meower wrote: 

http://www.studio360.org/2011/apr/
heard it again last night.  Worth a listen. 

 cc_rider wrote: 
damn fine read! thanks for that!

 aflanigan wrote: 

i heard the same report.  interesting.

 aflanigan wrote:
Mainstream media manipulating photos? That's crazy talk.

I don't doubt some of the photos were staged. Others seem just too gruesome to be posed, but who knows. Reporters and photographers of the period did not always adhere to the highest standards of journalistic integrity, like they do now.

 DaveInVA wrote: 

I was listening to the radio this weekend and a commenter was describing Matthew Brady's photographic exploits during the Civil War.  She claimed that one of Brady's proteges faked photos by bringing a dead body to battlefield sites and posing it.  She said the giveaway is when you see a rifle next to a corpse wearing boots/shoes;

neither of these valuable items would have been abandoned on the field.

The famous photo below is generally conceded to have been staged
(for example, the rifle in the photo is not one a Confederate sharpshooter would have used)

 ScottFromWyoming wrote:

Neither ignored the evils of slavery, but Lincoln at least publicly dissembled about it, adopting a wishy-washy stance that belied what he believed. Seward was chiding Lincoln for compromising those beliefs in an attempt to appease southern factions that might have broken with the Confederacy so long as they could keep their slaves.

Anti-slavery sentiment was the unifying factor in the north, the real motivator for the troops. Lincoln's failure to endorse that cause early on was seen in many quarters (by Fredrick Douglass especially) as a betrayal.

 miamizsun wrote: 
Justine says "chorff gots his frisky on!"

Not many knew, but Lyle Lovett actually fought for the south.

 winter wrote: 
Seward was Lincoln's SecState and neither of them had any notion of abolishing slavery at the outset of the war. Thru acts such as what are detailed in the article, emancipation was inevitable; he and Lincoln only recognized that years later. It sounded to me like —nevermind the war— he realized and was a bit ashamed that he'd been willfully ignoring the obvious wrongs of slavery in order to maintain some political stance.

 ScottFromWyoming wrote: 


Sounds to me like what Seward was saying was that the Confederates never had a hope of winning - that they may as well have saved themselves and the rest of the country a lot of blood and tragedy if they'd just accepted the need for change and worked to make it happen instead of clinging to a dying tradition.

 hippiechick wrote: 

i never killed you.  wha??

We have been watching the extremely long and interesting Ken Burns documentary The Civil War. What a horrid war that was. When we will stop killing each other?

 Antigone wrote: 
Cool, They had a 3 day encampment at the Nauseum of the Confederacy grounds behind my house this weekend. I should have taken pics. They are packing up to leave now...

A small group of re-enactors at the historic house down the block.

 cc_rider wrote: 
An interesting article. Enslaved people weren't treated much better than the way we treat cattle these days, which makes me seriously think about how badly we still treat animals.

 ScottFromWyoming wrote:  I'm gonna repost that speech. Take THAT, homophobes!

Thanks.

 cc_rider wrote: 
Middle East or Iowa, too. 

 ScottFromWyoming wrote: 
Love that line. It seems appropriate to some of the changes in the Middle East, you know? The 'ruling class' seems to be the last to hear the message from the street. Our own Administration included...

I've gotta make time to sit down and read the whole thing again. Important history.

 cc_rider wrote: 
Thanks, I read this twice yesterday.
 
Kind of an aside, I really liked the last few lines:

• When Lincoln finally unveiled the Emancipation Proclamation in the fall of 1862, he framed it in Butleresque terms, not as a humanitarian gesture but as a stratagem of war.On the September day of Lincoln’s edict, a Union colonel ran into William Seward, the president’s canny secretary of state, on the street in Washington and took the opportunity to congratulate him on the administration’s epochal act.
• Seward snorted. “Yes,” he said, “we have let off a puff of wind over an accomplished fact.”
• “What do you mean, Mr. Seward?” the officer asked.
• “I mean,” the secretary replied, “that the Emancipation Proclamation was uttered in the first gun fired at Sumter, and we have been the last to hear it.” 

===========
Makes me wonder how things would have turned out if Seward had been elected president at some point.

An interesting article in the Washington Post about a new exhibit of rare photographs at the Library of Congress.