Tag Archives: Books

Newspaper Dynasty

Posted on by
Reply

I opened this article thinking it would be about Chicago newspaper tycoon and erstwhile Lincoln advisor, Joseph Medill, and it is, in a way: Turns out that Medill and his grandchildren were responsible for three of America’s best-known dailies: The Chicago Tribune, the New York Daily News, and the Washington Herald, which was eventually merged into the Washington Post.

Medill had two contentious, competitive daughters — “the worst two she-devils in all Chicago,” a public evaluation from none other than their own father. Older sister Nellie married newspaperman Robert Patterson, who worked for his father-in-law. Kate married Robert McCormick, a diplomat. Each had two children.

Of Kate’s sons, Joseph Medill McCormick served in the U.S. Senate but, plagued by alcoholism and depression, killed himself at 47. The self-styled “Colonel” Robert Rutherford McCormick grew The Tribune into “the world’s greatest newspaper.”

http://www.courier-journal.com/article/20111231/FEATURES04/312310033/Book-review-Newspaper-Titan-Infamous-Life-Monumental-Times-Cissy-Patterson-?odyssey=mod%7Cnewswell%7Ctext%7CHome%7Cs

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Posted on by
Reply

Another e-book uncovered on my travels, though I’m shocked that I hadn’t included this one earlier: I read it in university, and it’s a very famous account of life as a female slave in the South.  Well worth a read for an insight into the horrors of slavery. Project Gutenberg, as always, provides multiple formats from which to choose.

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/11030

A Craft-y Escape

Posted on by
Reply

I can’t find a slot for this tale in my plans for the podcast, but it seems rollicking enough to post it here. Project Gutenberg offers various formats of Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, the tale of a light skinned slave who – posing as a male planter, and her dark skinned husband pretending to be her servant – made a very public escape from slavery. It was a bestseller in its day, and Wikipedia suggests it’s a good read. I’ll add it to the Library

Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom; or, the escape of William and Ellen Craft

A Voice From Harper’s Ferry

Posted on by
Reply

I’ve been reading more about John Brown’s Raid, and came across this first-hand account. The author, Osborne Perry Anderson, was the only surviving African-American who took part in the raid. Google has provided scans of the original book in its entirety (isn’t the Internet great?) I’ll add it to The Library.

http://books.google.ca/books?vid=07O-FNwsAHVDjCS26XVa-y&id=sUxp11UMkBMC&printsec=titlepage&dq=Osborne+Anderson%7CA&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=Osborne%20Anderson%7CA&f=false

Mark Twain Revisited

Posted on by
Reply

An interesting look at Mark Twain, who – like Lincoln – came to his openmindedness about race the long way. Twain’s history as a wannabe bushwhacker is well documented, even by him in his famous short story, The Private History of a Campaign That Failed. This book looks intriguing and has a grabber of a title!

When scholars sparred recently over one professor’s decision to ditch the “n-word” and replace it with “slave” in a revised edition of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, one issue was never in question: that Twain spurned racism.

But what scholars have overlooked is the bone — or rather, bones — Twain had to pick with the Union, despite his speeches celebrating Abraham Lincoln’s call for racial justice, said Dr. Joe B. Fulton, an award-winning professor of English at Baylor University, in a new book published during the sesquicentennial of the Civil War’s beginning.
What Twain witnessed during and after the Civil War turned him into a skeptic of “truth, justice and the American way” for the rest of his life, says Fulton in his latest book, The Reconstruction of Mark Twain: How a Confederate Bushwhacker Became the Lincoln of Our Literature.

http://www.newswise.com/articles/mark-twain-staunch-confederate-once-upon-a-time-150-years-ago-baylor-professor-says

The Bloody Dutch

Posted on by
Reply

The contribution of German Americans on the war is a topic I’d like to explore in more depth. They got a bad rap in the East, with the failures of the Fights mit Sigel divisions, but they were a significant population within the Union Armies, and, with Carl Schurz and Karl Marx among them, they had a lot of political influence as well.

This article discussed a Western unit and the translation of that regimental history from the original German.

They were a formidable group of soldiers. Some of them had fought in the German Revolution of 1848 and emigrated to the United States after the revolution failed. Others were sons of German revolutionary soldiers.
Virtually all of them were members of the Cincinnati Turner Society, an organization that emphasized the development of the body and the mind. They were physically fit, mentally tough and fully prepared to endure the hardships of war.

The 9th Ohio Regiment, trained locally at Camp Harrison and Camp Dennison, fought so efficiently and ferociously during its three years in the Civil War that the Confederates called them the “Dutch Devils,” and the “Bloody Dutch.”

http://cincinnati.com/blogs/ourhistory/2010/10/15/german-civil-war-soldiers/

The Scoundrel’s Descendant

Posted on by
Reply

Over my years of study I’ve read a few slave narratives, but it’s always a smack in the face to read a fresh one. It’s worth remembering, when the debates rage on States’ Rights and the other distracting discussions, that slavery was a horrific, inhumane system that deeply affected real people. The arguments are a lot easier to rebut when you put yourself in their shoes.

This article’s interesting, too, for its j’accuse towards the North, who was also benefitting from the products of slavery.

Twenty years ago, DeWolf discovered he was the direct descendant of a “scoundrel.” When his distant ancestor, Senator James DeWolf, died in 1837, he was the second richest man in America. Much of his wealth was acquired from the most successful slave-trading dynasty in history. A dynasty he built.

The discovery prompted DeWolf and 10 family members to research their checkered ancestry. Their efforts uncovered historical “myths” surrounding slavery that perpetuate a false history, and obscure the origins of social inequities that endure today, DeWolf said.

NPR Interviews Eric Foner

Posted on by
Reply

I spent the summer in the company of Abraham Lincoln, or at least it felt that way. Consequently, there isn’t a lot to be gleaned from this interview with Eric Foner, but for those who haven’t immersed themselves in Lincolnia lately, it’s worth a look:

“Almost from the very beginning of the Civil War, the federal government had to start making policy and they said, ‘Well, we’re going to treat these people as free. We’re not going to send them back into the slave-holding regions,'” Foner says. “And the Army opened itself up to the enlistment of black men. And by the end of the Civil War, 200,000 black men had served in the Union Army and Navy. And envisioning blacks as soldiers is a very, very different idea of their future role in American society. It’s the black soldiers and their role which really begins as the stimulus in Lincoln’s change [with regard to] racial attitudes and attitudes toward America as an interracial society in the last two years of his life.”
http://www.npr.org/2010/10/11/130489804/lincolns-evolving-thoughts-on-slavery-and-freedom

Bill’s Book

Posted on by
Reply

It seems Bill O’Reilly has co-authored a book on the Lincoln Assassination. After spending this summer reading James Swanson’s exhaustive (but not exhausting) Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer and other readings related to the exhausting (in the boring sense) movie, The Conspirator, I feel like my Assassination needs are met.  These needs were met by some quality sources, too, which O’Reilly’s book seems not to be.  Salon.com is giddily listing the experts who’ve taken issue with the factual errors, and the factual errors themselves. I am no O’Reilly fan, and some of the complaints are, frankly, nitpicky, but one in particular stands out as a prime example of inattention to detail:

Steers adds that one entire passage of the book about co-conspirator Mary Surratt is flat-out untrue:

The authors write that she was forced to wear a padded hood when not on trial, and that she was imprisoned in a cell aboard the monitor Montauk, which was “barely habitable.” She suffered from “claustrophobia and disfigurement caused by the hood,” and was “barely tended to by her captors.” “Sick and trapped in this filthy cell, Mary Surratt took on a haunted, bloated appearance.” None of this is true. Mary Surratt was never shackled or hooded at any time. She was never imprisoned aboard the Montauk, but taken to the Carroll Annex of the Old Capitol Prison before being transferred to the women’s section of the Federal Penitentiary at the Washington’s Arsenal.

I won’t be adding this one to my library.

http://www.salon.com/2011/11/12/second_expert_trashes_oreillys_lincoln_book/singleton/