I find Reconstruction a very difficult subject to read, mainly because of all the missed opportunities and broken promises involved, but if you’re going to be depressed, you might as well be depressed with Henry Louis Gates’s shoulder to lean on, and PBS’s stellar production values to make everything prettier. PBS starts a multi-part series on Reconstruction tonight!

https://www.pbs.org/weta/reconstruction/

This article is supposed to be about a Civil War era black woman doctor, but it is disappointingly light on details for her. There is this statement, though: “The Civil War, says James Downs, a professor of history at Connecticut College, “was the largest biological catastrophe of the 19th century. More soldiers died from disease than from battle or even battlefield wounds.” An interesting reframing of the discussion, which always looked at the war deaths as military, rather than medical byproducts!

It was an almost unimaginable public health crisis, and in 1865, Dr. Crumpler — one of the few Black women employed by Freedmen’s Bureau — rushed headlong into the breach, leaving Boston for Richmond to minister to the medical needs of as many of the freed slaves as she could. In addition to her desire to help a population of more than 30,000 people, she knew her extensive field experience in Virginia would provide her “ample opportunities to become acquainted with the diseases of women and children.” Accor

Source: The Trailblazing Black Female Doctor That American History Forgot | Flashback | OZY

The Miami Community Newspapers’ anecdote about Lincoln’s pardoning of a Jewish deserter is pretty basic, but it does open up the topic of Jews in the Civil War. Apart from some Jewish Confederate soldiers pardoned from the front lines during Yom Kippur, and Grant’s bizarre order expelling Jews from his camp, I don’t know much about this topic. There is a helpful citation from a book that promises more information, though: Jewish Participation in the Civil War.

A street in Jerusalem is named after America’s 16th president, Abraham Lincoln. The honor is well-deserved “as Jews throughout the world see Lincoln as a hero of unsurpassed stature and distinction.” Although he was not a deeply religious man, Lincoln read the Old Testament Scriptures and continually expressed how God “showered his blessing upon the Israelites in times if peril.”

Source: Historically yours : Lincoln, Simon Wolf and the Jewish Deserter – Miami’s Community News

Modern technology is being applied to old time records. I admit, I am a bit cynical in suspecting that this kind of tech is just being trialed on Civil War photos, with the ultimate use intended for privacy invasion on the level of Google and Facebook, but it is no doubt going to make genealogists very happy!

According to Luther, the key to the site’s post-launch success has been the ability to build a strong user community. More than 600 users contributed more than 2,000 Civil War photos to the website in the first month after the launch, and roughly half of those photos were unidentified. Over 100 of these unknown photos were linked to specific soldiers, and an expert analysis found that over 85 percent of these proposed identifications were probably or definitely correct. Presently, the database has grown to over 4,000 registered users and more than 8,000 photos.

“Typically, crowdsourced research such as this is challenging for novices if users don’t have specific knowledge of the subject area,” said Luther. “The step-by-step process of tagging visual clues and applying search filters linked to military service records makes this detective work more accessible, even for those that may not have a deeper knowledge of Civil War military history.”

Source: Facial recognition software to identify Civil War soldiers — ScienceDaily

I feel like Ben Butler is a general whose star has dimmed a lot in recent thinking of the war, so it’s nice to see this newspaper article singing his praises. He may not have been the best military general on any given field, but he was one of the wiliest lawyers in uniform. Here’s one of several examples of his sneaky forward-thinking, applied liberally wherever he was stationed!

Butler took his troops to Annapolis by sea and commandeered the Naval Aca­demy as his base. When the governor called a special session of the legislature to consider secession, Butler declared that if they voted to secede, he would arrest ev­ery member. He then seized the great seal of the state, without which no legislation could become law.

He marched 1,000 troops to Baltimore, seized the city and declared martial law. He was able to open the rail line to Washington.

http://homenewshere.com/wilmington_town_crier/news/article_34a7cd58-3880-11e9-bc70-f36db63eafbe.html

The Atlanta Cyclorama is reopening to the public after a lengthy closure for restoration. I’m curious to know if the revisionist nonsense painted over the original has been removed, or if the edits were restored along with the rest of the painting. Either way, I plan to see it next time I’m near Atlanta. I was pleasantly surprised by how engaging and engrossing the Gettysburg Cyclorama was.

The “Battle of Atlanta” painting was created by artists in Minnesota in 1886 as a dramatic tribute to Union Gen. William Sherman’s key victory in seizing and destroying Georgia’s capital. Among its dramatic licenses was including a soaring eagle – “Old Abe,” a mascot of a Wisconsin Union regiment that did not fight in the battle and would not have let the bird fly if it had, Jones says.

The painting toured several states in temporary displays before ending up in Atlanta, where it was altered to suit pro-Confederacy tastes. One famous change – later reversed — was repainting Confederate prisoners of war to transform them into fleeing Yankee troops. After the city constructed a permanent building in Grant Park to house the painting in 1921, it became a local icon of Lost Cause myths.

Only 17 Cyclorama paintings survive worldwide, museum officials say, and “The Battle of Atlanta” might have joined the others in rotting away if it were not for two African American mayors. Maynard Jackson, the city’s first black mayor, ordered a restoration that was completed in 1982, saying it was important to save a tribute to a key battle in a war that helped to free his ancestors. In 2011, Mayor Kasim Reed gathered a group to find a new and safe home for the painting as talk began of selling its Grant Park building.

Source: ‘Battle of Atlanta’ Cyclorama painting returns to view with ‘big picture’ on Civil War – Reporter Newspapers

Lincoln history, Harold Holzer, spoke last month on Lincoln’s contentious relationship with the Northern press.

Holzer said that during his research for “Lincoln and the Power of the Press,” he found 200 incidences in which newspapers and their editors were blocked.

Some cases included banning newspaper from the U.S. mail, arresting and imprisoning anti-war editors, seizing and destroying press equipment, and suspending publications.

“The truth is, the kickback, the pushback against the press was much more widespread than I think we had any idea of,” Holzer said.

Source: Lecturer speaks about Abraham Lincoln, media suppression during the Civil War

International involvement in the war – both direct and indirect – is a source of fascination to me. Here’s an interview with the author of a new book about Lincoln’s surprising skill at navigating the troubled waters of transatlantic affairs.

…That’s the argument Kevin Peraino makes in Lincoln in the World: The Making of a Statesmen and the Dawn of American Power. Peraino notes that Lincoln, who didn’t really travel or speak foreign languages, had an innate feel for the world…

I spoke with Peraino about why he thinks Lincoln’s foreign policy was so successful, what Lincoln can teach those sitting in the Oval Office now and in the future, and why — starting this Presidents Day — you should really start thinking about Lincoln as a global statesman.

Source: Presidents Day: Abraham Lincoln’s foreign policy helped win Civil War – Vox

A little Civil War levity for you! Unlike all the Confederate monuments making people hot-under-the-collar, there’s a shirtless Abraham Lincoln statue in LA that is just making people hot!

All the “Gettysburg Undress” and “honest abs” jokes the internet can handle are rolling in. And yes, there’s already been fan fiction about the statue circulating that interested parties can Google because the statue has gotten viral attention before.

Source: Hot Abraham Lincoln Statue Has People Swooning | Time