Blogger Don Roberson offers his top fifty Civil War sites and battlefields.  For the record, I’ve been to six of his top ten.  I love the photographs of the now middle aged Roberson visiting various battlefields as a boy.

The Nation’s Report Card corroborates what we have suspected for a while now.

Currier and Ives; Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

Next week, the black and gold theater glasses Lincoln is believed to have used the night before his death are going back on the auction block, where experts think they could fetch as much as $700,000.

The glasses are part of a June 17 Sotheby’s auction in New York that will include pricey Civil War items such as a handwritten letter from Robert E. Lee discussing his resignation from the U.S. Army and a flag from the famous Confederate warship CSS Alabama.

As we commence our sesquicentennial retrospection on the Civil War, it is worth remembering that much of the enthusiasm for the anniversary derives from Burns’ film, which first aired on public television just over 20 years ago. Over the course of nine parts and 11 hours, Burns’ camera peers into thousands of ghostly faces and pans across faded images of body-strewn battlefields guided by David McCullough’s stately baritone and Foote’s oracular drawl. All the while, the unmistakable, melancholy strains of the series’ theme, “Ashokan Farewell” ring out—at times, it seems, from the nation’s collective heartstrings. Running on consecutive nights at the height of network television’s new season in the fall of 1990 (when network television’s new season still mattered), the series became an unlikely hit. Some 40 million people chose to forego Cheers, Roseanne, The Wonder Years, and America’s Funniest Home Videos for a PBS documentary featuring nothing more than old photographs, footage of empty battle fields, and talking heads they likely had never heard of.

This Slate piece is somewhat uncharitable but it does serve to remind us to think critically about the war and how we perceive it.  Burns’s film succeeds more often than not and despite its flaws the documentary holds up quite well two decades on.  Moreover, much of the interest in the Civil War since the early 1990s is attributable to Burns and his work.  Not such a bad thing.

The other day I finally made it to the “Honoring Their Sacrifice” exhibit at Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery.

One of the most distinctive items was this Confederate field piece.  It is easily recognizable as such because of the short barrel.  Because raw materials were at a premium in the South during the war the Confederate States of America scrimped by making field pieces with shorter tubes.

There was also this Union piece.  Charles Wainwright, an artillerist in the Army of the Potomac, is interred at Green-Wood.  Wainwright was a favorite of General Henry Jackson Hunt, the dean of Civil War artillery, and served the Union cause throughout the conflict.  He was also the author of A Diary of Battle: The Personal Journals of Colonel Charles S. Wainwright, 1861–1865, one of the best personal accounts of the war.

Trivia question:  What is the only regiment to have three monuments at Gettysburg?

Answer:  The 14^th Brooklyn.

Their regimental commander, Colonel Fowler, too is buried in Green-Wood.

Here is yours truly in front of the 14^th monument at the railroad cut in Gettysburg.

These headstones will eventually be placed on the grounds, just like the thousands already laid during the cemetery’s ongoing project.

Those of the Prentiss brothers are just two of them.

Clifton Kennedy Prentiss, USA

William S. Prentiss, CSA

The soldiers and sailors monument has also been restored and is another “must see.”

If you intend to go, you had better act fast.  The exhibit ends this Sunday, June 12^th.

On my list of destinations for Summer 2011 is the African Burial Ground in Lower Manhattan.

Hey everybody, I got back from DC yesterday.  Being in the nation’s capital during Memorial Day weekend was a great experience.  I saw the Elmer Ellsworth exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery.  It will be on display through March 2012.  If you can make it, I highly recommend.  Adam Goodheart tells the Ellsworth story captivatingly in 1861: The Civil War Awakening.

(Source: The Photographic History of The Civil War in Ten Volumes: Volume One, The Opening Battles; Courtesy: Wikimedia Commons)

It is starting to feel like summer in New York: hot and humid.  Things are picking up here.  This Saturday a friend and I are going to see the just-opened “Honoring Their Sacrifice” exhibit at Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery.  Unfortunately I missed their Memorial Day programming because I was out of town.  I’m starting at Governors Island the next day.  I also have a few writing projects I’m working on.  Then in a few weeks we’re headed to Gettysburg and Antietam.  We have gone each June the last few years and have gotten it down to a science a little more each time.  I’m hoping to squeeze in Monocacy as well.  We will be there a week and it is difficult to squeeze in everything.  We’ll see how it goes.

I will be in Washington, DC for the next few days and blogging will be light at best.  Have a good Memorial Day weekend.  I’m looking forward to a fun and productive summer.

Earlier this spring I read The Great Bridge, David McCullough’s magnum opus about the creation of the span connecting Brooklyn and Manhattan.  One reason for doing so was because, after spending so much time reading about the death and destruction of the Civil War, I wanted to turn my attention to something being built not destroyed.  The bridge is down the street from where I work and I often have my lunch there.  It is also where I took my wife after our wedding reception.  Yesterday was the one hundred and twenty eighth anniversary of the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge.

Brooklyn Museum Collection

I sometimes think many New Yorkers assume the bridge has always “been there,” a natural part of the landscape.  Actually it was the brainchild of German-born John Augustus Roebling, who was wounded on the construction site and died prematurely years before the bridge’s completion.

Brooklyn Museum Collection, Gift of Paul Roebling

It was up to his son, Colonel Washington Augustus Roebling, to complete the task.  He did so, but at great personal expense.  Roebling contracted caisson disease, or the bends, from his frequent trips below the water to the excavation site and suffered in horrific pain the rest of his long life.  He lived until 1926.

Roebling was an officer in the Army of the Potomac and participated in many of the war’s most important events.  He fought at Antietam, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, and the Wilderness among other places.  He also personally witnessed the engagement between the Monitor and the Merrimac in 1862.  Roebling married Emily Warren, the sister of General Gouverneur Kemble Warren, in January 1865.

Looking at the bridge today…

Harpers, 1890

…it takes a leap of faith to imagine it as it was just after its completion.

The road in the top photograph is the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.  Below that in the same photograph is a new park being built along the Brooklyn side of the East River.  The waterfront has not been part of the daily fabric of New York life for decades, since the collapse of the shipping industry in the mid-twentieth century.  The city has been working hard to change that in recent years with a number of adaptive reuse projects.

(Author: H. Finkelstein & Son; Source: Wikimedia Commons)

The bridge has always been a favorite of painters and poets.

May 24, 1883 (Source: Brooklyn Museum Collection)

May 24, 2011