Tag: Slavery

Latin America in the Civil War Era: A working bibliography and research memo

This evolving list is the first of many steps of an intellectual process to comprehend the scope of relevant literature in this field. It is a very broad initial attempt to identify important books, essays, articles, memoirs, archival collections and other primary and secondary sources.

 

The U.S. Civil War sent economic, political and social shockwaves around the world.

One of my objectives is to understand how those shockwaves were felt throughout Latin America, specifically throughout the republican and imperial governments, the intelligentsia, the diplomatic circles, the street-level multiracial societies, and the military commands. I am especially interested and focused on Mexico’s civil war between supporters of the republican government of Benito Juarez and the supporters of Maximilian, the French puppet emperor. The civil strife began when France invaded in the early 1860s. I am particularly interested in exploring how these two civil wars churned like two hurricanes, feeding off each other, destroying everything within reach, and setting the stage for new eras of democratic government.

I will also explore how both wars resonated in the Texas-Mexico borderlands communities and how people in that region thrived economically, endured privation and tragedy, and reimagined their relationship to their respective republican states. I also hope to better understand through literature and letters how men and women throughout Latin America – and particularly in Mexico — intellectually and politically perceived their own futures as they watched the U.S. republic break apart over slavery and the French invaders attempt to build a European monarchy from the ruins of Mexican democracy.

This evolving list of sources is the first of many steps of an intellectual process to comprehend the scope of relevant literature in this field. It is a very broad attempt to identify important books, essays, articles, memoirs, archival collections and other primary and secondary sources. Studies of communities throughout the Western Hemisphere and Europe are included to inform the larger transnational and transatlantic context I will prepare.

The second step will be an annotated bibliography. That will then lead to a comprehensive review essay analyzing the evolution of the literature, the conversations, and the debates. The essay will also identify potential avenues of future research and the challenges of traveling down those avenues.

I certainly welcome corrections, comments and suggestions as this process continues. You may reach me at this address: remembrance_@hotmail.com.

MEXICO

Aldis, Owen F. “Louis Napoleon and the Southern Confederacy,” North American Review 129 (October 1879): 342-362.

Auer, Jeffrey J. “Lincoln’s Minister to Mexico,” Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Quarterly 57 (1950).

Bacha-Garza, Roseann, Christopher L. Miller and Russell K. Skowronek. The Civil War on the Rio Grande, 1846-1876. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2019.

Baguley, David. Napoleon III and His Regime: An Extravaganza. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000.

Barker, Nancy N. “France, Austria, and the Mexican Venture, 1861-1864,” French Historical Studies (Autumn 1963): 224-245.

—. “Monarchy in Mexico: Harebrained Scheme or Well-Considered Prospect?” The Journal of Modern History 48, no. 1 (March 1976): 51-68.

—. “The Factor of ‘Race’ in the French Experience in Mexico, 1821-1861,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 59, no. 1 (February 1979): 64-80.

Bernstein, Harry. Matias Romero, 1837-1898. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1973.

Beverton, Alys. “Transborder Capitalism and National Reconciliation: The American Press Reimagines U.S.-Mexico Relations after the Civil War,” The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (2022): 40-61.

Bissell, Jonathan. “The Conflicting National Narratives of the 1846-1848 North American Invasion of Mexico,” Historical Geography 45 (2017): 220-251.

Bock, Carl H. Prelude to Tragedy: The Negotiation and Breakdown of the Tripartite Convention of London, October 31, 1861. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1966.

Brettle, Adrian Robert. “The Fortunes of War: Confederate Expansionist Ambitions During the American Civil War.” PhD diss. University of Virginia, 2014.

Callahan, James Morton. Evolution of Seward’s Mexican Policy. West Virginia University Studies in American History ser. 1, Diplomatic History, nos. 4, 5, and 6. Morgantown, W.Va.: West Virginia University, 1909.

Dabbs, Jack Autrey. The French Army in Mexico, 1861-1867: A Study in Military Government. The Hague: Mouton, 1963.

Downs, Gregory P. “The Mexicanization of American Politics: The United States’ Transnational Path from Civil War to Stabilization.” American Historical Review 117 (April 2012): 408.

Delaney, Robert W. “Matamoros, Port for Texas during the Civil War,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 4 (April 1955): 473-487.

Flint, Henry M. Mexico Under Maximilian. HardPress Publishing, 2013.

Frazier, Robert W. “Matias Romero and the French Intervention in Mexico.” PhD diss. University of California, Los Angeles, 1941.

—. “Latin American Projects to Aid Mexico during the French Intervention,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 28 (August 1948): 377-388.

Goldwert, Marvin. “Matias Romero and Congressional Opposition to Seward’s Policy toward the French Intervention in Mexico,” The Americas 22, no. 1 (July 1965): 22-40.

Gonzalez-Quiroga, Miguel Angel. “Conflict and Cooperation in the Making of Texas-Mexico Border Society, 1840-1880” in Bridging National Borders in North America: Transnational and Comparative Histories, 33-58, edited by Benjamin H. Johnson and Andrew R. Graybill. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010.

Greenberg, Amy S. A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico. New York: Knopf, 2012.

Hanna, A.J. “The Role of Matthew Fontaine Maury in the Mexican Empire,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 55 (April 1947): 105-125.

Hanna, Kathryn Abbey. “The Roles of the South in the French Intervention in Mexico,” The Journal of Southern History 20, no. 1 (February 1954): 3-21.

—. Napoleon III and Mexico: American Triumph over Monarchy. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1971.

—. “Incidents of the Confederate Blockade,” The Journal of Southern History 11: 222.

Hardy, William E. “South of the Border: Ulysses S. Grant and the French Intervention.” Civil War History 54, no. 1 (March 2008): 63-86.

Hart, John Mason. Empire and Revolution: The Americans in Mexico since the Civil War. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

Henderson, Timothy J. A Glorious Defeat: Mexico and Its War with the United States. New York: Hill and Wang, 2008.

Horgan, James J. “A Confederate Bull in a Mexican China Shop” in Divided We Fall: Essays on Confederate Nation Building, edited by John M. Belohlavek. Saint Leo, Fla: Saint Leo College Press, 1991.

Hudson, Linda S. Mistress of Manifest Destiny: A Biography of Jane McManus Storm Cazneau, 1807-1878. Austin: Texas State Historical Society, 2001.

Ibsen, Kristine. Maximilian, Mexico, and the Invention of Empire. Nashville, Tennessee: Vanderbilt University Press, 2010.

Irby, James. Backdoor at Bagdad: The Civil War on the Rio Grande. El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1977.

Jonas, Raymond. Habsburgs on the Rio Grande: The Rise and Fall of the Second Mexican Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2024.

Kiser, William S. “We Must Have Chihuahua and Sonora: Civil War Diplomacy in the U.S. Mexico Borderlands,” The Journal of Civil War History 9, no. 2 (June 2019): 196-222.

McAllen, M.M. Maximilian and Carlotta, Europe’s Last Empire in Mexico. San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 2014.

McCormack, Richard. “James Watson Webb and the French Withdrawal from Mexico,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 31 (May 1951): 274-286.

Mahoney, Harry Thayer., and Marjorie Locke Mahoney. Mexico and the Confederacy: 1860-1867. San Francisco, California: Austin & Winfield, 1998.

Malloy, George Wallace. “The United States and the French Intervention in Mexico, 1861-1867.” PhD diss. University of California, Berkeley, 1937

Martin, Percy F. Maximilian in Mexico: The Story of the French Intervention (1861-1867). New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1914.

“The Mexico Question,” Harper’s Weekly, September 12, 1863, 578.

Mijangos y Gonzalez, Pablo. “Guerra Civil y Estado-Nacion en Norteamerica (1848-1867),” in El poder y la sangre: Guerra, Estado y nacion en la decada de 1860, edited by Guillermo Palacios and Erika Pani. Mexico City: El Colegio de Mexico, 2014: 43-62.

Miller, Robert Ryal. “Californians against the Emperor,” California Historical Society Quarterly 37 (1958): 192-214.

—. “The American Legion of Honor in Mexico,” Pacific Historical Review 30 (1961): 229-241.

—. “Gaspar Sanchez Ochoa: A Mexican Secret Agent in the United States,” The Historian 23 (1961): 316-329.

—. “Placido Vega: A Mexican Secret Agent in the United States,” The Americas 19 (1962): 137-148.

—. “Lew Wallace and the French Intervention in Mexico,” Indiana Magazine of History 59 (1963): 31-50.

—. “Matias Romero: Mexican Minister to the United States during the Juarez-Maximilian Era,” The Hispanic American Historical Review, 45 (May 1965): 228-245.

—. “Arms across the Border: United States Aid to Juarez during the French Intervention in Mexico,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, n.s, 63, no. 6 (1973): 1-68.

Monaghan, Jay. Abraham Lincoln Deals with Foreign Affairs: A Diplomat in Carpet Slippers. Lincoln, Neb.: Bison Books, 1997.

Mora-Torres, Juan. The Making of the Mexican Border: The State, Capitalism, and Society and Nuevo Leon, 1848-1910. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001.

Pani, Erika. “Dreaming of a Mexican Empire: The Political Projects of the Imperialistas,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 82, no. 1 (2002): 1-31.

—. “Law, Allegiance, and Sovereignty in Civil War Mexico, 1857-1867,” The Journal of the Civil War Era 7, no. 4 (December 2017): 570-596.

—. Torn Asunder: Republican Crises and Civil Wars in the United States and Mexico, 1848–1867. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2025.

Resendez, Andres. “North American Peonage,” The Journal of the Civil War Era 7, no. 4 (December 2017): 597 619.

Ridley, Jasper. Maximilian and Juarez. London: Constable, 2001.

Rippy, J. Fred. The United States and Mexico. New York, 1926.

—. “Mexican Projects of the Confederates,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 22: 219-317.

Rister, Carl Coke. “Carlota: A Confederate Colony in Mexico,” The Journal of Southern History 11 (February 1945): 33-50.

Roeder, Ralph. Juarez and His Mexico: A Biographical History. New York: Viking, 1947.

Rolle, Andrew F. The Lost Cause: The Confederate Exodus to Mexico. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1965.

Romero, Matias. A Mexican View of America in the 1860s: A Foreign Diplomat Describes the Civil War and Reconstruction, ed. and trans. Thomas D. Schoonover. London: Associated University Presses, 1991.

Salm-Salm, Felix C. My Diary in Mexico in 1867 Including the Last Days of the Emperor Maximilian. London, 1868.

Schoonover, Thomas. “Mexican Affairs and the Impeachment of President Johnson,” East Tennessee Historical Society’s Publications 46 (1974): 76-93.

—. Dollars Over Dominion: The Triumph of Liberalism in Mexican-United States Relations, 1861-1867. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978.

—., ed., Mexican Lobby: Matias Romero in Washington 1861-1867. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1986.

—., “Napoleon Is Coming! Maximilian Is Coming? The International History of the Civil War in the Caribbean Basi,” in The Union, The Confederacy, and the Atlantic Rim, edited by Robert E. May. West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1995. 101-130.

Smith, Gene. Maximilian and Carlota: A Tale of Romance and Tragedy. Morrow, 1973.

St. John, Rachel. “The Unpredictable America of William Gwin: Expansion, Secession, and the Unstable Borders of Nineteenth Century North America,” The Journal of the Civil War Era 6 no. 1 (March 2016): 56-84.

Thompson, Jerry Don. Mexican Texans in the Union Army. El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1986.

—. “Mutiny and Desertion on the Rio Grande: The Strange Saga of Captain Adrian J. Vidal,” Military History XII, no. 3.

—. “A Stand Along the Border: Santos Benavides and the Battle of Laredo,” Civil War Illustrated (August 1980).

—, ed. Juan Cortina and the Texas-Mexico Frontier: 1859-1877. El Paso: University of Texas at El Paso Press, 1994.

—. Cortina: Defending the Mexican Name in Texas. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2007.

Truett, Samuel. Fugitive Landscapes: The Forgotten History of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.

Tyler, Ronnie C. Santiago Vidaurri and the Southern Confederacy. Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1973.

Tyrner-Tyrnauer, A.R. Lincoln and the Emperors. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1962.

Wahlstrom, Todd W. The Southern Exodus to Mexico: Migration across the Borderlands after the American Civil War. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015.

Waite, Kevin. “Jefferson Davis and Proslavery Visions of Empire in the Far West,” The Journal of the Civil War Era 4 (December 2016): 554-557.

Wasserman, Mark. Everyday Life and Politics in Nineteenth Century Mexico: Men, Women, and War. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000.

Wilson, William Moss. “Lincoln’s Mexican Visitor.” Disunion: The New York Times. January 17, 2011. Accessed on January 25, 2023. https://archive.nytimes.com/opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/17/lincolns-mexican-visitor.

CANADA

Bachand, Marise. “Disunited Daughters of the Confederates: Creoles and Canadians at the Intersection of Nations, States, and Empires.” The Journal of the Civil War Era 7, no. 4 (December 2017): 541-569.

Buckner, Phillip. “‘British North America and a Continent in Dissolution:’ ” The American Civil War in the Making of the Canadian Confederation,” The Journal of the Civil War Era 7, no. 4 (December 2017): 512-540.

Dashew, Doris W. “The Story of an Illusion: The Plan to Trade the Alabama Claims for Canada,” Civil War History 15 (December 1969): 332-348.

Jenkins, Danny R. “British North Americans Who Fought in the American Civil War: 1861-1865.” MA thesis, University of Ottawa, 1993.

Morton, W.L. “British North America and a Continent in Dissolution, 1861-71.” History 47 (January 1962): 139-156.

Reid, Richard M. African Canadians in Union Blue: Volunteering for the Cause in the Civil War. Vancouver: University of British Colombia Press, 2014.

Winks, Robin. Canada and the United States: The Civil War Years. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1960.

CHILE

Burr, Robert N. By Reason or Force: Chile and the Balancing of Power in South America, 1830-1905. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967.

PERU

Blanchard, Peter. Slavery and Abolition in Early Republican Peru. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources Books, 1992.

Eichhorn, Niels. “The Many South Carolinas in the Americas,” Muster: The Journal of the Civil War Era. May 2, 2023. Accessed on May 23, 2023. https://www.journalofthecivilwarera.org/2023/05/the-many-south-carolinas-in-the-americas.

“Emancipation Declared in Peru,” Anti-Slavery Reporter, July 2, 1855, 157.

Love, Thomas F. The Independent Republic of Arequipa: Making Regional Culture in the Andes. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017.

GENERAL SOUTH AMERICA

Ferris, Nathan L. “The Relations of the United States with South America during the Civil War,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 21 (February 1941): 51-78.

Fitz, Caitlin A. “The Hemispheric Dimensions of Early U.S. Nationalism: The War of 1812, Its Aftermath, and Spanish American Independence,” The Journal of American History 102 (September 2015): 356–379.

—. Our Sister Republics: The United States in an Age of Revolutions. New York: Norton, 2016.

Gobat, Michel. “The Invention of Latin America: The Transnational History of Anti-Imperialism, Democracy, and Race,” American Historical Review 118 (December 2013): 1345-1375.

Joseph, Gilbert M., Catherine C. Legrand, and Ricardo D. Salvatore, eds. Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of U.S.-Latin American Relations. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998.

Kelly, Patrick J. “The Cat’s-Paw: Confederate Ambitions in Latin America” in American Civil Wars: The United States, Latin America, Europe and the Crisis of the 1860s. Edited by Don H. Doyle. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017.

—. “The Lost Continent of Abraham Lincoln,” The Journal of the Civil War Era 9, no. 2 (June 2019): 223-248.

May, Robert E. Manifest Destiny’s Underworld: Filibustering in Antebellum America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.

—. Slavery, Race and Conquest in the Tropics: Lincoln, Douglass and the Future of Latin America. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

—. “The Irony of Confederate Diplomacy; Visions of Empire, the Monroe Doctrine, and the Quest for Nationhood,” The Journal of Southern History 81 (February 2017): 69-106.

Rothera, Evan C. Civil Wars and Reconstructions in the Americas: The United States Mexico and Argentina, 1860-1880. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2022.

Sanders, James E. The Vanguard of the Atlantic World: Creating Modernity, Nation, and Democracy in Nineteenth Century Latin America. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014.

Scott, Rebecca, et. al. The Abolition of Slavery and the Aftermath of Emancipation in Brazil. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1988.

Tenorio-Trillo, Mauricio. Latin America: The Allure and Power of an Idea. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017.

CUBA

Chaffin, Tom. Fatal Glory: Narciso López and the First Clandestine U.S. War Against Cuba. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996.

Corwin, Arthur. Spain and the Abolition of Slavery in Cuba, 1817-1886. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1967.

Levander, Caroline. “Confederate Cuba,” American Literature 78 (December 2006): 821-845

Scott, Rebecca. Slave Emancipation in Cuba: The Transition to Free Labor, 1860-1899. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985.

—. Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba After Slavery. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005.

GENERAL SPANISH CARIBBEAN

González-Quintero, Nicolás. “Empire, Slavery, and Exile in the 19th Century Spanish Caribbean.” PhD diss. University of Texas at Austin, 2020.

May, Robert E. The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire, 1854-1861. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973.

Rugemer, Edward Bartlett. The Problem of Emancipation: The Caribbean Roots of the American Civil War. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008.

Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher. Empire and Antislavery: Spain, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, 1833-1870. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999.

—. “From Aggression to Crisis: The Spanish Empire in the 1860s” in American Civil Wars: The United States, Latin America, Europe and the Crisis of the 1860s. Edited by Don H. Doyle. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017.

HAITI

Clavin, Matthew. “A Second Haitian Revolution: John Brown, Toussaint Louverture and the Making of the American Civil War,” Civil War History 54 no. 2 (June 2008): 117-145.

HONDURAS

Coryell, Janet L. “’The Lincoln Colony:’ Aaron Columbus Burr’s Proposed Colonization of British Honduras,” Civil War History 43, no. 1 (March 1997): 5-16.

NICARAGUA

Gobat, Michel. Confronting the American Dream: Nicaragua under U.S. Imperial Rule. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005.

BRITISH EMPIRE

Barnes, James J., and Patience P. Barnes. The American Civil War Through British Eyes: Dispatches from British Diplomats. Kent, OH: Kent University Press, 2005.

Blackett, R.J.M. Divided Hearts: Britain and the American Civil War. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000.

Blume, Kenneth J. “Coal and Diplomacy in the British Caribbean during the Civil War,” Civil War History 41 no. 2 (June 1995): 116-141.

Campbell, Duncan Andrew. English Public Opinion and the American Civil War. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Royal Historical Society, 2003.

Dubrulle, Hugh. “A Military Legacy of the Civil War: The British Inheritance,” Civil War History 49, no. 2 (June 2003): 153-180.

—. Ambivalent Nation: How Britain Imagined the American Civil War. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2018.

Elkins, Caroline. Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire. New York: Knopf, 2022.

Foner, Philip. British Labor and the American Civil War. New York: Holmes & Meier, 1981.

Foreman, Amanda. A World on Fire: Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War. New York: Random House, 2010.

Hughes, Michael F. “’The Personal Observations of a Man of Intelligence:’ Sir James Fergusson’s Visit to North America, 1861,” Civil War History 45, no. 3 (September 1999): 238-247.

Jenkins, Brian. Britain and the War for the Union. 2 vols. Montreal, Quebec: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1974-1960.

Jones, Howard. Union in Peril: The Crisis over British Intervention in the Civil War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012.

Kinser, Brent E. The American Civil War in the Shaping of British Democracy. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011.

Logan, Frenise. “India – Britain’s Substitute for American Cotton, 1861-1865,” Journal of Southern History 24 (November 1958): 472-480.

Meyers, Philip. Caution and Cooperation: The American Civil War in British-American Relations. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2008.

Mulligan, William. “Mobs and Diplomats: The Alabama Affair and British Diplomacy, 1865-1872” in The Diplomats’ World: A Cultural History of Diplomacy, 1815-1914, eds. Markus Mosslang and Torsten Riotte (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 105-132.

Myers, Phillip E. Caution and Cooperation: The American Civil War in British American Relations. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2008.

O’Connor, Peter. American Sectionalism in the British Mind, 1832-1863. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2017.

Tal, Nimrod., “Putting Out the ‘Embers of This Resentment:’ Anglo-American Relations and the Rewriting of the British Response to the American Civil War, 1914-1925,” The Journal of the Civil War Era 8, no. 1 (March 2018): 87-110.

FRANCE

Belanger, Damien-Claude. Franco-Americans in the Civil War Era (1861-1865). Montreal: n.p., 2001.

Case, Lynn M., and Warren F. Spencer. The United States and France: Civil War Diplomacy. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1970.

Curtis, Eugene M. “American Opinion of the French Nineteenth Century Revolutions,” American Historical Review 29 (January 1924): 25-60.

Gavronsky, Serge. French Liberals and the American Civil War. New York: The Humanities Press, 1968.

Gray, Walter D. Interpreting American Democracy in France: The Career of Edouard Laboulaye, 1811-1883. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1994.

Katz, Philip M. From Appomattox to Montmartre: Americans and the Paris Commune. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.

GERMANY

McGrane, Reginald C. “The American Position on the Revolution of 1848 in Germany,” Historical Outlook 11 (1920): 333-339.

SPAIN

Bowen, Wayne S. Spain and the American Civil War. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2011.

ITALY

Adams, Charles Francis. “Lincoln’s Offer to Garibaldi,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 41 (1907-1908): 315-393.

Dal Lago, Enrico. “Lincoln, Cavour, and National Unification: American Republicanism and Italian Liberal Nationalism in Comparative Perspective,” The Journal of Civil War Era 3, no. 1 (March 2013): 85-113.

—. Civil War and Agrarian Unrest: The Confederate South and Southern Italy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018.

Doyle, Don H. Nations Divided: America, Italy and the Southern Question. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002.

Gay, H. Nelson. “Lincoln’s Offer of a Command to Garibaldi: Light on a Disputed Point of History,” Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine 75, no. 1 (November 1907): 63-74.

Gemme, Paola. Domesticating Foreign Struggles: The Italian Risorgimento and Antebellum American Identity. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005.

CIVIL WAR ERA DIPLOMACY / FOREIGN POLICY

Baker, George., ed. The Works of William H. Seward in The Diplomatic History of the War for the Union. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1884.

Bonner, Robert E. “Slavery, Confederate Diplomacy, and the Racialist Mission of Henry Hotze,” Civil War History 51, no. 3 (September 2005): 288-316.

Carwardine, Richard, and Jay Sexton, eds. The Global Lincoln. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Chaffin, Tom. “Abe Lincoln and Filibuster Fever.” Disunion: The New York Times, January 10, 2011. Accessed on January 25, 2023. https://archive.nytimes.com/opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/10/abe-lincoln-and-filibuster-fever.

Crook, David Paul. The North, the South, and the Powers, 1860-1865. New York: Wiley, 1974.

—. Diplomacy during the Civil War. New York: Wiley, 1975.

Ferris, Norman B. Desperate Diplomacy: William H. Seward’s Foreign Policy, 1861. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1976.

Fry, Joseph A. Henry Sanford: Diplomacy and Business in Nineteenth-Century America. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1982.

Green, Jennifer R., and Patrick M. Kirkwood. “Reframing the Antebellum Democratic Mainstream: Transatlantic Diplomacy and the Career of Pierre Soulé,” Civil War History 61, no. 3 (September 2015): 212-251.

Hubbard, Charles M. The Burden of Confederate Diplomacy. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1998.

—. “James Mason, the ‘Confederate Lobby’ and the Blockade Debate of March 1862,” Civil War History 45, no. 3 (September 1999): 223-237.

Jones, Howard. Abraham Lincoln and a New Birth of Freedom: The Union and Slavery in the Diplomacy of the Civil War. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999.

—. Blue and Gray Diplomacy: A History of Union and Confederate Foreign Relations. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016.

Karp, Matthew. This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016.

Mattson, Gregory Louis. “Pariah Diplomacy: The Slavery Issue in Confederate Foreign Relations.” PhD diss. University of Southern Mississippi, 1999.

Owsley, Frank Lawrence. King Cotton Diplomacy: Foreign Relations of the Confederate States of America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959.

Palen, Marc-William. “The Civil War’s Forgotten Transatlantic Tariff Debate and the Confederacy’s Free Trade Diplomacy,” The Journal of the Civil War Era. 3, no. 1 (March 2013): 35-61.

Paolino, Ernest. The Foundations of the American Empire: Willian Henry Seward and U.S. Foreign Policy. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1973.

Peraino, Kevin. Lincoln in the World: The Making of a Statesman and the Dawn of American Power. New York: Crown, 2013.

Perkins, Dexter. The Monroe Doctrine, 1826-1867. Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1965.

Quigley, Paul, and James Hawdon, eds. Reconciliation After Civil War. Global Perspectives. Routledge Press, 2018.

Robinson, Michael. “William Henry Seward and the Onset of the Secession Crisis,” Civil War History 59, no. 1 (March 2013): 32-66.

Sexton, Jay. “Towards a Synthesis of Foreign Relations in the Civil War Era, 1848-1877,” American Nineteenth Century History. 5 (Fall 2004): 50-73.

—. The Monroe Doctrine: Empire and Nation in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Hill & Wang, 2012.

—. “William H. Seward in the World,” The Journal of the Civil War Era 4, no. 3 (September 2014): 398-430.

—. “The Civil War and U.S. World Power” in American Civil Wars: The United States, Latin America, Europe and the Crisis of the 1860s. Edited by Don H. Doyle. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017.

Seward, William H., and Olive Risley Seward. William H. Seward’s Travels around the World. New York: D. Appleton, 1873

Stahr, Walter. Seward: Lincoln Indispensable Man. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012.

Taylor, John. William Henry Seward: Lincoln’s Right Hand. New York: HarperCollins, 1991.

Tyrner-Tyrnauer, A.R. Lincoln and the Emperors. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1962.

Warren, Gordon H. Fountain of Discontent: The Trent Affair and Freedom of the Seas. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1981.

Whitaker, Arthur P. “The Origins of the Western Hemisphere Idea,” Proceedings of the American Philosophy Society 98 (October 15, 1954): 323.

TRANSNATIONAL HISTORY – ANTEBELLUM, WARTIME, POSTWAR

Ayers, Edward L. “The American Civil War, Emancipation, and Reconstruction on the World Stage,” OAH Magazine of History 20, no. 1 (January 2006): 54-61.

Beckert, Sven. “Emancipation and Empire: Reconstructing the Worldwide Web of Cotton Production in the Age of the American Civil War,” American Historical Review 109 (December 2004): 1405-1438.

Bolton, Herbert E. “The Epic of Greater America,” American Historical Review 38 (April 1933): 448-474.

Bonner, Robert E. “The Salt Water Civil War: Thalassological Approaches, Ocean-Centered Opportunities,” The Journal of the Civil War Era 6, no. 2 (June 2016): 243-267.

Brettle, Adrian. Colonial Ambitions: Confederate Planning for a Post-Civil War World. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2020.

Brown, Charles H. Agents of Manifest Destiny: The Lives and Times of the Filibusters. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980.

Cummins, Light T. “Getting beyond Bolton: Columbian Consequences and the Spanish Borderland, A Review Essay,” New Mexico Historical Review 70 (April 1995): 201-215.

Curti, Merle. “The Impact of the Revolutions of 1848 on American Thought,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 93 (1949): 209-215.

Davis, William C. “Confederate Exiles.” American History Illustrated 5, no. 3 (June 1970): 30-43.

Doyle, Don H., ed. Secession as an International Phenomenon: From America’s Civil War to Contemporary Separatist Movements. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010.

—. The Cause of All Nations: An International History of the American Civil War. New York: Basic Books, 2015.

Egerton, Douglas R. “Rethinking Atlantic Historiography in a Postcolonial Era: The Civil War in a Global Perspective,” The Journal of the Civil War Era 1, no. 1 (March 2011): 79-95.

Eichhorn, Niels. “North Atlantic Trade in the Mid-Nineteenth Century: A Case for Peace during the American Civil War,” Civil War History 1, no. 2 (June 2015): 138-172.

Fleche, Andre. “The American Civil War in the Age of Revolution,” South Central Review 33 no. 1 (Spring 2016): 5-20.

—. Revolution of 1861: The American Civil War in the Age of Nationalist Conflict. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011.

Graber, Samuel S. “Twice Divided Nation: The Civil War and National Memory in the Transatlantic World,” 2 vols. (PhD diss., University of Iowa, 2008).

Graybill, Andrew R. “Civil Wars and Their Soldiers in the Southwest Borderlands,” Reviews in American History 46, no. 4 (December 2018): 586-591.

Greenberg, Amy S. Manifest Manhood and Antebellum American Empire. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

—. Manifest Destiny and American Territorial Expansion: A Brief History with Documents. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2012.

Guterl, Matthew Pratt. American Mediterranean: Southern Slaveholders in the Age of Emancipation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008.

Hahn, Steven. “What Sort of World Did the Civil War Make?” in The World the Civil War Made. Edited by Gregory P. Downs and Kate Masur. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015.

Hammond, John Craig. “Slavery, Sovereignty, and Empires: North American Borderlands and the American Civil War,” The Journal of the Civil War Era 4, no 2 (June 2014): 264-298.

Honeck, Mischa. “Men of Principle: Gender and the German American War for the Union,” The Journal of the Civil War Era 5, no. 1 (March 2015): 38-67.

Johnson, Benjamin H., and Andrew R. Graybill, eds. Bridging National Borders in North America: Transnational and Comparative Histories. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010.

Kaye, Anthony E. “The Second Slavery: Modernity in the Nineteenth-Century South and the Atlantic World,” The Journal of Southern History 75 (August 2009): 627-50.

Keehn, David C. Knights of the Golden Circle: Secret Empire, Southern Secession, Civil War. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013.

Kelly, Patrick J. “The North American Crisis of the 1860s,” The Journal of the Civil War Era 2, no. 3 (September 2012): 337-368.

—. “1848 and the Transnational Turn in Civil War History,” The Journal of the Civil War Era 4, no. 3 (September 2014): 431-443.

LaFeber, Walter. The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860-1898. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1963.

Lewis, Kay Wright. A Curse upon the Nation: Race, Freedom and Extermination in America and the Atlantic World. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017.

Lonn, Ella. Foreigners in the Confederacy. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.

McDaniel, W. Caleb, and Bethany L. Johnson. “New Approaches to Internationalizing the History of the Civil War Era: An Introduction,” The Journal of the Civil War Era 2, no. 2 (June 2012): 145-150.

McPherson, James. “‘The Whole Family of Man:’ Lincoln and the Last Best Hope Abroad” in The Union, the Confederacy and the Atlantic Rim. Edited by Robert May. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1995.

Mahin, Dean P. One War at a Time: The International Dimensions of the U.S. Civil War. Washington, D.C.: Brassey’s, 1999.

May, Robert E., ed. The Union, the Confederacy, and the Atlantic Rim. West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1995.

Morrison, Michael A. “American Reaction to European Revolutions, 1848-1852: Sectionalism, Memory, and the Revolutionary Heritage,” Civil War History 49, no. 2 (June 2003): 111-132.

Potter, David M. The South and the Sectional Conflict. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968.

—. “Civil War,” in The Comparative Approach to American History. Edited by C. Van Woodward. New York: Basic Books, 1968.

Roberts, Timothy Mason. Distant Revolutions: 1848 and the Challenge to American Exceptionalism. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009.

Rood, Daniel B. The Reinvention of Atlantic Slavery: Technology, Labor, Race, and Capitalism in the Greater Caribbean. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017.

Schoen, Brian. The Fragile Fabric of Union: Cotton, Federal Politics, and the Global Origins of the Civil War. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.

—. “The Fates of Republics and Empires Hang in the Balance: The United States and Europe during the Civil War Era,” OAH Magazine of History 27, no. 2 (April 2013): 45.

Sexton, Jay. “Steam Transport, Sovereignty, and Empire in North America, circa 1850-1885,” The Journal of the Civil War Era 7, no. 4 (December 2017): 620-647.

Tucker, Ann L. Newest Born of Nations: European Nationalist Movements and the Making of the Confederacy. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2020.

Walther, Karine V. Sacred Interests: The United States and the Islamic World, 1821-1921. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015.

Weeks, William Earl. Building the Continental Empire: American Expansion from Revolution to the Civil War. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996.

Zimmerman, Andrew. “From the Rhine to the Mississippi: Property, Democracy, and Socialism in the American Civil War,” The Journal of the Civil War Era 5, no. 1 (March 2015): 3-37.

—. “From the Second American Revolution to the First International and Back Again: Marxism, the Popular Front, and the American Civil War” in The World the Civil War Made. Edited by Gregory P. Downs and Kate Masur. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015.

GENERAL WORKS

Baptist, Edward E. The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. New York: Basic Books, 2014.

Bayly, C.A. The Birth of the Modern World, 1780-1914: Global Connections and Comparisons. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2004: 165-166.

Beckert, Sven, “Merchants and Manufacturers in the Antebellum North” in Ruling America: A History of Wealth and Power in a Democracy. Edited by Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005.

—. Empire of Cotton: A Global History. New York: Knopf, 2014.

—. Capitalism: A Global History. New York: Penguin, 2025.

Bender, Thomas, ed. Rethinking American History in a Global Age. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

—. A Nation Among Nations: America’s Place in World History. New York: Hill and Wang, 2006.

Bensel, Richard Franklin. Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859-1877. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Blair, William. “Imagining a Hemispheric Greater America,” The Journal of the Civil War Era 7, no. 4 (December 2017): 507-511.

Bledsoe, Andrew S. “Beyond the Chessboard of War: Contingency, Command and Generalship in Civil War Military History,” The Journal of the Civil War Era 9, no. 2 (June 2019): 275-301.

Boritt, Gabor S., Mark E. Neely Jr., and Harold Holzer, “The European Image of Abraham Lincoln,” Winterthur Portfolio 21 (Summer-Autumn 1986): 158-160.

Browning, Judkin, and Timothy Silver. “Nature and Human Nature: Environmental Influences on the Union’s Failed Peninsula Campaign, 1862.” The Journal of the Civil War Era 8, no. 3 (September 2018): 388-415.

Colby, Robert. “Negroes Will Bear Fabulous Prices.” The Journal of the Civil War Era 10, no. 4 (December 2020): 439-468.

Davis, David Brion. Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Faust, Drew Gilpin. Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War. Durham, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.

Fogel, Robert William. Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1994.

Foster, Gaines M. “What’s Not in a Name.” The Journal of the Civil War Era 8, no. 3 (September 2018): 416-454.

Geyer, Michael, and Charles Bright. “Global Violence and Nationalizing Wars in Eurasia and America: The Geo Politics of War in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” Comparative Studies in History and Society 38, no. 4, (October 1996): 619-657.

Goldfield, David. America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation. New York: Bloomsbury, 2011.

Grandin, Greg. “The Liberal Tradition in the Americas: Rights, Sovereignty, and the Origins of Multilateralism,” American Historical Review 117 (February 2012): 68-91.

Greene, Jack P., and Philip D. Morgan, eds. Atlantic History: A Critical Reappraisal. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Grimsley, Mark, and Brooks D. Simpson, eds. The Collapse of the Confederacy. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001.

Guterl, Matthew. American Mediterranean: Southern Slaveholders in the Age of Emancipation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008.

Hamalainen, Pekka. The Comanche Empire. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009.

—, and Samuel Truett. “On Borderlands,” The Journal of American History 98, no. 2 (September 2011): 338-361.

Hunt, Aurora. The Army of the Pacific: Its Operations in California, Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, Plains Region, Mexico, etc. 1860-1866. Glendale, CA: Arthur H. Clark, 1951.

Hunt, Jeffrey William. The Last Battle of the Civil War: Palmetto Ranch. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002.

Johnson, Walter. Soul By Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.

—. River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. Cambridge, MA.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013.

Jones, Howard. Crucible of Power: A History of American Foreign Relations to 1913. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009.

Kerby, Robert L. Kirby Smith’s Confederacy: The Trans-Mississippi South, 1863-1865. New York: Columbia University Press, 1972.

Lang, Andrew F. “Memory, the Texas Revolution, and Secession: The Birth of Confederate Nationalism in the Lone Star State,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 114, no. 1 (July 2010): 21-36.

Langley, Lester D. The Americans in the Age of Revolution, 1750-1850. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996.

Levine, Bruce. The Spirit of 1848: German Immigrants, Labor Conflict, and the Coming of the Civil War. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992.

Lincoln, Abraham. The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. Edited by Roy P. Basler. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1953-1955.

McPherson, James M. Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Marvel, William. The Alabama and the Kearsarge: The Sailor’s Civil War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.

Morrison, Michael A. Slavery and the American West: The Eclipse of Manifest Destiny and the Coming of the Civil War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.

Nelson, Megan Kate. “Death in the Distance: Confederate Manifest Destiny and the Campaign for New Mexico, 1861-1862” in Civil War Tests: Testing the Limits of the United States. Edited by Adam Arenson and Andrew R. Graybill. Oakland: University of California Press, 2015.

Prior, David M. et. al. “Teaching the Civil War in Global Context: A Discussion,” The Journal of the Civil War Era 5, no. 1 (March 2015): 126-153.

Reynolds, Larry J. Righteous Violence: Revolution, Slavery, and the American Renaissance. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011.

Richardson, Heather Cox. West From Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America after the Civil War. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007.

Rothman, Adam, “The Slave Power in the United States, 1783-1865” in Ruling America: A History of Wealth and Power in a Democracy. Edited by Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005.

Rubin, Anne Sarah. A Shattered Nation: The Rise and Fall of the Confederacy, 1861-1868. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007.

Rugemer, Edward B. “Slave Rebels and Abolitionists: The Black Atlantic and the Coming of the Civil War,” The Journal of the Civil War Era 2, no. 2 (June 2012): 179-202.

San Antonio Ledger. July 28, 1853.

Stokes, Donald. The Grand Design: Strategy and the U.S. Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Silverman, Jason H. Lincoln and the Immigrant. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2015.

Thomas, Emory M. The Confederacy as a Revolutionary Experience. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1971.

Townsend, Stephen A. The Yankee Invasion of Texas. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2006.

Tucker, Phillip Thomas. The Final Fury: Palmito Ranch, The Last Battle of the Civil War. Mechanicsburg, Pa.: Stackpole Books, 2001.

U.S. War Department. The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies. Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1880-1901.

Recommended reading / viewing / listening

This week: A new history of Robert McNamara / 40 TV shows to watch / The wisdom of a human stain remover / Protest music survives Iran’s theocracy / More women choose to go makeup free / The Booker Prize shortlist unveiled

Most of these items come from my social media networks. Follow me on BlueSky, Instagram, Tumblr, LinkedIn, and Facebook for more fascinating videos, photos, articles, essays, and criticism. Learn more about my academic background here and about me here.

1. The War Hawk Who Wasn’t
By Philip Taubman and William Taubman | The Atlantic | September 2025
“Newly discovered documents reveal Robert McNamara’s private doubts about Vietnam.”

2. So You Want a Civil War? Let’s Pause to Remember What One Looks Like.
By David Blight | The New Republic | September 2025
“[Sept. 17] marks the 163rd anniversary of Antietam. Those who say they’re ready for civil war should stop and think about what happened there.”

3. 40 Shows to Watch This Fall
By Mike Hale | The New York Times | September 2025
“A Ken Burns documentary on the birth of the American Republic, the end of ‘Stranger Things,’ a new series from Sterlin Harjo and much more.”

4. After Martha
By Paul Laity | The London Review of Books | September 2025
“It​ was immediately clear when Martha, my 13-year-old daughter, died of septic shock that serious errors had been made.”

5. The human stain remover: what Britain’s greatest extreme cleaner learned from 25 years on the job
By Tom Lamont | The Guardian | September 2025
“From murder scenes to whale blubber, Ben Giles has seen it – and cleaned it – all. In their stickiest hours, people rely on him to restore order”

6. The Trump Administration Is Quietly Curbing the Flow of Disaster Dollars
By Jennifer DeCesaro and Sarah Labowitz | Emissary :: The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace | September 2025
“The current administration is deploying three different strategies to slow-walk the flow of disaster dollars to state and local governments: stalling disbursements, delaying FEMA’s emergency response function, and suspending mitigation funding.”

7. Birding by ear: How to learn the songs of nature’s symphony with some simple techniques
By Chris Lituma | The Conversation | September 2025
“A simple way to start bird-watching is to buy a feeder, a pair of binoculars and a field guide, and begin watching birds from your window. However, one of the most rewarding ways to identify birds is to listen to them and learn to recognize their songs.”

8. The world needs peasants
By Maryam Aslany | Aeon | September 2025
“Far from being a relic of the past, peasants are vital to feeding the world. They need to be supported, not marginalized.”

9. Dr. Strangelove: The Darkest Room
By David Bromwich | The Criterion Collection | June 2016
“Human beings for Kubrick possess something of the quality of mobile dolls or mannequins. … Human actions, in his view, are governed by determinations beyond our grasp.”

10. Protest music thrives in Iran, three years after young woman’s death sparked grassroots uprising
By Joy Hackel | The World :: PRI | September 2025
“The death of Mahsa Amini — a young Kurdish Iranian woman who was arrested and beaten in police custody — sparked widespread protests across Iran in September 2022. Protest songs became a powerful unifying force for the movement.”

11. New evidence proves North Sea asteroid impact
BBC News | September 2025
“Scientists have found proof that an asteroid hit the North Sea more than 43 million years ago causing a huge tsunami and leaving a 1.9 mile (3km) wide crater under the seabed.”

12. RFK Jr’s war on vaccines is about shaming women, not helping kids
By Amanda Marcotte | Salon | September 2025
“The MAHA movement regards all childhood ailments as a sign that moms are failing.”

13. Pamela Anderson leads the way for women who choose to go makeup free
By Leanne Italie | Associated Press | September 2025
“It’s a look, especially for older women, that serves to plague and perplex. Do we chase youth (and relevancy) with a full face, or do we foster radiant skin and march on makeup free?”

14. From looms to laptops, Afghan women lose lifeline in Taliban internet ban
By Mohammad Yunus Yawar | Reuters | September 2025
“Local government officials confirmed a ban on fibre-optic services in five northern provinces — Balkh, Kunduz, Badakhshan, Takhar and Baghlan. Officials said the ban is to prevent ‘immoral activities.’ Residents in other provinces, including Kandahar, Herat and Parwan have reported disruptions, though these have not been formally acknowledged by authorities.”

15. Introducing the Booker Prize 2025 shortlist!
The Booker Prizes | September 2025
“Find out which six books are in the running for the world’s most significant award for a single work of fiction.”

16. A look inside the AI strategies at ‘The New York Times’ and ‘The Washington Post’
By Joshua Benton | Nieman Lab | September 2025
“Digiday held the most recent edition of its Digiday Publishing Summit in Miami last week, and it’s been rolling out highlights from many of the sessions.”

17. New Black Hole Measurements Show More Ways Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein Were Right
By Clara Moskowitz | Scientific American | September 2025
“Spacetime ripples from a black hole collision across the cosmos have confirmed weird aspects of black hole physics”

18. Scott Glenn on Gene Hackman, Saving Coppola’s Life and Still Having ‘Gas Left in the Tank’
By Scott Roxborough | The Hollywood Reporter | September 2025
“The character actor’s character actor plays a rare leading role in ‘Eugene the Machine,’ which is opening the 2025 Oldenburg Film Festival.”

19. Lincoln As Commander in Chief
By James M. McPherson | American Heritage | Summer 2025
“Even though he had no military training, Lincoln quickly rose to become one of America’s most talented commanders.”

20. Roman Slavery
By Melvyn Bragg | In Our Time :: BBC 4 | 2015-2018
Also see: Saturn | Josephus | Frederick the Great | Frida Kahlo

Recommended reading / viewing / listening

This week: Looking back at the goth girls of 2009 / The U.S. Capitol lives on / Andrew Johnson and Donald Trump / A decade since the Arab Spring / The hellish three months ahead of us

This week: Looking back at the goth girls of 2009 / The U.S. Capitol lives on / Andrew Johnson and Donald Trump / A decade since the Arab Spring / The hellish three months ahead of us

Most of these great items come from my social media networks. Follow me on Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, LinkedIn, and Facebook for more fascinating videos, photos, articles, essays, and criticism. Learn more about my academic background here.

1. After the insurrection
The Economist | January 2021
“The terrible scenes on Capitol Hill illustrate how Donald Trump has changed his party”

2. Our Capitol perseveres
By Greg Roney | Opinion :: The Washington Post | January 2021
“The Capitol Dome is topped by the Statue of Freedom, under which Lincoln lay in state for three days following his funeral. … The Union did not allow the South within the city limits, yet Wednesday’s lawless rioters trampled the Capitol’s sacred halls waving Confederate flags over the very spot Lincoln was bid farewell by a grateful nation.”

3. This impeached, one-term president refused to go to his successor’s inauguration. Now Trump will do the same.
By Robert G. Schafer | Retropolis :: The Washington Post | January 2021
“It’s been 152 years since Andrew Johnson decided not to attend the swearing-in of Ulysses S. Grant”

4. Raven, the Acid Bath Princess of the Darkness, Emerges from the Depths of Hell (the Internet)
By Clare Martin | Vulture :: New York Magazine | January 2021
“Their YouTube channel, xXblo0dyxkissxX, featured the girls and, occasionally, their friend Azer (who was briefly disowned after being spotted in a Hollister) dancing and singing along to the likes of Good Charlotte and Papa Roach, while also asserting their devotion to the goth lifestyle.”

5. The Next 3 Months Are Going to Be Pure Hell
By Timothy Egan | The New York Times | December 2020
“We are prisoners of our homes and our minds, Zoom-fatigued, desperate for social contact. As a nation, we are diminished and exhausted, and millions remain out of work.”

6. Pandemic-era Mardi Gras: No big crowds, but plenty of cake
By Rebecca Santana | Associated Press | January 2021
“The season is usually marked by extravagant balls and parades where costumed riders throw trinkets to the mobs of people packed along the parade routes. The coronavirus has put an end to those large events. But that has not stopped notoriously creative New Orleanians from coming up with socially distant ways to celebrate.”

7. How to Collect Salt
By Malia Wollan | Tip :: The New York Times Magazine | December 2020
“Find somewhere warm, near the sea, and fashion shallow evaporation ponds to concentrate salinity.”

8. Mapping Perspectives of the Mexican-American War
By Christopher Rose, Joan Neuberger and Henry Wiencek | 15 Minute History :: UT Department of History | 2014-2020
Also see: Effects of the Atlantic Slave Trade on the Americas | Russia’s October 1917 Revolution | The International Energy Crisis of 1973 | America and the Beginnings of the Cold War

9. ‘He ruined us’: 10 years on, Tunisians curse man who sparked Arab spring
By Michael Safi in Sidi Bouzid | The Guardian | December 2020
“Thanks in part to Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation, Tunisians are freer than before, but many are miserable and disillusioned”

10. Fernando Pessoa
By Melvyn Bragg | In Our Time :: BBC 4 | 2020
Also see: The Zong Massacre | Maria Theresa | Alan Turing | Macbeth

Recommended reading / viewing / listening

This week: Reading faster / Biden’s foreign policy challenges / Remembering a slave’s death in a pandemic / The rise of freebirthing / The fall of Rome and the fall of America

This week: Reading faster / Biden’s foreign policy challenges / Remembering a slave’s death in a pandemic / The rise of freebirthing / The fall of Rome and the fall of America

Most of these great items come from my social media networks. Follow me on Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, LinkedIn, and Facebook for more fascinating videos, photos, articles, essays, and criticism. Learn more about my academic background here.

1. What’s next for America’s favorite news podcast
By Kerry Flynn | CNN Business | December 2020
“[W]ith an incoming president who ran on restoring normalcy to a chaotic White House, what remains to be decided is whether listeners will still flock to ‘The Daily’ for deep dives and explanations of the news.”

2. How to Read Faster
By Malia Wollan | Tip :: The New York Times Magazine | March 2020
“You tend to read faster by reading more.”

3. Biden faces a changed world and no end of foreign policy challenges from China to Iran
By Karen DeYoung | The Washington Post | December 2020
“Biden faces competing priorities, congressional hurdles and wary, if welcoming, allies. In some cases, such as with North Korea and Venezuela, the most daunting obstacle to foreign policy success is the one that has bedeviled several presidents before him. There are no good options.”

4. How to Talk to Yourself
By Malia Wollan | Tip :: The New York Times Magazine | April 2020
“Research suggests that people with low self-esteem who try to force positive self-talk can end up feeling worse.”

5. A Brief Appreciation of the Incest Gnocchi Scene in The Godfather: Part III
By Roxana Hadadi | Vulture :: New York Magazine | December 2020
“In the kitchen of Vincent’s club, though, Mary stops being his ‘little cousin’ and asserts herself as the executor of her own desires. She is a young woman discovering her sexuality, and I’m sorry, who wouldn’t fall for a man who makes his own pasta?”
Also see, from Vulture: In Conversation: Francis Ford Coppola

6. Cicely was young, Black and enslaved – her death during an epidemic in 1714 has lessons that resonate in today’s pandemic
By Nicole S. Maskiell | The Conversation | December 2020
“Throughout the United States, as COVID-19 affects frontline workers and communities of color far more than other demographic groups … I believe it’s important to look back at how a few marginalized and oppressed people who served on the front lines of prior epidemics have been treated and remembered. ”

7. ‘Women feel they have no option but to give birth alone’: the rise of freebirthing
By Hannah Summers | The Guardian | December 2020
“As Covid infections rose, hospital felt like an increasingly dangerous place to have a baby. But is laboring without midwives or doctors the answer?”

8. The Social Life of Forests
By Ferris Jabr | The New York Times Magazine | December 2020
“Trees appear to communicate and cooperate through subterranean networks of fungi. What are they sharing with one another?”

9. America Is Eerily Retracing Rome’s Steps to a Fall. Will It Turn Around Before It’s Too Late?
By Tim Elliott | Politico Magazine | November 2020
“Two thousand years ago, the famous Republic had a chance to reject a dangerous populist. It failed, and the rest is history.”

10. The Amazon has seen our future
The New York Times | October 2020
“We’ve been talking about ‘saving the rainforest’ for decades, but trees are still burning, oil is still spilling, and dams are still being built. Today, the people of the Amazon are living through the most extreme versions of our planet’s most urgent problems.”

Recommended reading / viewing / listening

This week: The fate of Trump’s followers / How we speak to our dogs / The women taking down Harvey Weinstein / Slavery in Native America / Are you doing enough?

This week: The fate of Trump’s followers / How we speak to our dogs / The women taking down Harvey Weinstein / Slavery in Native America / Are you doing enough?

Most of these great items come from my social media networks. Follow me on Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, LinkedIn, and Facebook for more fascinating videos, photos, articles, essays, and criticism. Learn more about my academic background here.

1. What Will Happen to The Trump Toadies?
By Frank Rich | Intelligencer :: New York Magazine | January 2020
“Look to Nixon’s defenders, and the Vichy collaborators, for clues.”

2. Which Star Trek Captain Has the Best Managerial Technique?
By Keith Phipps | Vulture | March 2019
“We considered the captains featured in various film and TV branches of the Star Trek universe and tried to rank them based on who would provide the best work experience — and who would be most likely to bring you back home in one piece.”

3. Why Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis spent her final days in an office instead of a yacht
By Eric Spitznagel | The New York Post | April 2019
“What makes her editing career so remarkable — besides that it lasted longer than her two famous marriages combined — was how it shed new light on a woman whose name is synonymous with 20th-century glamour.”

4. Things People Say to Their Dogs
By Alexanda Horowitz | The New York Times | August 2019
“Our running commentary tells us a lot about who we are — and who we think animals are.”

5. Can CBD Really Do All That?
By Moises Velasquez-Manoff | The New York Times Magazine | May 2019
“How one molecule from the cannabis plant came to be seen as a therapeutic cure-all.”

6. We Have Always Loved Ranking Things, Particularly American Presidents
By Douglas Brinkley | LitHub | May 2019
“In the 18th century, when the Republic began, ranking the American presidents was not much of a discussion. Washington was a demigod, and Adams acted like one, making him a bitterly controversial second choice. From 1800 onward, however, as more presidencies piled up, the debate expanded, but only in a cracker-barrel way.”

7. 100 Women vs. Harvey Weinstein
By Irin Carmon and Amanda Demme | The Cut :: New York Magazine | January 2020
“The disgraced movie mogul finally faces his day in court. But as his accusers know best, there might not be a Hollywood ending. ”
Also see: The Complete List of Allegations Against Harvey Weinstein

8. The Voice of Orson Welles
By Farran Smith Nehme | Current :: The Criterion Collection | November 2018
“In Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), the summit of his work as a vocal actor, he is chronicling the decline of an entire wealthy midwestern civilization—both how the Ambersons pulled their own world down and what was lost with it. He does so with breathtaking grace.”

9. Slavery in Indian Territory
By Brooks Winfree | Not Even Past :: UT Austin Department of History | December 2018
“Many American Indian cultures, like the Choctaw and Chickasaw Indians, practiced a form of non-hereditary slavery for centuries before contact with Europeans. But after Europeans arrived on Native shores, and they forcibly brought African people into labor in the beginning of the 17th century, the dynamics of native slavery practices changed.”

10. Do you ever feel like you’re not enough?
By Mary Halton | Ideas :: TED.com | March 2019
“If your self-worth seems to rise and fall according to what other people think, you’re not alone. But you can challenge this mindset and find a new way of valuing yourself, says psychologist Meag-gan O’Reilly.”

Recommended reading / viewing / listening

This week: Your dog’s mind / John Bercow, the unlikely hero / Baltimore, the fallen city / La Malinche / Slavery in the Pacific

This week: Your dog’s mind / John Bercow, the unlikely hero / Baltimore, the fallen city / La Malinche / Slavery in the Pacific

Most of these great items come from my social media networks. Follow me on Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, LinkedIn, and Facebook for more fascinating videos, photos, articles, essays, and criticism.

1. ‘I shouldn’t really be saying this’: John Bercow on Brexit, backbenchers and why nobody dreams of being speaker
By James Graham | Prospect | April 2019
“The speaker’s chair has become the crucible for the whole Brexit constitutional crisis. And John Bercow is loving it”

2. The Tragedy of Baltimore
By Alec MacGillis | ProPublica | March 2019
“Since Freddie Gray’s death in 2015, violent crime has spiked to levels unseen for a quarter century. How order collapsed in an American city.”

3. Inside the grand and sometimes slimy plan to turn octopuses into lab animals
By Ben Guarino | The Washington Post | March 2019
“In a cavernous laboratory here, scientists are raising thousands of octopuses, cuttlefish and their kin as part of the Cephalopod Program, a three-year-old initiative to transform these sea creatures into the next lab animals. Cephalopods ooze scientific appeal: They have complex bodies, unusual genetics, impressive spatial skills and intelligent minds. Yet the animals can be reluctant to breed, hard to raise and difficult to keep from escaping their tanks.”

4. Let’s Journey Through the Mind of a Dog
By Erica Tennenhouse | The Crux :: Discover | March 2018
“While our grasp of canine cognition may never approach what we know of the human psyche, the latest research has yielded tantalizing nuggets about the inner lives of dogs.”

5. The Democrats’ Dilemma
By Tim Alberta | Politico Magazine | March 2019
“What Ilhan Omar and Dean Phillips tell us about the future of the Democratic Party.”

6. How Regime Change Breeds Demagogues
By Kristen Ghodsee | The New Republic | March 2019
“Economic liberalization can be just as traumatic as military intervention.”

7. Who Was La Malinche?
By Farah Mohammed | JSTOR Daily | March 2019
“La Malinche was a key figure in the conquest of the Aztecs. But was she a heroine or a traitor It depends on whom you ask.”

8. Richmond exhibit seeks to reimagine Confederate statues
By Denise Lavoie | Associated Press | March 2019
“The exhibit grew out of an international design competition that asked architects, planners, designers, and artists to reimagine Monument Avenue, a 5-mile historic urban boulevard where five giant statues of Confederate figures from Virginia stand, including Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, J.E.B. Stuart, Thomas ‘Stonewall’ Jackson and Confederate naval commander Matthew Fontaine Maury.”

9. How the Daughters and Granddaughters of Former Slaves Secured Voting Rights for All
By Martha S. Jones | Smithsonian Magazine | March 2019
“[T]he history of black women and the vote is one about figures who, though subjected to nearly crushing political disabilities, emerged as unparalleled advocates of universal suffrage in its truest sense.”

10. The Trans-Pacific Slave Trade
By Christopher Rose | Not Even Past :: UT Austin Department of History | January 2016
“At the height of the Spanish Empire, the Manila Galleon – an annual flotilla between Manila and Acapulco – was considered the lifeline of Spain’s economy, bringing silver from the mines of New Spain to the markets of Asia. On the reverse trip, the galleons would be loaded with Asian luxury goods, such as spices, silks — and slaves.”

Amerikan Rambler: Podcast 28: Ira Berlin

From Oct. 2016: “Ira Berlin has been called ‘one of the greatest living historians of slavery in the United States.’ “

Dr. Berlin talks about his first plane ride, activism in the 1960s, and why he chose to exchange a lab coat for the historian’s garb. Also, Ira and Colin share their thoughts about the 2016 election.

via Podcast 28: Ira Berlin — Amerikan Rambler: Everybody Has a Story

Amerikan Rambler: Podcast 25: Daniel Crofts

From Sept. 2016: “He is the author of ‘Reluctant Confederates’ and more recently ‘Lincoln and the Politics of Slavery.’ “

Here, he talks with Colin about growing up in Chicago, studying under C. Vann Woodward at Yale, and his adventures teaching in China, following in the footsteps of his missionary grandfather.

via Podcast 25: Daniel Crofts — Amerikan Rambler: Everybody Has a Story

Recommended reading / viewing / listening

This week: George Michael dies / 2016’s best science stories / Texas and Planned Parenthood / What men should know by 22 / Plantations and public history

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This week: George Michael dies / 2016’s best science stories / Texas and Planned Parenthood / What men should know by 22 / Plantations and public history

Most of these great items come from my social media networks. Follow me on Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, LinkedIn, and Facebook for more fascinating videos, photos, articles, essays, and criticism.

1. Ex-Wham singer George Michael dies
BBC News | Dec. 25
“The star … is said to have ‘passed away peacefully at home.’ … Police say there were no suspicious circumstances.”

2. Ordered Deported, Berlin Suspect Slipped Through Germany’s Fingers
By Alison Smale, Carlotta Gall, and Gaia Pianigiani | The New York Times | Dec. 22
“Amri’s life and odyssey underscore a vexing problem, common in Europe: how to handle hundreds of thousands of virtually stateless wanderers who are either unwilling or unable to return home.”

3. ‘Life disappeared before my eyes’: photographer describes killing of Russian ambassador
By Burhan Ozbilici | The Guardian | Dec. 19
“Associated Press photographer Burhan Ozbilici went to view an exhibition in Ankara but instead witnessed the assassination of Andrei Karlov”
Also, from the Associated Press: A look at the most significant attacks in Turkey in 2016

4. The Most Popular Science Stories of 2016
By Andrea Gawrylewski | Scientific American | Dec. 19
“The presidential election took center stage, but our readers were also fascinated by everything from particle physics and rage disorder to autism in girls and the polar vortex”

5. The Best TV Performances of 2016
By Tim Goodman and Daniel Fienberg | The Hollywood Reporter | Dec. 20
Sadness, fear, strength, vulnerability — 2016 had an incredible array of acting achievements.

6. Texas officially kicking Planned Parenthood out of Medicaid
By Alexa Ura | The Texas Tribune | Dec. 20
“Planned Parenthood had previously received $3.1 million in Medicaid funding, but those dollars will be nixed in 30 days …”

7. 22 Things Men Should Know By Age 22
By Todd Brison | Medium | Dec. 15
“Most of the people in your life now will not be there in 5 years. Tell them how much they matter to you today.”

8. The Plantation Tour Disaster: Teaching Slavery, Memory, and Public History
By Niels Eichhorn | Muster :: Journal of the Civil War Era | Dec. 5
“Regardless whether a plantation does or does not cover slavery, they provide an interesting mechanism to teach about the institutions of the Old South, collective memory, and public history.”

9. Mexico: The Cauldron of Modernism
By J. Hoberman | NYR Daily :: The New York Review of Books | Dec. 12
“To a degree, ‘Paint the Revolution’ is the story of the three star muralists, Diego Rivera, David Siqueiros, and José Clemente Orozco, who along with the posthumously canonized Frida Kahlo, defined the new Mexican art.”

10. From White Knight to Thief
By Michael Beschloss | HistorySource :: The New York Times | September 2014
“At the start of the terrifying market plunge of October 1929, he had bravely helped shore up the market by parading around the exchange floor, placing bids for shares of U.S. Steel, as well as other blue-chip holdings.”

Loreta’s Civil War: The proper costume of my sex

Velazquez barely escapes a hotel fire, reunites with her missing slave, and returns to Richmond to resume her espionage activities.

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Throughout 2016 and 2017, Stillness of Heart will share edited excerpts from the extraordinary memoir of Loreta Janeta Velazquez, who chronicled her adventures throughout the Civil War — either as herself, as a Confederate spy, or in disguise as Confederate Lt. Harry T. Buford. She fought and led men in terrible battles, fell in love, bore and lost children, and traveled throughout the U.S. and Europe, ultimately fulfilling her childhood dream of a rich and adventurous life.

You can read the entire 1876 memoir online here. Learn more about Velazquez (and the incredible documentary film Maria Agui Carter made about her) here.

Part 25: Velazquez barely escapes a hotel fire, reunites with her missing slave, and returns to Richmond to resume her espionage activities.

******

In leaving New Orleans I had no very definite plans for the immediate future … but did not doubt of my ability to find a field for the display of my talents ere a great while. I was now more intent than ever upon being employed on detective and scouting duty, for which my recent residence in New Orleans had been an excellent schooling; so excellent, indeed, that I considered myself as well out of my apprenticeship, and as quite competent to assume all the responsibilities of the most difficult or dangerous jobs that might be thrust upon me. …

I judged that matters ought soon to be approaching a crisis somewhere, although exactly what definite aims the belligerents were driving at, if, indeed, they had any just then, I could not comprehend. I resolved, if a grand movement of any kind was coming off, that I must have a hand in it in some shape but that if something of importance was not attempted before a great while I would return to Virginia and see what Fortune had in store for me there. I judged, however, that I would not have much difficulty in finding work to do in the West if I went about looking for it in the right way, and I knew of no better locality in which to seek the information I needed before commencing operations in the field again than Jackson.

To Jackson, therefore, I went … and arrived just in time to witness an occurrence for which I was sincerely sorry. This was the burning of the Bowman House by [Confederate Gen. John C.] Breckenridge’s men, who were infuriated at being told that the proprietor had permitted the Federals to occupy the hotel, and that he had entertained them. … The unfortunate man was in reality not to blame in the matter, for the Federals had occupied his house without his consent. … This incident will serve to show the desperately unpleasant position of the non-combatants throughout this whole region at this and later periods of the war. They were literally between two fires, and no matter how peaceably disposed they might be, they could satisfy neither party and were made to suffer by both. The proprietor of the Bowman House was forced to witness a fine property destroyed before his eyes through the reckless and unthinking anger of men who never stopped to inquire whether he was guilty or not of any offense against them or their cause before taking vengeance upon him. He was reduced to poverty by the burning of his hotel, and I could not help feeling the keenest regret for the occurrence, although I recognized it as one of the inevitable calamities of warfare.

I was, myself, in the hotel when it was fired and barely succeeded in escaping from the building with my life. Not expecting any such occurrence, I had taken rooms and was proceeding to make myself comfortable when, all of a sudden, I found that it was in flames, and that it would be as much as I could do to get out unscathed. The men who fired the building did not give the proprietor an opportunity to make explanations, or if they did, they refused to believe him. …

Several times already had the Federals made attacks of greater or less importance on Vicksburg, which city was now the most important position held by the Confederacy, and commanding the Mississippi River as it did, its possession was considered a matter of the most vital importance. The fall of Vicksburg, everybody knew, would practically give the Federals possession of the river throughout its entire length, and as such a calamity would … be an even greater blow to the Confederate cause than the fall of New Orleans had been. … That sooner or later the Federals would make a more determined effort than they had done previously to take this post appeared to be certain but the natural advantages of the position were such and the fortifications in course of construction were so strong … that the utmost confidence in the ability of the garrison to hold it was felt by every one. …

On my arrival at Jackson I heard of my negro boy Bob for the first time since I had lost him, just after the battle of Shiloh. I therefore proceeded to Grenada, where I found the darkey, who appeared to be heartily glad to see me again after such a long separation. Bob, it seems, had gone plump into a Federal camp, having missed his road, after I had started him off for Corinth but, not liking the company he found there, had slipped away at the earliest opportunity and had wandered about in a rather aimless manner for some time, seeking for me. Not being able to hear anything of me, he had made up his mind that I was dead, and was quite surprised to see me turn up again alive and well. …

From Grenada, I returned once more to Jackson and found the place in considerable excitement over the prospective army movements but as there did not seem to be much for me to do in the particular line of business I desired to take up, I now determined to put my old intention of returning to Virginia into execution, and … I was soon speeding eastward again on my way to Richmond.

I should have mentioned that after leaving New Orleans I resumed male attire at the earliest possible moment and figured once more as Lt. Harry T. Buford. Perhaps if I had gone to [Confederate Gen. Joseph E.] Johnston or some other commanding officer of high rank and frankly stated that I was a woman, giving at the same time a narrative of my exploits, and furnishing references as guarantees of the truthfulness of my story, I would have obtained the kind of employment I was looking for, with permission to use the garments of either sex, as I might deem expedient for the particular errand I had in hand. …

Once past the Confederate pickets, I believed that I could easily reach Washington, and I felt certain that a skillful spy, such as I esteemed myself now to be, could, without great difficulty, find out plenty of things which the Richmond authorities would be glad to know, and for the furnishing of which they would be glad to extend me such recognition as I desired. The military situation in Virginia, too, was more satisfactory than it was in the West, and I had a hankering to be where the Confederates were occasionally winning some victories. Since I had been in the West, I had witnessed little else than disaster, and I greatly desired to take a hand in a fight when the victory would rest with the Confederates, if only for the sake of variety. …

The war had now been in progress nearly two years, and, although the South had not been conquered, affairs were beginning to look decidedly blue for us. All our fine expectations of an easy achievement of our independence had long since vanished, and the situation every day was getting more and more desperate. The country was becoming exhausted, and had not its natural resources been enormous, our people must, ere this, have given up the contest. As it was, with a large portion of the male population in the field, and with heavy drafts being constantly made upon it to fill the ranks of the armies, the cultivation of the ground was neglected, and the necessities of life every day became scarcer and dearer. We were shut out, too, owing to the stringency of the Federal blockade, from anything like regular intercourse with Europe, and all kinds of manufactured articles, and the food we had been accustomed to import, were held at such enormous figures, that they were utterly beyond the reach of any but the most wealthy. The suffering among the poorer classes in all parts of the South was very great, and in those portions which had been devastated by the tramp of the different armies, many of the people were very nearly on the verge of starvation.

It was fast becoming a serious question how long the contest could be prolonged, unless some signal advantage could speedily be achieved in the field by the Confederate forces. It is impossible to express in words how eagerly all classes looked for the achievement of some such advantage, and how bitter was the disappointment, as month after month wore away, and in spite of occasional victories, the people saw, day by day, the Federals drawing their lines closer and closer, and slowly but surely closing in upon them.

We were now entering upon the desperate stage of the war, when the contest was conducted almost against hope, and had the South been inhabited by a less determined race, or one less animated by a fixed resolve to fight to the very last, and until it was impossible to fight any longer, the Federal forces would have succeeded long ere they did in compelling a surrender of the Confederate armies. The men who commanded the armies, however, were not the sort to give up until they were absolutely defeated, and it was starvation, rather than the Federal arms, that at length forced the contest to the conclusion it reached, by the surrender of the armies under the command of [Robert E.] Lee and [Joseph E.] Johnston. …

Richmond … was a very different place from what it was on my last visit to it, as I soon found to my cost. Martial law was in force in its most rigorous aspect. … Beleaguered as Richmond was, every person was more or less an object of suspicion, and strangers, especially, were watched with a vigilance that left them few opportunities to do mischief, or were put under arrest, and placed in close confinement. …

It is not surprising, therefore, that almost immediately upon my arrival in Richmond I fell under the surveillance … as a suspicious character, and was called upon to give an account of myself. My story was not accepted in the same spirit of credibility that some rather tough yarns I had manufactured in the course of my career, for the purpose of satisfying the curiosity of inquisitive people, had been. … There was, evidently, something suspicious and mysterious about me, and, suspicion having once been excited, some lynx-eyed detective was not long in noting certain feminine ways I had, and which even my long practice in figuring as a man had not enabled me to get rid of, and the result was, that I was arrested on the charge of being a woman in disguise, and supposedly a Federal spy, and was conducted to Castle Thunder to reflect upon the mutabilities of fortune until I could give a satisfactory account of myself.

I thought that this was rather hard lines, but as good luck often comes to us in the guise of present tribulation, as matters turned out it was the very best thing that could have happened to me, for it compelled me to reveal myself and my plans to persons who were willing and able to aid me, and to tell my story to friendly and sympathetic ears.

The commander of Castle Thunder was Major G. W. Alexander, a gentleman who, ever since I made his acquaintance through being committed to his custody as a prisoner, I have always been proud to number among my best and most highly-esteemed friends. Major Alexander and his lovely wife both showed the greatest interest in me, and they treated me with such kindness and consideration that I was induced to tell them exactly who I was, what my purposes were in assuming the male garb, what adventures I had passed through, and what my aspirations were for the future. They not only believed my story, but thinking that my services to the Confederacy merited better treatment than I was then receiving at the hands of the authorities, interested themselves greatly in my behalf.

Both the major and his wife … seemed to be shocked, however, at the idea of a woman dressing herself in the garb of the other sex and attempting to play the part of a soldier, and they eagerly urged me to resume the proper costume of my sex again, assuring me that there would be plenty of work for me to do if I were disposed still to devote myself to the service of the Confederacy. The major, however … was urgent that I should abandon my disguise and represented, in forcible terms, the dangers I ran in persisting in wearing it.

To these remonstrances I turned a deaf ear. I had passed through too many real trials to be frightened by imaginary ones, and I did not like to change my costume under compulsion. I accordingly refused positively to put on the garments of a woman, except as a means of gaining my liberty, and with the full intention of resuming male attire at the earliest opportunity. Major Alexander, therefore, finding me fixed in my determination to have my own way, undertook to have matters arranged to my satisfaction without putting me to the necessity of discarding my disguise. …

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North River Notes

Observations on the Hudson River as it passes through New York City. The section of the Hudson which passes through New York is historically known as the North River, called this by the Dutch to distinguish it from the Delaware River, which they knew as the South River. This stretch of the Hudson is still often referred to as the North River by local mariners today. All photos copyright Daniel Katzive unless otherwise attributed. For more frequent updates, please follow northriverblog on Facebook or Instagram.