Nineteenth Century America
Road Trip Through History: Fort Sumter
My Own True Love and I are spending a long weekend in Charleston, South Carolina. For me, it’s a vacation/work sandwich. Yesterday we bopped around together doing history-buff stuff.* Today he heads off for twenty-four hours with his grandson’s Cub Scout troop aboard the USS Yorktown while I settle in for a day of reading…
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Mr. Eiffel Built More Than a Tower
Alexandre-Gustave Eiffel, the engineer who designed the Eiffel Tower, reportedly said “I ought to be jealous of the tower. It is more famous than I am.” It’s probably true. Eiffel was a world-famous engineer before he made the tower that bears his name, but not for the kind of things that make a man a…
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Contrabands
Over the course of the last year I became familiar with the use of the term “contrabands” to describe escaped slaves in the American Civil War. Like many terms of the period, it seemed self-explanatory, in an ugly way. A symptom of the racism that was fundamental in the Union as well as in the…
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