Remembering the American Civil War -- Spring 2011

For my post this week I wanted to do something pertaining to the bombardment of Fort Sumter. On April 12th of this week it was the 150th anniversary of the Confederate bombardment of Fort Sumter, and it was the events at Fort Sumter that is considered to be where the first shot was fired of the Civil War. As the first of many sesquicentennial events takes place it will be interesting to see how the play out for the remainder of the year.

http://www.abcnews4.com/story/14432484/remembering-the-first-attack-on-fort-sumter

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2011/04/12/civil-war-still-divides-americans/?hpt=C1

I found another resource on the Civil War from the CNN website. Interesting article about how America is still divided on the Civil War.

I found this website called the Center for Civil War Research (run by the University of Mississippi).  It has some pretty interesting stuff to check out as well as a section dedicated to Civil War memory, so I felt it was fitting for this week.

http://www.civilwarinteractive.com/

So, this website is pretty cool. It has a lot of different things going on. There are pages where you can find recipes during this era, a discussion board, links to a plethora of Civil War blogs, and a link of short biographies of Civil War soldiers and officers. Of course the site also has Civil War games and an online gift shop-which only sells book, however.

CNN just posted this article 4 Ways We’re Still Fighting the Civil War. The article points at the parallels between the antebellum period and now. Most of the parallels pointed out in the article deal with the Federal Government. One of the debates that went on in the antebellum period and now is “How much power should the federal government have?”

The Civil War: The Way We Weren’t (from TIME magazine)

This is a really interesting article from TIME magazine that discusses the legacy of the Civil War. It talks about memory, forgetting parts of history, rewriting history, etc., all themes that have come up in our class discussions. But the most interesting part of this article is in the section titled “Why It Matters.” Take a look at it0 it’s pretty interesting!

http://www.cnn.com/2011/LIVING/04/09/civil.war.reenacting/index.html?hpt=C1

I found this while on CNN this morning.  Its an interview with a guy who considers himself a living historian.  I thought the video was pretty interesting so I figured I’d post it.

http://www.reenactor.net/

So, for this week I, like several others, decided to keep up the reenactor theme from our last class. The site I found was the universal reenactors website which covers reenactors that do everything from Ancient Greece to World War II and up. The website is not exactly the best constructed one on the internet, but it shows a wide spread of reenacting interests that we didn’t even touch on.