This is a pretty good panel discussion on the Patriots vs. the Loyalists during the American Revolutionary War. The video's description reads, "Historians explored the Revolutionary War as a civil war at a conference hosted by Texas Christian University in Fort Worth."

This article came up in my feed. "By President Trump’s account, his desire to annex Greenland merely restores prewar borders, his trade policy returns Gilded Age fiscal policy and prosperity and his efforts to build a towering arch in Washington completes a 150-year-old architectural dream. President Andrew Jackson’s spoils system was an anti-corruption purge, not unlike Mr. Trump’s own. President William McKinley’s protectionist stance was also downright Trumpian. Oh, and the Unabomber, too, evidently has a link to the 47th president, by his telling: His uncle once taught the notorious terrorist.

I found this essay from Professor Manisha Sinha. "The state of Florida recently released a new American history high school course with a conservative tilt. Troublingly, it glosses over the relationship between the founders and slavery—a topic that should in 2026 promote a rich understanding of the U.S. past, but one that has also been a subject of controversy, including in Philadelphia at the site of the President’s House. In fact, slavery was central to the economic growth and expansion of the young republic, so much so that it would take a long and brutal war to get rid of it.

We begin with this article from Batavia, New York. "Of all the military graves in Genesee County, one stands out for its uniqueness of the soldier buried there. A Confederate soldier is buried in the Historic Batavia Cemetery. His name was Major Philemon Tracy and his grave is one of the farthest north of a Confederate soldier in the United States. He is also most likely the only Confederate officer to be transported north and buried during the entire Civil War. Tracy’s story is an interesting one which always raises the question as to why he is buried in Batavia."

In this lecture, Professor Daniel Feller discusses the year 1860 and how it may have led to the "Second American Revolution," The video's description reads, "Historian Daniel Feller discussed the year of 1860 as the 'Second American Revolution.' The Knoxville Civil War Roundtable, in Tennessee, hosts this event."

This is the discussion from the 2025 Robert Fortenbaugh Lecture in Gettysburg, PA. I have to say the title is deceptive, because there is very little discussion about the field of Civil War studies. The video's description reads, "Historians Drew Gilpin Faust, David Blight, and Stephanie McCurry discussed the evolving field of Civil War studies. The Gettysburg College Civil War Institute hosted this event."

This is a nice conversation between Dr. Annette Gordon-Reed and Dr. Lonnie Bunch on the politics of public history. The video's description reads, "Organization of American Historians President Annette Gordon-Reed and Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie Bunch addressed political controversies - including those prompted by Trump administration policies - over how to present American history in museums, historic sites, and public displays. This conversation was held in Philadelphia during the annual meeting of professional historians as the city prepared for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence."

A banner outside the Theodore Roosevelt Federal Building in Washington, D.C. Christine Kao/Getty Images I found this article on the Trump administration's war on the truth in history. "It’s been a puzzling period for formal expressions of patriotic nostalgia. On two separate occasions this week, the federal government publicized false quotations of iconic American presidents, fumbling attempts to commemorate the nation’s 250th anniversary. The first instance came on Flag Day, when the Department of Homeland Security’s official X account misattributed the following description of the American flag’s symbolism to George Washington: 'We take the stars from heaven, the red from our mother country, separating it by white stripes, thus showing that we have separated from her, and the white stripes shall go down to posterity, representing our liberty.' While this quote has been ascribed to Washington, it is evidently apocryphal.

The History, Archives, and Records Preservation Project just released its report on the Orange Pedophile's war on American History. You can find the link to it at this website. "The History, Archives, and Records Preservation Project (HARPP) has released “The Federal Assault on History: A Record of Executive Actions,” the first comprehensive report documenting and analyzing the Trump administration’s sweeping, coordinated effort since January 2025 to reshape how the American past is recorded, preserved, and shared with the public. "Organized by federal agency and category of action, such as the censorship and erasure, attacks on public institutions, and the promotion of 'patriotic' history, the 70-plus-page report functions as an accessible reference guide for journalists, policymakers, and the public seeking to track specific intiatives by the White House targeting evidence-based and accurate history.

This is another terrific interview on NPR's program, "Fresh Air," In this episode, host Tonya Moslely talks with Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw.

It's been my observation that if you scratch a confederate heritage person you will find a racist underneath. Our article this week is more evidence for that observation. It comes to us from Atlanta, Georgia. "Atlanta Public Schools and Jefferson City Schools are investigating after allegations of racist behavior surfaced following a high school football game Friday night. The allegations involve Maynard Jackson High School students who traveled to Jefferson High School for the Sept. 11 game. Since the game, FOX 5 Atlanta has been tagged in social media posts and received emails from people calling for an investigation into what happened.

Freedmen’s Celebration,” Houston Daily Evening Star, June 20, 1866. Photograph by author from copy preserved in the Texas Newspaper Collection at the Texas State Library and Archives Commission. Professor W. Caleb McDaniel provides us this essay on the first Juneteenth celebration. On June 19, 1866, several thousand Black Texans filled the streets of Houston for the first “celebration of the anniversary of their freedom.” That morning, according to newspaper reports, the crowds assembled on a city block in the Fourth Ward, where Black Methodists had recently erected a church. Waving US flags and banners of red, white, and blue, they paraded through the center of town, led by two ministers: Elias Dibble as president and Sandy Parker as marshal.

This is an outstanding discussion between host Professor Gerald Prokopowicz and his guest, Dr. Jared Peatman, about Dr. Peatman's latest book concerning the 20th Maine Volunteer Infantry.

This is a terrific interview with Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, one of the founding scholars of Critical Race Theory. The episode's description reads, "Law professor Kimberlé W. Crenshaw coined the term 'intersectionality' decades ago. In Trump 2.0, we need her work more than ever." You can access the interview here.

This is a discussion between host Professor Gerald Prokopowicz and his guest, Joe Boslet about Joe's book on Little Round Top.

Robert G. Ingersoll (circa 1865-1880). Source: Wikimedia Commons Check out this outstanding post from Dr. Caleb McDaniel. It's well worth your time. The main points of his post: And a careful look at that history reveals three important facts about the history of Arlington House that are not widely known: In its early years as a historic site, before it became a Lee memorial, the Department of War didn’t hide slavery at Arlington House. The Congressman who sponsored a “permanent memorial” to Lee in 1955 opposed the Civil Rights Movement.

Residences of delegates who voted for and against secession on April 17, 1861, displayed on E. Hergesheimer, Map of Virginia Showing the Distribution of its Slave Population from the Census of 1860, C. B. Graham, Lithographer (Washington, D.C.: Henry S. Graham, 1861), Library of Virginia. I found this map to be enlightening . "On April 17, 1861, the Virginia Convention voted 88 to 55 in favor of secession. That vote took place when civil war was breaking out, and the delegates had to decide which side to take. Plotting the places of residence of the delegates on an 1861 map showing the distribution of slaves in Virginia illustrates that most of the 55 delegates who opposed secession resided in the greater Ohio Valley, in or near the Shenandoah Valley, or near the Potomac River and Chesapeake Bay.

This column takes a look at the Reconstruction Amendments and their effects. "Americans often speak of the Constitution as though it were a single inheritance from the Founders. The reality is more complicated. There is, of course, only one written Constitution. But the Civil War and Reconstruction changed its moral and legal center of gravity. Historians and legal scholars have often described Reconstruction as a second founding. Some have gone further, referring to the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments as creating a kind of Second Constitution. That phrase describes a constitutional transformation rather than a separate document.

People who either don't know what history really is or get intellectually lazy will accuse historians and others who explode their cherished myths of being "revisionists" as if it's a bad thing to revise our understanding of things. When historians find new information, they revise our understanding of the past. When they approach a subject from a different direction and that yields new understandings, it revises our understanding of the past. That's a good thing. Those who use the word "revisionist" as a pejorative lose credibility. I found this posting…

Pope Leo XIV, left, attends the presentation of his first encyclical, “Magnifica humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence,” at the Vatican, Monday, May 25, 2026. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino) I saw this article. " Pope Leo XIV made a historic apology on Monday for the Holy See’s role in legitimizing slavery and for having failed to condemn it for centuries, calling the Vatican’s record a 'wound in Christian memory.' Past popes have apologized for Christians’ involvement in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. But no pope had ever publicly acknowledged, much less apologized for, the role that past popes played in giving European sovereigns explicit authority to subjugate and enslave 'infidels.' History’s first U.S.-born pope, 

YouTube video by Jimmy Kimmel Live

The National Aboriginal Veterans Monument, Ottawa (source). This essay from Professor Daniel Sims shows how indigenous history in North America knows no national boundaries, and historical truth also knows no national boundaries. Nor does racism. "In May 2024, I attended a meeting of Parks Canada’s Indigenous Cultural Heritage Advisory Council in Sydney, British Columbia. One of our agenda items was the federal government’s commemoration of upcoming historical events, including the passage of the Indian Act in 1876. The hope was that we would tell the federal government how to commemorate these events in an Indigenous way or at least in a manner that reflected the value of Indigenous peoples and Indigenous values.

This essay from Professor Andrew S. Curran again proves history is relevant to the present, and the history of other nations has relevance to our own nation. "In May 2025, François Bayrou, then the prime minister of France, fielded an unusual question from a member of Parliament: Why hadn’t France formally revoked the Code Noir, the notorious set of laws that had been used to enforce slavery in French colonies? It would be safe to assume that Mr. Bayrou didn’t see that question coming; few people understood that the laws were still on the books.

This is something we can use much more of in the Trump era. It's Carl Sagan's Baloney Detector. The Fine Art of Baloney Detectionby Carl Sagan View the original Fine Art of Baloney article here as a downloadable PDF! My parents died years ago. I was very close to them. I still miss them terribly. I know I always will. I long to believe that their essence, their personalities, what I loved so much about them, are — really and truly — still in existence somewhere. I wouldn't ask very much, just five or ten minutes a year, say, to tell them about their grandchildren, to catch them up on the latest news, to remind them that I love them.

This is a book by Joseph Boslet that seeks to offer a new interpretation of the fighting on Little Round Top on July 2, 1863. Mr. Boslet has done a great deal of research in the secondary sources and in the Official Records and has also integrated his personal experience as a Vietnam veteran to craft his interpretation. The book is actually mistitled. It should be titled, "Vincent's Brigade on Little Round Top at Gettysburg," because the book overwhelmingly discusses the actions Colonel Strong Vincent and his brigade took. Other brigades are mentioned only in passing, with the exception of the 140th New York under Patrick O'Rorke.

Statues of Stonewall Jackson, William “Extra Billy” Smith and Dr. Hunter Holmes McGuire are loaded onto a truck after being removed from their plinths in Capitol Square, Friday, Aug. 28, 2026 in Richmond, Va.MIKE KROPF, TIMES-DISPATCH We're back in the Old Dominion this week with this article from Richmond, VA. "Crews removed statues of Confederate figures Stonewall Jackson, William 'Extra Billy' Smith and Hunter Holmes McGuire from Capitol Square in Richmond on Friday. The three statues are being transferred to the Shenandoah Valley Battlefields Foundation, a nonprofit that preserves Civil War battlefields and operates two museums.

A witness stone for Frank on the grounds of Historic Rock Ford describes him as a “multi-talented worker enslaved on this farm.” | Historic Rock Ford I came across this article detailing some interesting research some students in Lancaster, PA did. "There’s no shortage of history in Lancaster ahead of the United States’ 250th anniversary. One of the nation’s oldest inland cities, it was once the U.S. capital — for a single day. George Ross, who signed the Declaration of Independence, had a law practice there. Edward Hand, adjutant general to George Washington, owned a Lancaster home that still stands today.

Dead soldiers on a field after the battle of Gettysburg. Timothy H. O'Sullivan, The J. Paul Getty Museum I found this article on how the Civil War is still shaping our politics today. It's from Professors John Kinder and Jennifer Murray. "The negative public reaction to Operation Metro Surge – the violent immigration dragnet in Minnesota – was 'MAGA’s Gettysburg,' wrote New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie on Jan. 28. Bouie, of course, was comparing ICE’s setbacks to the Confederate defeat at Gettysburg, the battle often credited with turning the tide of the American Civil War…

I found this interesting article by Professors Greg Downs and Kate Masur. "Two days after the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, we authored a piece for the Washington Post drawing on our expertise in Civil War and Reconstruction era political violence to contextualize what had happened. Somewhat later, as the U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol began to assemble expert testimony on political violence, staffers asked us to provide an account of the fragility of American democracy in the 19th century and to suggest some of the likely consequences of refusing to fully grapple with the implications of January 6. 

This is a terrific conversation between host Professor Gerald Prokopowicz and his guest, Professor Ken Noe about Ken's latest book on Abraham Lincoln as commander-in-chief. I'm really looking forward to reading this book.

Elizabeth FreemanMiniature portrait, watercolor on ivory by Susan Anne Livingston Ridley Sedgwick, 1811 "Mumbett" (manuscript draft), by Catharine Maria Sedgwick, 1853 I found this article on how slavery ended in Massachusetts. "I think the Idea of Slavery is inconsistent with our own conduct & Constitution..."~William Cushing, Chief Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, 1783 Slavery persisted in Massachusetts through most of the eighteenth century. While individual enslaved people had successfully sued for freedom, and groups had petitioned the colonial government for freedom (although without success; see "The Struggle for Freedom" section of this website for more information), the institution of slavery was not legally abolished until the 1780s, in direct response to the new Massachusetts Constitution.

This excellent history of the first month of World War I justifiably won the Pulitzer Prize. Tuchman's style makes this an easy and enjoyable read, even as she delves into the details of military planning and troop movements. Most have read about Germany's Schlieffen Plan, and Tuchman discusses it while also looking into the French Plan 17. She also unravels the puzzle of how so many European nations got roped into the conflict that began when Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary. Princip was a Serbian whose goal was the eventual independence of Serbia.

Statues of Stonewall Jackson, William "Extra Billy" Smith and Hunter Holmes McGuire are loaded onto a truck Friday after being removed from their plinths in Capitol Square in Richmond. (Mike Kropf/Richmond Times-Dispatch/Getty Images) This week we go to the Old Dominion and this story from Richmond. "More than six years after protesters in Richmond toppled an iconic statue of Jefferson Davis amid national civil rights demonstrations, work crews quietly removed three remaining Confederate monuments from their pedestals across town. The removals of the past Confederate heroes — Gen. Thomas J.