neutral objects of public remembrance, Confederate monuments articulate a narration of the past that forms the basis for a normative vision of the future. The story, told through the character of a religious mythos, carries implicit sacred convictions; thus, these spires and statues are inherently theological.

In Cut in Stone, Ryan Andrew Newson contends that we cannot fully understand or disrupt these statues without attending to the convictions that give them their power. With a careful overview of the historical contexts in which most Confederate monuments were constructed, Newson demonstrates that these "memorials" were part of a revisionary project intended to resist the social changes brought on by Reconstruction while maintaining a romanticized Southern identity. Confederate monuments thus reinforce a theology concerning the nature of sacrifice and the ultimacy of whiteness. Moreover, this underlying theology serves to conceal inherited collective wounds in the present.

If Confederate monuments are theologically weighted in their allure, then it stands to reason that they must also be contested at this level―precisely as sacred symbols. Newson responds to these inherently theological objects with suggestions for action that are sensitive to the varying contexts within which monuments reside, showing that while all Confederate monuments must come under scrutiny, some monuments should remain standing, but in redefined contexts. Cut in Stone represents the first detailed theological investigation of Confederate monuments, a resource for the larger collective task of determining how to memorialize problematic pasts and how to shape public space amidst contested memory.

The progression in vernacular architecture which took place in the south following the conclusion of the Civil War varied extensively depending upon the industry in which the property holder made their living. This historic time of regrowth and reorganization in Georgia, may have only dispensed a minor impact upon the architecture of the home or a major one. Exploration of the widely divergent histories of two properties; Jarrell Plantation and the Hay House, built a decade before the start of the Civil War, circa 1850, in roughly the same location, Macon, Georgia, will consider their; construction, homeowner history, historic and current uses as well as the  evolution of the surrounding area.

Laboulaye, “le plus Américain de tous les Francais” , n’avait jamais visité les États-Unis, bien qu’il ait reçu beaucoup d’invitations officielles pour s’y rendre. En dépit de cette lacune, il était devenu à partir des années 1860s, sous le Second Empire, l’Américaniste le plus éminent de la France. Comment se fait-il donc que quelqu’un qui n’a jamais visité un pays aussi complexe et divers que les États-Unis ait pu devenir un jour son meilleur interprète en France? C’est ce paradoxe que cet essai se propose d'explorer.

“Laboulaye et les États-Unis,” Revue Française d'Histoire des Idées Politiques, 47:1 (May 2018), pp. 203-226 [in French], http://liseuse.harmattan.fr/978-2-343-14752-9
https://www.cairn.info/revue-francaise-d-histoire-des-idees-politiques.htm

When the United States emerged as a world power in the years before the Civil War, the men who presided over the nation’s triumphant territorial and economic expansion were largely southern slaveholders. As presidents, cabinet officers, and diplomats, slaveholding leaders controlled the main levers of foreign policy inside an increasingly powerful American state. This Vast Southern Empire explores the international vision and strategic operations of these southerners at the commanding heights of American politics. As Matthew Karp demonstrates, these leaders were nationalists, not separatists. The empire of their dreams was not an independent South but the entire United States, and only the election of Abraham Lincoln broke their grip on national power. Fortified by years at the helm of U.S. foreign affairs, slaveholding elites formed their own Confederacy―not only as a desperate effort to preserve their property but as a confident bid to shape the future of the Atlantic world.

Whatever Jefferson Davis’s reputation as a slave-holder and proponent of states’ rights, McPherson has done a service in resurrecting Davis’s reputation as commander-in-chief from overly critical historians, even if McPherson himself overinflates Davis by ignoring some of his arguably more severe errors, including the deficiencies in leadership Davis displayed in economic matters. Davis’s brand of centrally planned, wartime socialism grossly exacerbated the problems in feeding, clothing, and supplying the military the commander in chief faced by preventing the maintenance of a market price system, whereby desperately needed goods could be efficiently allocated to where they were most urgently needed. The learned reader expecting the same level of academic work on display in Tried by War will be disappointed by the lack of novelty, but Embattled Rebel will function well for any student looking for a polished introduction to Jefferson Davis and the problems facing the Confederacy during the war. What we can garner from McPherson’s work is that Davis was handed the reins to a Confederate military that suffered from woeful inadequacies in supplies and manpower, was handicapped by disobedient or overly tame generals, and faced with an un-navigable political situation, but still managed to hold at bay the largest, most powerful army the world had yet seen for over 4 years—no small feat, indeed.

Profiles Peter Gray Meek, the editor of Bellefonte, Pennsylvania's newspaper the Democratic Watchman during the Civil War. Meek stood out as an anti-war Democrat, or "Copperhead," in the Republican lion's den that was Bellefonte during the Civil War