“What she did in nursing is incredibly important and we don’t want to diminish that at all. But to say that Clara Barton is a nurse is a gross understatement of her importance. The fact is that she was a relief organizer at a time when women didn’t do that. At a time when women found that they had to get men involved in order to be taken seriously, Clara…

Recently stumbled upon this, very funny!

This is pretty cool. Two professional colorists have combined their skills with photographs and fascination with the American Civil War to create a remarkable series of color photographs from the era. Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/

Been out of the loop for a month now with my teaching and coaching duties. My HS Football team in the last 3 weeks alone has traveled over 1600 miles to play teams around the state of Colorado. Anyway, I had an article, “Robbed of Glory, the Aftermath of Gettysburg and its impact on Soldiers and Civilians,” published via the Smithsonian last month. Thanks to the Smithsonian it was an…

In August of 1862 Private Jonas Fuller of Bradford County enlisted  in Company A of the 141st Pennsylvania Infantry. His regiment spent time at Camp Prescott Smith in Arlington, VA., and on the march protecting Washington, D.C. The regiment was organized in August, 1862 and did not see significant action until December, 1862, at the Battle of Fredericksburg, after Jonas had passed away. Jonas wrote several letters home that have…

During some research today came across this nugget of a quote from Nathan Bedford Forrest who clearly had “no moral scruples against slavery,” when he apparently stated during the war “If we aint fightin’ fer slavery then I’d like to know what we are fightin’ fer.” Turns out not to be an unknown quote, but where I found it was in the book Veteran Comes Back, by Willard Wallard published…

In his 1998 review of Shook Over Hell: Post-Traumatic Stress, Vietnam, and the Civil War (by Eric T. Dean, Jr.), James M. McPherson declared that the work “breaks new ground in its analysis of the psychiatric casualties of battle.” Yet since the book’s publishing it has been vastly overlooked by social historians. When researching Civil War historiography one rarely finds Shook Over Hell mentioned when assessing the soldier. Though McPherson…

Over the last three months SoldierStudies.org has received over 2 million page views! For June alone the total surpassed one million total. The leading search string was “civil war” (21.15%) of all visitors came from a search engine using those key terms! This total is for both the database and the blog.

As noted in Part I, during the Civil War conditions such as “melancholy” and “nostalgia” first appeared as a medical condition in the military surgeon’s reports. According to at least one study, “three cases of nostalgia per 1,000 troops per year were reported among Union soldiers” and most of the soldiers were less than 20 years of age. This led to Surgeon General William A. Hammond in 1862 recommending that…