As the anniversary of the bombardment of Fort Sumter edges ever closer, these two recent accounts of the events immediately leading up to the outbreak of the Civil War might be of interest.
“Fort Sumter: The Civil War Begins,” Smithsonian
(our own Bernie Powers is quoted in this one, as is the Executive Director of the CLAW Program, Vernon Burton)
“The Choice Is Charybdis,” Opinionator Blog, New York Times
Also, the College’s Division of Marketing and Communication made a video recording some of the comments made during the panel on memory of the War that closed out the CLAW conference just before Spring Break. You can view the video on YouTube.
Monthly Archives: March 2011
Reminder: TONIGHT – Daniel R. Biddle and Murray Dubin’s Tasting Freedom
Join Us TONIGHT (March 31st) at 7:00 pm at Addlestone Library, Room 227 for Daniel R. Biddle and Murray Dubin’s lecture and book signing of their work Tasting Freedom: Octavius Catto and the Battle for Equality in Civil War America.
Daniel R. Biddle, the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Pennsylvania editor, has worked in nearly every phase of newspaper reporting and editing. His investigative stories on the courts won a Pulitzer Prize and other national awards. He has been a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and has taught at the University of Pennsylvania. Murray Dubin, author of South Philadelphia: Mummers, Memories and the Melrose Diner, was a reporter and editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer for 34 years before leaving the newspaper in 2005.
In case you missed it…
Check out the Public Panel Session “What We (Should) Remember about the Civil War, and How and Why We (Should) Remember It.” This recorded session was part of the Conference Civil War – Global Conflict held on Saturday, March 5, 2011 at the College of Charleston. The panel was chaired by CLAW’s executive director, Vernon Burton.
The Question of the Sesquicentennial:
How Should We Remember the Civil War?
As the Civil War Sesquicentennial unfolds over the next several months, Southern Cultures (Emory University) is providing an online resource for scholars and students of the War, which includes new and featured content that explores the nation’s memory of the War and much more. This resource also includes all of the essays we’ve published over the last ten years on the Civil War from noted scholars and other great writers.
Our first offering for the Sesquicentennial is a new essay from former College of Charleston Professor and CLAW UK affiliate, David Gleeson (Northumbria University) that looks at how Confederate veterans used their status to post-War political advantage. In addition, among other offerings we’ll also provide a new essay from Peter Carmichael that suggests why competing schools of memory of Robert E. Lee provoke so many arguments.
Over 65,000 scholars and students around the world have read our content online and in print, including numerous Civil War experts and aficionados. For our new and archival Sesquicentennial content, please
visit:
http://www.southerncultures.org/content/read/read_by_subject/civil_war/
The untold story of Octavius Catto and the first civil rights movement in America
Join Us on March 31, 2011 at 7:00 pm at Addleston Library, Room 227 for this exciting lecture and book signing.
He shared stages with Frederick Douglass and recruited black men for Lincoln’s armies. He played for a pioneering black baseball team, taught at a renowned Philadelphia black school, and fought for equality in the state house and the streets. His name was Octavius Catto, and he and his allies—men and women, black and white—waged their battles for civil rights a century before Birmingham and Selma.
Like the Freedom Riders of the modern civil rights movement, they braved the wrath of white policemen, politicians, mobs and murderers. Catto’s life was cut short at the moment when, as W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, African Americans “were first tasting freedom.”
In Tasting Freedom: Octavius Catto and the Battle for Equality in Civil War America (Publication Date: September 22, 2010), Pulitzer Prize winner Daniel R. Biddle and Murray Dubin chronicle the life and times of this charismatic leader in a movement of preachers, teachers, Underground Railroad agents and former slaves. Their white supporters ranged from pacifist Lucretia Mott to murderous John Brown.
Catto’s “band of brothers,” as they called themselves, anticipated Rosa Parks, Jackie Robinson, and Martin Luther King Jr. by nearly a century. They sat down in whites-only streetcars, challenged baseball’s color line and marched through a rain of eggs, epithets, brickbats and bullets to proclaim their right to vote. The story of their struggle to change America will change readers’ understanding of America’s racial history.
Daniel R. Biddle, the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Pennsylvania editor, has worked in nearly every phase of newspaper reporting and editing. His investigative stories on the courts won a Pulitzer Prize and other national awards. He has been a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and has taught at the University of Pennsylvania. Murray Dubin, author of South Philadelphia: Mummers, Memories and the Melrose Diner, was a reporter and editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer for 34 years before leaving the newspaper in 2005.
Faculty Seminar – Dr. Tim Coates
Forced labor by Europeans and the Prison of Luanda, Angola 1881-1932
Dr. Tim Coates, Dept. of History, College of Charleston
Friday, March 18, 2011
3:15 PM
Addlestone Library, Room 227
205 Calhoun Street, Charleston, S.C.
Civil War — Global Conflict
March 3-5, 2011
Conference: Civil War – Global Conflict
On March 4, 1865, with the Civil War all but over, Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated for the second time as President of the United States of America. In his justly celebrated inaugural address he called for healing in a reunited nation: “With malice toward none; with charity for all…let us strive on to finish the work we are in…to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.”
In that same spirit, the CLAW program today begins its 4-year-long commemoration of the Civil War with a conference that reflects on the war as a global conflict. Some of the nation’s leading Civil War scholars will consider, among other things: how the international circulation of ideas about liberty, slavery, race, ethnicity, nationalism, imperialism, gender, and religion all helped to shape the conflict; how diplomacy and military strategy affected the war’s outcome; and how the war itself determined subsequent political alliances and military conventions.
As Lincoln’s second inaugural speech intimated, this is not a moment for bravado, nor even a moment for passive mourning, but a moment for settling down to carry on the unceasing work necessary to achieve the kind of understanding that might lead to a just and lasting peace.
The conference will take place at the Stern Center starting today at noon and running till 5:30 on Saturday. Full details are available at http://spinner.cofc.edu/atlanticworld/civilwar/index.html. Please join us if you can.