Articles from Pamphlet Produced by the National Park Service
A report by Carleton Beals on Italy’s new order:
The strong state has arrived in Italy. It has been on the road ever since the failure of the factory seizures in September, 1920.
A second and far more thorough book review of My Story, by German General Erich von Ludendorff (1865 – 1937).
When the bitterness of these days has passed, historians will very likely classify Ludendorff as first among the military geniuses of his time. But his ‘own story’ will have importance principally because of certain sidelights it casts upon his motives and psychology.
A shorter review of Ludendorff’s memoir can be read here.
Read about Ludendorff’s collusion with Hitler…
James Agee, the film reviewer for The Nation (1942 – 1948), was charmed by the warmth of It’s a Wonderful Life
and believed that it was an admirable and well-crafted piece of film making; he nonetheless came away feeling like he’d been sold a bill of goods and rejected the movie primarily because he believed that films created in the Atomic Age should reflect the pessimism that created the era.
A short paragraph from General Grant’s memoir recalling the the first private interview with President Lincoln, on the occasion in the early spring of 1864 when he was given command of all the Federal armies.
In my first interview with Mr. Lincoln alone he stated to me that he had never professed to be a military man or to know how campaigns should be conducted…
Click here to read about a dream that President Lincoln had, a dream that anticipated his violent death.
Horace M. Kallen (1888 – 1974) was a deep thinker who questioned the practice of Americanization (ie. assimilation). In this 1915 article, Kallen contended that although immigrants to American shores are required to develop allegiances to certain self-evident beliefs that are embraced throughout our republic – but outside of that, there is no reason that immigrants should not be able to maintain their own ethnic and cultural identities. In the Eighties, those who embraced this line of thinking preferred to call America a salad bowl as opposed to a melting pot.
By the afternoon of July 2, the powerful forces of Meade and Lee were at hand, and battle on a tremendous scale was imminent. That part of the Union line extending diagonally across the valley between Seminary and Cemetery Ridges held. Late in the forenoon, General Dan Sickles, commanding the Third Corps which lay north of Little Round Top, sent Berdan’s sharpshooters and some of the men of the 3rd Maine Regiment forward from Emmitsburg Road to Pitzer’s Woods… as they reached the woods, a strong Confederate force fired upon them…
In just two paragraphs this author beautifully summed up the immediate aftermath of that remarkable battle:
Late on the afternoon of July 4, Lee began an orderly retreat. The wagon train of wounded, 17 miles in length, guarded by Imboden’s cavalry, started homeward through Greenwood and Greencastle. At night, the able-bodied men marched over the Hagerstown Road by way of Monterey Pass to the Potomac…
From Amazon: Retreat from Gettysburg: Lee, Logistics, and the Pennsylvania Campaign
Click here to read about the 1913 Gettysburg Reunion.
An account of the inconclusive first day at Gettysburg:
The two armies converge on Gettysburg – The men of Heth’s division, leading the Confederate advance across the mountain, reached Cashtown on June 29. Pettigrew’s brigade was sent on to Gettysburg the following day to obtain supplies, but upon reaching the ridge a mile west of the town, they observed a column of Union cavalry approaching…
Click here to read a Confederate perspective of the first day at Gettysburg.
It was on the first day at Gettysburg that the Confederates made a terrible mistake. Read about it here.
For Jefferson Davis and his confederates, the double disasters of Gettysburg and Vicksburg that came with the summer of 1863 spelled doom for the Rebel cause. Writing in his diary during those canicular days was Confederate General Josiah Gorgas (1818 – 1883) who succinctly summarized the meaning of these two major defeats:
Events have succeeded one another with disastrous rapidity. One brief month ago we were apparently at the point of success. Lee was in Pennsylvania, threatening Harrisburg, and even Philadelphia… Today absolute ruin seems to be our portion. The Confederacy totters to its destruction.
Not long after the Titanic catastrophe was made known to the world there were many rumors and half truths that had to be sorted out and recognized as such in order to fully understand the full scope of the catastrophe; the editors of The Nation printed this article which contributed to that effort:
…two terrible, damning facts stand out: the first, that the ship was speeding through an ice-field of the presence of which its officers were fully aware; the second, is that every life could readily have been saved had there been boats and rafts enough to keep people afloat in a clear, starry night on an exceptionally smooth Atlantic sea. Both these facts are indisputable.
As for the lifeboats, these expensive affairs that could cost the large sum of $425.00 apiece – there were but twenty of them in addition to a few rafts…
The attached file is a digital facsimile of a classified ad that was once posted in a Georgia newspaper long after the Emancipation Proclamation was passed into law. The editors at THE NATION saw fit to title the notice as an interesting little advertisement when they reproduced it six months later on their pages. Yet, for the Southerners who set the type-face, applied the ink, delivered the paper and subscribed, the ad was typical of so many other classifieds that had appeared during the past one hundred and fifty years, and it was not, as the Yankees put it:
…the request of someone who never heard of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution of the United States.
The weapons and tactics used at the Battle of Gettysburg were in no way different from those brought into use during other parts in the war. Just as war has always been practiced, weapons influence tactics and this article lists a variety of Civil War rifles and artillery pieces that were put to use during that three day battle. The author also goes to some length describing the manner in which Civil War regiments and brigades marched into battle and the deployment of their supporting artillery batteries.
A clearly written piece which sums up the climactic third day of the Gettysburg battle:
Night brought an end to the bloody combat at East Cemetery Hill, but this was not the time for rest. What would Meade do? Would the Union Army remain in its established position and hold its lines at all costs?
This small notice from The Nation marked the death of General John McCausland (1836 – 1927), C.S.A.. Much to the disappointment of the town elders residing in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, McCausland (pardoned by President U.S. Grant) escaped the hangman and outlived every last Confederate general ever put in the field.
The Nation reported in 1912 that a telegram of great historical importance had been put up for auction (N.B.: the Twenty-First Century equivalent of a telegram is a text message). The telegram was addressed to General William Techumseh Sherman and signed by General U.S. Grant and it clearly gives Sherman free reign to ravage the countryside as he marched.
Click here to read the chronologies of the American Civil War.
To read the story behind Lincoln’s beard, click here.
Second only to New Orleans, Richmond was the largest city in the Confederacy, having a population of about 38,000. It was also the center of iron manufacturing in the South. The Tredegar Iron Works, main source of cannon supply for the Southern armies, influenced the choice of Richmond as the Confederate Capital and demanded defense.
Click here to read about the heavy influence religion had in the Rebel states during the American Civil War.
On the first anniversary marking the American intervention into the First World War Charles Payne of Grenell College, Iowa, wrote to the editors at The Nation and cautioned his fellow-Americans to remember the conduct and humility of Civil War General Robert E. Lee.
Click here to read about the heavy influence religion had in the Rebel states during the American Civil War.
The post war period was the time when the press had to start figuring out what was true and what was false in all matters involving the reports that their assorted papers and magazines had printed during the conflict. Admiral Sims of the U.S. Navy caused a stir when he went on record announcing that a particularly odious policy observed by the Germans, widely believed to have been true, was in fact, a falsehood:
I stated…that barring the case of the hospital ship Llandovery Castle I did not know of any case where a German submarine commander had fired upon the boats of a torpedoed vessel…
