Women’s Battalion of Death – Smart History Blog

Maria Bochkareva by Boris Losin, 22 November 1917

We know a number of female soldiers from Russian history. Many of them, aviators and snipers, were praised as war heroes during the Great Patriotic War. Speaking of personal bravery on a battlefield, there is no-one quite like Maria Bochkareva – “the Jeanne d’Arc of Russia”, during…

Source: Women’s Battalion of Death – Smart History Blog

June 29, 1861: Pretty Woman, the Kind I’d Like To Meet – Wretched Richard’s Almanac

In 1861, sixty people boarded the St. Nicholas, a steamer that carried passengers between Baltimore and points along the Potomac – among them a Madame LaForte, a stylish young lady who spoke very l…

Source: June 29, 1861: Pretty Woman, the Kind I’d Like To Meet – Wretched Richard’s Almanac

The only woman to win the medal of honor fought for her role in the Civil War

Dr. Mary Edwards Walker in 1911. (Bain News Service/Library of Congress)

Mary Edwards Walker was no stranger to sneaking across enemy lines. When she wasn’t acting as a surgeon to tend to the Union wounded, she would sometimes enter Confederate territory — with armed escort and two pistols in her saddlebags — to deliver supplies to their hungry and deprived citizens. But one day, General William Tecumseh Sherman asked her to embark on …

Source: The only woman to win the medal of honor fought for her role in the Civil War

Revisited Myth #114: You had to have two opposing teeth to join the army in early America so you could tear off the end of the cartridge. | History Myths Debunked

John Hill, Supervisor of Military Programs for Colonial Williamsburg, lays this one to rest. “I have heard many reenactors note the need for two opposing teeth as part of their musket-firing …

Source: Revisited Myth #114: You had to have two opposing teeth to join the army in early America so you could tear off the end of the cartridge. | History Myths Debunked

Lincoln’s Laboratory | streetsofsalem

I’ve been digging around in bins and folders for scraps of paper for as long as I can remember, and I do recall one item that caught my attention years ago: it was an envelope with a still-br…

Source: Lincoln’s Laboratory | streetsofsalem

The Spanish Civil War: The 80th anniversary | REDFLAGFLYING

With all the various worthy and necessary commemorations about the centenary of the First World War, another anniversary has been sadly overlooked. The Spanish Civil War started in 1936, eighty yea…

Source: The Spanish Civil War: The 80th anniversary | REDFLAGFLYING

How I learned that grandad executed Erskine Childers

Do you know where you’ll be on April 24? Maybe not, but chances are you might just find yourself huddled over a form, answering innumerable questions about your personal life. Filling in the census…

Source: How I learned that grandad executed Erskine Childers

George Washington Williams and the Congo Genocide | toritto

Political cartoon from 1906 showing King Leopold of Belgium entangling the Congolese in rubber coils

“At the very beginning of the twentieth century there was an unquenchable demand in America and Europe for an amazing new technology—air-filled rubber tires. The Age of the Railroad was ending. Henry Ford was making cars by the million, bicycles were pouring out of factories, freight was moving in gasoline-powered trucks, and they all ran on rubber. The Congo had more natural rubber than anywhere else.

To meet this demand King Leopold II of Belgium, in one of the greatest scams in history, tricked local tribes into signing away their lands and lives in bogus treaties that none of them could read. He sold these “concessions” to speculators who used torture and murder to drive whole communities into the jungle to harvest rubber.

The profits from the slave-driving concessions were stupendous. Wild rubber, as well as elephant ivory for piano keys and decoration, was ripped out of…

Source: George Washington Williams and the Congo Genocide | toritto

Seriously, though, was the American Revolution a Civil War? « The Junto

On February 18, 2014, Tom Cutterham asked, “Was the American Revolution a Civil War?” According to Cutterham, understanding the Revolution that way might be useful. If we did, he suggested, “we’d better understand the way the modern world—the nexus of state, citizen, and property—was born in and determined by violence.”[1]

Understanding the American Revolution as a civil war is an accepted concept. In 1975, John Shy argued that the Revolution was a civil war. Since then, a number of historians have made similar propositions. More recently, in 2012, Alan Taylor delivered a talk, in New Mexico, titled “The First American Civil War: The Revolution.” There are other instances, too, and they are not hard to find or engage with. I don’t think historians will jettison the civil war framework, either. Indeed, we will be understanding the Revolution as a civil war indefinitely.[2]

Was the American Revolution a “civil war,” though? I mean, seriously? Or, is framing the Revolution as a…

Source: Seriously, though, was the American Revolution a Civil War? « The Junto.

Pilot Fish Trailblazer Nominee: The Iron Man of India – Pilot Fish

The Great Divide

Studio/31.10.49,A22b
Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel photograph on October 31, 1949, his 74th birthday.

The nation of India was born, on the 15th August, 1947. Pakistan was born on the 14th August, 1947.The border between the two countries was not revealed until a few days later. What followed then was a period of howling madness. Hindus from the new Pakistan lost their assets and came to India as refugees. My family was amongst them. Muslims from India suffered likewise.

What followed was an orgy of violence. New-found hatred gave way to bloodshed. People who had been neighbours for generations, hacked away at each other. An estimated half million to one million people died in the waves of violence that followed Independence. Others have estimated that…

Source: Pilot Fish Trailblazer Nominee: The Iron Man of India – Pilot Fish

Cromwell cancels Christmas (John Evelyn, 1657) | The Lost City of London

On this [25th December] day in 1657, during the Commonwealth and Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell that followed the Civil War, John Evelyn wrote in his diary:

“I went to London with my wife, to celebrate Christmas day, Mr Gunning preaching in Exeter chapel … .  Sermon ended, as he was giving us the Holy Sacrament, the chapel was surrounded with [Parliamentarian] soldiers, and all the communicants and assembly surprised and kept prisoner by them … .  It fell to my share to be confined to a room …, where yet I was permitted to dine with the master of it … and some others of quality who invited me.  In the afternoon came Colonel Whalley, Goffe, and others … to examine us one by one; some they committed to the marshal, some to prison.  When I came before them…

Source: Cromwell cancels Christmas (John Evelyn, 1657) | The Lost City of London

Capital Dames by Cokie Roberts – A Book Review | Saints, Sisters, and Sluts

Originally posted on Saints, Sisters, and Sluts.

Capital Dames: The Civil War and the Women of Washington, 1848-1868 by Cokie Roberts tells the story of the Civil War through the eyes of the women living in Washington. Many of the names are familiar such as Mary Lincoln, Varina Davis, and Clara Barton, but many I was unfamiliar with, such as Sara Pryor, Lois Adams, and Elizabeth “Lizzie” Lee Blair. There were rivalries between women in Washington prior to the war, but also many friends who would be torn apart because of opposing views.

The social scene in Washington before the war was flourishing. Harriet Lane, niece of President James Buchanan, was stylish, cultured, well-liked, and an excellent White House hostess. Buchanan, however, was unable to prevent the move of the country toward disunion. Between the time Lincoln was elected in November of 1860 and the time he took office in March of 1861, the southern states had seceded and formed the Confederacy.

In describing the years between 1848 and 1860, Roberts lays the groundwork for understanding the changes that…

via Capital Dames by Cokie Roberts – A Book Review | Saints, Sisters, and Sluts.

Essential Civil War Reader

The Embalmed Soldiers of the American Civil War

The Chirurgeon's Apprentice

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Thomas Holmes—the “Father of Modern Embalming”—had an unusual way of advertising his services throughout the American Civil War. During one of his many excursions to the front, the surgeon plucked the body of an unknown soldier from the battlefield and brought it back to Washington D.C. There, he washed the corpse and injected it with his patented “safe” embalming fluid, which he claimed was free from toxins. He then dressed the soldier in a fine set of clothes and put him on display in his shop window for all to see.

Prior to the mid-19^th century, embalming was used chiefly to preserve specimens after dissection. Surgeons and anatomists often used arsenic when creating dry mount displays from cadaverous remains. Mixtures of arsenic and soap…

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What Happened on August 25th – The Pinkertons

IF I ONLY HAD A TIME MACHINE

Allan Pinkerton (1819-84), founder of Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency, was born in Glasgow, Scotland, on August 25, 1819.

Allan Pinkerton

• Pinkerton emigrated to the United States in 1842 and eventually established a barrel-making shop in a small town outside of Chicago.
• He was an ardent abolitionist, and his shop functioned as a “station” for escaped slaves traveling the Underground Railroad to freedom in the North.
• Pinkerton’s career as a detective began by chance when he discovered a gang of counterfeiters operating in an area where he was gathering wood. His assistance—first in arresting these men and then another counterfeiter, led to his appointment as deputy sheriff of Kane County, Illinois, and, later, as Chicago’s first full-time detective.
• Pinkerton left his job with the Chicago police force to start his own detective agency.

• One of the first of its kind, this predecessor to Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency, provided an array…

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