The Crowded Bandwagon – and Coming up Next Week

 

  

 

It looks like everyone is jumping on the failure-of-Reconstruction bandwagon.  Charles Lane’s The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction and LeeAnna Keith’s The Colfax Massacre: The Untold Story of Black Power, White Terror and the Death of Reconstruction both revisit the incident covered in Nicholas Lemann’s Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War.

I’ll be in Ohio on March 12 (next Wednesday), delivering my Threads program to the Central Ohio Civil War Round Table in Columbus.  I’m reworking my presentation, dropping the campaign and battle summaries altogether and grouping the stories differently.  The end result should be more structured and easy going at the same time.  But I’ll be using most of my free time this weekend working on the PowerPoint slides, so I won’t be posting much original material between now and my return – though I will put up the full review of the Jackson Video if America’s Civil War shows up on the news stand this week.

Unless I hear from any other organizations that want to hear this program, this will probably be the last time I present Threads.  I’ll be focusing next on the role played in the battle by graduates of the West Point classes of 1861.  I don’t have any takers yet (leave a message here if you’re interested), but I’m not letting that stop me and you readers, both of you, will be the beneficiaries of whatever I turn up regardless.