Conning tower of U.S.S. Cavalla (SS-244), as it appeared on her first war patrol in June 1944. In the 1950s Cavalla was refitted as a hunter-killer submarine (SSK), and in the process had her superstructure completely rebuilt, changing her external appearance permanently from what it was during World War II. In the comments section of my recent posting with the digital model of the coastal steamship Harlan, a regular reader asked about the software I use and how I go about doing the modeling and renderings. In response to that, I’ll put down a few notes here that may give a little background ..read more

On Decoration Day, 1871, Frederick Douglass gave the following address at the monument to the Unknown Dead of the Civil War at Arlington National Cemetery. It is a short speech, but one of the best of its type I’ve ever encountered. I’ve posted it before, but it think it’s something worth re-reading and contemplating every Memorial Day. The Unknown Loyal Dead Arlington National Cemetery, Virginia, on Decoration Day, May 30, 1871 Friends and Fellow Citizens: Tarry here for a moment. My words shall be few and simple. The solemn rites of this hour and place call for no lengthened speech. There ..read more

As many readers will know, the practice of setting aside a specific day to honor fallen soldiers sprung up spontaneously across the country, North and South, in the years following the Civil War. One of the earliest — perhaps the earliest — of these events was the ceremony held on May 1, 1865 in newly-occupied Charleston, South Carolina, by that community’s African American population, honoring the Union prisoners buried at the site of the city’s old fairgrounds and racecourse, as described in David Blight’s Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Over the ..read more

Note: This is the first of three posts that I republish every Memorial Day weekend. Last week I was traveling, and so was unable to post them over several days as I usually do. _______ This Memorial Day weekend, I’d like to highlight three Civil War veterans interred here in Galveston. I don’t have a familial or personal connection to any of them, but I think of them as neighbors of mine, of a sort. Charles DeWitt Anderson (1827-1901) served as a Colonel in the Confederate army, and in the summer of 1864 was charged with the defense of Fort Gaines, on the eastern side of the entrance to ..read more

The Virginia Flaggers may not be my biggest fans, but they clearly think my efforts are good enough to plagiarize this old 2013 post of mine. Virtually every word in their Facebook posting is one I wrote eight years ago, verbatim. The only important thing they omitted was the name of the artist who colorized the original black-and-white image, Mads Madsen, and that’s actually a bigger offense. The Flaggers claim to stand for “Honor, Dignity, Respect, and Heritage,” but those things apparently don’t prevent them from taking others’ work and passing it off as their own. The Confederate Heritage ..read more

Update, March 1: It turns out that Bill Dorris’ estate is worth far less than one might expect, given his bequest of $5 million to his dog, who didn’t even live with him. Like, maybe ONE TENTH of that. What a BS artist that guy was. Thanks to KEW for bringing this to my attention. _____ Charles William “Bill” Dorris (above), the Nashville attorney and developer who owned the land on Interstate 65 where that hideous fiberglass statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest stands, carked late last year. Dorris insisted he wasn’t racist, of course, but in 2015 he told Nashville Public Radio that the institut ..read more

Stonewall Jackson no longer glowers across the parade ground at the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington. H/t Kevin. Photo by Steve Helber, Martinsville Journal. _____ ..read more

For a while now I’ve been posting this well-known Thomas Nast cartoon from 1868, “Uncle Sam’s Thanksgiving Dinner.” This year, though, I’d like to direct my readers to Pat Young’s detailed discussion of the work and the symbolism in it — there’s a lot there you may not have noticed. ________ ..read more

Recently I discovered that one of my old blog posts about Frederick Douglass was cited by a fellow named Mike Scruggs, writing at VDARE. Scrugg’s short essay was a pastiche of tired and mostly-debunked tropes about Black Confederates, and the post he cited (and linked to) was one of mine that discussed Douglass’ well-known assertion from September 1861 that there were Black soldiers, “having muskets on their shoulders, and bullets in their pockets, ready to shoot down loyal troops,” in the Confederate army at the First Battle of Manassas/Bull Run. More specifically, my post discussed likely so ..read more

There have been a lot of articles over the years on the confederados, descendants of the southerners who emigrated to Brazil after the Civil War, hoping to recreate their plantation-based culture in a new region. This included slaveholding, of course, that remained legal in Brazil for another two decades after the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in the United States. Most articles have been pretty shallow, treating the confederados like a quaint curiosity, a people and culture caught in a time bubble, a little part of the old Confederacy that survives in an out-of-the-way spot in th ..read more