I beg to present you as a Christmas gift the Library of Congress’ Top Treasures website, with dozens of historical documents and plenty of good reading, and also a great deal of Civil War related documents.
Top Treasures Gallery: American Treasures of the Library of Congress.
If you live in the LA area, and are reading this, you have until January 14th to get yourself to the Huntington. There’s an exhibition of Civil War photos that sounds excellent.
The Strange and Fearful Interest exhibition at The Huntington isn’t just a collection of portraits, it’s a photographic journey through the Civil War, and most especially the aftermath of the Civil War, when the nation struggled to understand what we had done to ourselves and each other.
Key moments captured in the exhibition include scenes of carnage at Antietam — a battle in which 23,000 men died in one day, Lincoln’s assassination, personal grief, collective mourning, and finally, a sense of reconciliation.
The Huntington’s extensive collection of Civil War photography started with Henry Huntington himself, when he purchased three major collections of Abraham Lincoln materials, including work by war photographers Mathew Brady, Timothy O’Sullivan, George Barnard, and others. These form the basis of the 200 images on display at the Boone Gallery.
via A Strange and Fearful Interest : A Unique Look at the Civil War – San Marino, CA Patch.
A new Civil War Medicine museum is opening in Frederick, MD. Given the description in this article, it sounds well worth a visit.
In the beginning of the war, wounded soldiers languished for days before they were retrieved. Sometimes their friends would stop fighting and carry them to the rear, knowing no one else would, recounts historian James M. McPherson in Battle Cry of Freedom. Litter-bearers were musicians, other soldiers and anyone who could be spared. Letterman developed a system for evacuating the wounded, establishing ambulances and dedicated personnel for each regiment.The wounded were treated in three stages: “There was a dressing station 60 to 70 yards from the front line” Dammann said, noting that 350 doctors on the Union side were killed in battle. “First aid was done here, tourniquets and splinting. From there, they went back into battle or to a field hospital, maybe in a barn or church three or four miles behind the lines. Here they had operating surgeons, where they did amputations. Wounds of head, chest and abdomen werent treated; they were given painkillers and most died there. From here, they were evacuated, usually by train, to fixed hospitals.” Letterman’s system saved lives, but for every man killed in battle, two died of disease. Many perished from malnutrition, especially in the South.
via washingtonpost.com: On Surgerys Cutting Edge In Civil War.
T.S. Lowe’s Intrepid flies again! This is quite the way to reenact! If I wasn’t terrified of heights I’d make my way down to NY for this. The tickets are very reasonable considering the expense of running such a project.
Officials at Genesee Country Village & Museum decided that replicating a Civil War balloon that had been christened Intrepid would be an ideal way to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the war.Peter Arnold, the museums president and chief executive officer, said the $400,000 project, which has been partially offset by numerous donations, has triggered intense interest.Starting today and continuing into October, visitors will be invited to board the tethered balloon when weather permits and float several hundred feet above the picturesque landscape, getting a taste of what the first military pilots experienced a century-and-a-half earlier. The cost of 15-minute flights is $10 for museum members and $15 for non-members, charges that are in addition to general admission.
via Civil War air power on display – City & Region – The Buffalo News.
I’ve only been to Illinois once, but loved it. My nostalgia and this news are combining into roadtrip lust. Here’s hoping the Address displayed isn’t as disappointing as the documents in the National Archives, though – mouldy, green, unintelligible paper isn’t as big a draw as you’d expect.
A handwritten manuscript of the Gettysburg Address will be displayed this summer at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield.
The document can be viewed in the museum’s Treasures Gallery from Friday through Sept. 4. It was last displayed for five days in February.
via Abraham Lincoln museum to display Gettysburg Address – Rockford, IL – Rockford Register Star.
As if the Lincoln Library needs more adversity in this troubled sesquicentennial, it seems one of their centerpieces is of questionable provenance. Such a sham(e).
The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield has long proclaimed that an 1850s-era stovepipe hat in the museum’s possession belonged to Lincoln.
But this month, after Dave McKinney of the Chicago Sun-Times began looking into the matter, museum officials admitted they can’t prove it.
via Editorial: The mystery of Lincoln’s hat – Chicago Sun-Times.
This one’s rather macabre, so if you have a sensitive constitution, don’t click through to the picture that accompanies the article.
Shortly after the battle of Antietam, a farmer plowing his field dug up a dismembered arm. For some reason, he and the doctor he consulted about it decided to pickle it rather than bury it, and it wound up in the collection of a private museum.
Wunderlich said he hopes to have a Smithsonian Institution forensic anthropologist examine the arm for clues about the owner’s diet and origin.
Battlefield Superintendent Susan Trail said the arm can’t be displayed at the Antietam visitor center because the National Park Service generally forbids displaying human remains. But she said the medical museum could display it at the Pry House, a field hospital site that the museum runs on the battlefield.
This imagery reminded me of a passage from Sam Watkins’ Co. Aytch, where he describes a very human reaction that led to many mangled and dead boys:
I saw another man try to stop one of those balls that was just rolling along on the ground. He put his foot out to stop the ball but the ball did not stop, but, instead, carried the man’s leg off with it. He no doubt today walks on a cork-leg, and is tax collector of the county in which he lives. I saw a thoughtless boy trying to catch one in his hands as it bounced along. He caught it, but the next moment his spirit had gone to meet its God.
The Lincoln Museum in Springfield is deep in debt and feuding internally. A shame that this is happening during the sesquicentennial celebrations. Here’s hoping they can get their act together and their debt paid off, and get on with being an informative and entertaining center of history.
Just seven years old, the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum is on its third executive director. Attendance is down and money is tight.
The institution is not accredited, and American Association of Museums in 2010 found shortcomings ranging from an inadequate disaster preparedness plan to a governance structure with potentials for conflicts of interest. There is tension between the institution and its private fundraising foundation. Not even Lincoln’s iconic stovepipe hat is a given.
via A museum divided.
Today is the anniversary of Lincoln’s death, the process of which started the night before at Ford’s Theater, and ended across the street at the Petersen House. This year, both events and locations have been commemorated in a newly expanded museum housed in the building adjoining the House Where Lincoln Died.
Wait a minute, you might think. Education and leadership? The Civil War is barely over. Lincoln is dead. The nation is in shock. How do we get from there to a “center for education and leadership”? I have questions about that, but before exploring the quirks of contemporary commemoration, it is worth paying tribute to what has been accomplished. Lincoln has long been at the heart of the capital city: the National Mall is an affirmation of the Union he championed, the Lincoln Memorial on one end, and the Ulysses S. Grant Memorial on the other. But there was, until recently, no extensive exhibition here about Lincoln and his times. Ford’s Theater, Mr. Tetreault explained, used to be a brief stopping point.
Now, with these exhibitions, Lincoln has found a home in a place best known for his death. With the historian Richard Norton Smith as adviser, and displays designed by Split Rock Studios and Northern Light Productions, Mr. Tetreault has given visitors a grounding in the history of Lincoln’s time, a sense of the melodrama of his murder and an affirmation of Lincoln’s influence.
The biography is omitted — for that you should visit the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Ill., which turns his life into a series of special effects and tableaus — and his ideas could be more fervently explored, but there may be no better survey of Lincoln than the one offered here. The emphasis is not on artifacts, though you can see the ring of keys found on Booth’s body and other objects. But the exhibition succeeds because of a careful narrative, well-chosen images and informative touch screens; the new completes the old.
I keep putting off my trip to Washington, and keep finding articles like this chastising me and reminding that this is a bad decision!
If – like me – you’re planning a visit to DC during this 1862 sesquicentennial year, be sure to add the National Portrait Gallery to your must-sees. In addition to an exhibition of Brady’s portraits of the Union generals, there’s a collection of Adalbert Volck etchings on display.
A Volck lithograph was reproduced in the very first Civil War book I was ever given, and his clean, line-drawn caricatures and wicked sense of humour immediately caught my attention. I’m excited to see what’s on view.
A dentist by trade, Volck served the Southern cause in a myriad of ways, including smuggling medical supplies to Virginia across the Potomac River. However, Volck’s most significant contribution to the Confederate cause was his production of pictorial propaganda that vilified Lincoln, abolitionists and Union soldiers in his publication Sketches from the Civil War in North America.
via The National Portrait Gallery/Exhibitions/The Confederate Sketches of Adalbert Volck.