The Devil’s Punchbowl

A bit of Natchez, Mississippi history during Union occupation that conveniently gets swept under the rug, as it destroys the narrative of Lincoln’s virtuous war of emancipation. According to local historian Don Estes, during the War Between the States, African American Union Troops were segregated and quartered “Under the Hill” near the sawmill. They had…

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Christmas in 19th Century America

The Christmas that Americans celebrate today seems like a timeless weaving of custom and feeling beyond the reach of history. Yet the familiar mix of carols, cards, presents, trees, multiplicities of Santas and holiday neuroses that have come to define December 25th in the United States is little more than a hundred years old.
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The Revolutionary Christmas

The American Revolutionary War, also known as the American War of Independence was fought between Great Britain and the thirteen British colonies between the years 1775 and 1783. The mutinous colonists declared themselves no longer allied with the crown and kicked off an eight year struggle against the political and economic policies of the British Empire. The Declaration of Independence was signed during the revolution in 1776 and declared the thirteen colonies, now to be separately chartered and governed, the United States of America.
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Civil War Railroads

Confederate troops were rushed by rail to confront the Union army led by Brigadier General Irwin McDowell at Bull Run. Among those who rode by rail was a brigade under an eccentric professor from Virginia Military Institute. That brigade delivered the battle’s knockout blow and its general, Brigadier General Thomas Jonathan Jackson, would gain his sobriquet “Stonewall”.
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Battle of New Market Heights

As the morning sun burned through the fog along the New Market Road about eight miles southeast of Richmond on the autumn morning of September 29, 1864, it revealed a scene of carnage and human wreckage. Dead infantrymen in coats that were a familiar shade of Union blue covered the slopes before New Market Heights. But most of the faces of the dead and maimed were black.
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Red Republicans and Lincoln’s Marxists

  After the failed socialist revolutions of 1848 which encompassed most of the European continent, many German, English, Hungarian, Bavarian, etc. atheistic socialists flocked to the United States having been banned from their homelands for treason. Ironically just about all of them wound up in the North (for a number of factors including an already…

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