Sci-Fi and Slavery
“The first impulse is to go, oh man, are you supposed to be writing about that, as a white American?” he said. “We tend to think of racism and slavery…
Posts by tag
Civil War
37 posts
Wanted/Needed/Loved: Laura Ballance’s Ghost Stories
There is one story that my mother used to tell me often, which has become in some ways a symbol of my childhood.
The Sunday Rumpus Essay: Widow
If he had died in the Civil War, the extent of my mourning would have been a scandal. He was not my husband, my fiancé, my father, or my brother.
The Rumpus Interview with Chris Jennings
Chris Jennings talks about his new book Paradise Now: The Story of American Utopianism, incremental reform, Transcendentalists, Shakers, and creating a more perfect future.
The Rumpus Interview with Margo Jefferson
Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Margo Jefferson talks about her new memoir, Negroland, and about growing up in an elite black community in the segregated Chicago of the 1950s and 1960s.
Albums of Our Lives: Matt Jones’s The Deep Enders
Matt Jones writes haunting songs. February songs. Songs that get under my skin and seep into my short stories. Songs that remind me of the rust belt and the south...
Remembering the Blue and the Gray
Memorial Day is a time of both national reflection and diverse local tradition. In a piece connecting poetry and community storytelling, The Atlantic offers some literary history in observance of…
Why the Civil War Is Still Worth Talking About
Byliner’s list of spectacular nonfiction articles of 2012 highlights two complementary essays from the Atlantic‘s Civil War issue. First, Yoni Appelbaum uses a hyperrealistic “cyclotron” painting of the Battle of Gettysburg…
When the Wall Between Church and State Fell
The Daily Beast has a fascinating post about a mostly forgotten moment in American history: the time General Ulysses S. Grant “wrote out an order banishing all Jews throughout his…
Burns Gets Burned
Remember all those VHS tapes that added up to a compendium of everlasting Civil War knowledge? It turns out Ken Burns’ Civil War documentary series isn’t entirely accurate, but in…
“Pastor Witherspoon Goes to War”
I’ve been an ardent follower of the NY Times Disunion blog almost since it started. If you’re unfamiliar with it, the Times is reliving the Civil War in a sense,…
Fables of the Reconstruction
With patience reminiscent of Tolstoy, Cornelia Nixon weaves a tapestry of events to explain how an ordinary girl in post-Civil War Maryland kills her lover and gets away with it.