How Black homesteaders built a town in Nicodemus Kansas
Nicodemus is still there, on the high plains of Graham County in northwestern Kansas. It is a National Historic Site now, with a handful of residents and five historic buildings,…
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What we actually know about women who enlisted in disguise
This is a subject where the popular literature and the documentary record have drifted a long way apart, and I want to walk through both, because the real version is more…
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What happened to the refugee camps of the Civil War
They were called contraband camps, and the name comes from a legal argument rather than from anything humane.
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How early radar changed the battles on the USS Texas BB 35
The Texas was commissioned in 1914. She is a museum ship now, and she is the only surviving American battleship that served in both world wars, which makes her a useful place to…
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How the USS Olympia C 6 brought home the Unknown Soldier
Olympia is the oldest steel warship still afloat anywhere, and she is tied up in Philadelphia. Most people know her as Dewey’s flagship at Manila Bay in 1898. The voyage I find…
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The women the Union Army actually employed
Ask a class who worked for the Union Army and you get soldiers, and after some prompting, nurses. That is roughly where the textbook stops, and it leaves out thousands of women…
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Why so many second world war deck logs never made it to the archives
People write to the National Archives expecting to find a day by day record of a relative’s ship and are told the record does not exist. That answer is usually correct, and it is…
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Why smallpox spread through wartime Richmond
Disease killed more men in the Civil War than combat did. That sentence appears in most textbooks and then nothing is done with it.
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The southern mill strikes that history textbooks forgot
American labour history, as taught in most high schools, happens in northern cities. Coal in Pennsylvania, steel in Chicago, garment work in New York.
