Strange-but-true stories on the Civil War
Today's featured facial hair is a fan find! Thank you to Paul H. for alerting us to this wonderful forked beard. In fact, this beard really looks like there's enough hair to be two beards. Perhaps Colonel Strother had a beard for each of his names? Before his stint in the Army during the Civil War, David Hunter … Continue reading Facial Hair Friday: Two names and almost two beards
Intriguing discoveries are made all the time in the National Archives. This tintype of a woman and child doesn’t look like the typical federal record, let alone one associated with military records. But it was found in one of the 1.28 million Civil War Widows Certificate Approved Pension Case Files. Since 2007, a team of … Continue reading A Civil War Widow’s Story
About 20,000 women volunteered in military hospitals during the Civil War. Unfortunately, the majority of them left little or no written evidence of their sacrifice in the war. Louisa May Alcott, renowned 19th-century author of Little Women, was one of them, and her service is documented in a Washington, D.C., hospital’s muster roll. Alcott was … Continue reading Little Women in the Civil War
Today in 1881, President Garfield died as the result of being shot at close range by an assassin. It took him nearly three months to die. On July 2, after months of increasing agitation and several aborted attempts to shoot the President with a pearl-handled pistol, Charles Guiteau finally mortally wounded the President as he waited … Continue reading Paging Dr. Bell to the President’s deathbed
This week saw the 150th anniversary of the first Battle of Manassas, with hundreds of reenactors and spectators ignoring the extreme heat and coming to the Virginia battlefield. There was another, stranger Civil War anniversary today. On July 22, 1975, the House of Representatives joined the Senate in voting to restore full American citizenship to … Continue reading Facial Hair Friday: Amnesty for this beard, 100 years later
Did you know that in 1984, President Reagan declared July 15 as "National Ice Cream Day" and July to be the official "National Ice Cream Month"? In his proclamation, the President declared that "Ice cream is a nutritious and wholesome food, enjoyed by over ninety percent of the people in the United States." Ice-cream-on-a-stick production took … Continue reading Facial Hair Friday: No ice cream for old men
Perhaps the most famous goatee in all of America belongs to Uncle Sam, the white-haired patriot who appeared in political cartoons in the late 1890s, on recruitment posters in both World Wars, and continues to appear on all kinds of products today. And while facial hair fashions have changed drastically through the years since the … Continue reading Facial Hair Friday: Make a date with Uncle Sam
Americans are used to waiting in line for things they really want: tickets to a rock concert, a World Series game or a controversial new movie, for example. At the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, this week some people waited all night for a brief look at one of the nation's most historic documents --- the … Continue reading Waiting All Night for a Look at History
If you have watched the movie Glory, you saw a recreation of the assault on Fort Wagner, South Carolina, by the 54th Massachusetts Colored Infantry. But a real-life hero from that battle was Sgt. William Harvey Carney, who was awarded the Medal of Honor on May 23, 1900—37 years after the assault on Fort Wagner. The Medal of Honor is … Continue reading A record of valor
Today's an eggs-ellent day in Washington, DC, for young people! It's the annual White House Easter Egg Roll, where hundreds of children gather to roll eggs and play games on the South Lawn of the President's House. But the tradition did not start at the White House. It began on the lawns and terraces of the … Continue reading An Egg-centric White House Tradition
