Evidence of Black Soldiers? Photo (cc) J. Stephen Conn.

I haven’t seen an edition of the Carnival of Bad History for a while, and I’ve mixed feelings about its demise. A lot of the writing in it was very good, but it’s very easy to write about Bad History badly. I’d be happier writing about popular history and talking about what is good or bad about it, rather than just talking about the bad. At the same time, if there’s something off in the popular press then I can see why it’s a good idea to blog about it. An excellent example of this has been recent discussion of Black Confederates on Civil War Memory. A search will bring up quite a few posts.

There are a couple of ways of looking at the Civil War. One is that it was about slavery, and a move to emancipation by the North which was resisted by the South. This makes the war against the Confederacy a war against racism, and clearly the guys in grey were the Bad Guys. That makes life difficult in the South. The Civil War isn’t in living memory it was fought in the 1860s. Still, there are More >