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At least 79 teacher assistants and instructors at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill are threatening to withhold grades unless their demands in the Silent Sam controversy are met, local activists say. A proposal by the university’s Board of Trustees to rehouse Silent Sam in a $5.3 million historical center has been met with protests from students and community activists, but a proposed strike crosses a line, UNC System Board of Governors member Marty Kotis told Carolina Journal. “When people start saying you have to believe something or we’re not going to release your grades unless this is done, they’re...

Some 150 years since Abraham Lincoln outlawed slavery in the U.S., a collection of rare Civil War-era photographs have been brought to life through painstaking colorization. February 1 marks National Freedom Day, honoring the signing by President Lincoln of a resolution which became the 13th Amendment to the Constitution and abolished slavery.

It seems fitting that the de facto anthem of the Confederacy during the Civil War, which some people might still be shocked to learn the North won, turned out to be "Dixie." After all, since Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox there's been no shortage of looking away, looking away at the reality of history when it comes to the Civil War. Nowhere is that full flower of denial more apparent than among the followers of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, which is upset about a proposal to erect a monument to Union soldiers who died in the Battle...

FREDERICKSBURG, Va., April 10 (UPI) -- A Virginia man who found a silver ring engraved with the name a Civil War soldier said he spent seven years tracking down the owner's family. John Blue of Manassas, who has been hunting Civil War relics for 30 years, said he found the ring engraved with the name of union soldier Levi Schlegel at a Fredericksburg construction site and decided to return the $1,500 relic to Schlegel's family, WUSA-TV, Washington, reported Wednesday. "I wanted to set an example. I've never heard of an ID piece going back to an original family member," Blue...

As the nation commemorates the 150th anniversary of its deadliest war this week, some historians say we're still fighting over some of the same issues that fueled the Civil War. "There are all of these weird parallels," says Stephanie McCurry, author of "Confederate Reckoning," a new book that examines why Southerners seceded and its effect on Southern women and slaves. "When you hear charges today that the federal government is overreaching, and the idea that the Constitution recognized us as a league of sovereign states -- these were all part of the secessionist charges in 1860," she says. 1. The...

The Library of Congress announced last week that it has made a huge collection of Civil War portraits available on its Flickr site. The portraits — almost 700 of them — are available at http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/sets/72157625520211184. This collection is all from one place — the Liljenquist family — and includes the frames of the pictures as well as the ambrotype and tintype photographs themselves. Many of the pictures are soldiers (including some portraits of African-American soldiers) but there are some civilian pictures here as well. There are also many group pictures, both of civilians and soldiers. Some of the pictures are...

Civil War History Meets Twitter @Discovercivwar Follow the National Archives’ Upcoming Civil War Exhibit on Twitter Washington, DC…You can now follow the National Archives’ exhibition marking the sesquicentennial of the Civil War, Discovering the Civil War on Twitter [http://twitter.com/discovercivwar]. Followers can discover the Civil War for themselves through tweets highlighting the people and stories of the Civil War linking to images of items that will be featured in the exhibition such as letters, diaries, photos, maps, petitions, receipts, patents, amendments, and proclamations. @discovercivwar will also alert the public to exciting, free programs related to the exhibition that will be held...

Reviled in the South to this day as a terrorist, Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman decided that the only way to end the protracted armed conflict of the American Civil War and terminate the rebellious, racist, slave-regime in the south was to bring the war home to the civilian population of the Confederacy. Defying conventional military wisdom, he turned his back on the Confederate field armies, captured and burned Atlanta, and commenced his "March to the Sea". According to Wikepedia" He and U.S. Army commander, Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, believed that the Civil War would end only if the Confederacy's...

The Selected Civil War Photographs Collection contains 1,118 photographs. Most of the images were made under the supervision of Mathew B. Brady, and include scenes of military personnel, preparations for battle, and battle after-effects. The collection also includes portraits of both Confederate and Union officers, and a selection of enlisted men. An additional two hundred autographed portraits of army and navy officers, politicians, and cultural figures can be seen in the Civil War photograph album, ca. 1861-65. (James Wadsworth Family Papers). The full album pages are displayed as well as the front and verso of each carte de visite, revealing...

Ron Paul appeared on "Meet the Press" over the weekend, and gave voice to a sentiment scarcely heard in American politics. He claimed that the Civil War was unnecessary, and that Lincoln "never should have gone to war" to stop slavery. A better approach would have been for the federal government to simply purchase freedom for all of the slaves in the country. Watch Ron Paul on Meet the Press [YouTube]: Of course, such a program sounds more than a little strange coming from a man who is so mistrustful of government that he wants to abolish the Department of...

Nelson Winbush is intent on defending the flag of his grandfather. It's just surprising which flag that is. ___ KISSIMMEE -- Nelson Winbush rotates a miniature flag holder he keeps on his mantel, imagining how the banners would appear in a Civil War battle. The Stars and Bars, he explains, looked too much like the Union flag to prevent friendly fire. The Confederacy responded by fashioning the distinctive Southern Cross -- better known as the rebel flag. Winbush, 78, is a retired assistant principal with a master's degree, a thoughtful man whose world view developed from listening to his grandfather's...

Bill Styple and time have a peculiar relationship. He lives in the present, writes about the past and wants to save both the present and the past for the future of his town. "I just want to preserve for our children a little of what I and my parents had in the past," says Styple, 46, who, with others from Kearny, is about to give the Hudson County town, its residents and its children a gift: A statue of a Civil War soldier. A replica of a statue that, for nearly 50 years until 1933, stood mute guard before the...

On March 5, 1861, the day after his inauguration as president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln received a message from Maj. Robert Anderson, commander of the U.S. troops holding Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. The message stated that there was less than a six week supply of food left in the fort. Attempts by the Confederate government to settle its differences with the Union were spurned by Lincoln, and the Confederacy felt it could no longer tolerate the presense of a foreign force in its territory. Believing a conflict to be inevitable, Lincoln ingeniously devised a plan that would...

I began this column last week with a quote attributed to Abraham Lincoln in which harsh treatment was deemed warranted for congressmen who willfully take actions during wartime that damage morale and undermine the military. It turns out to have been a paraphrase of our 16th president's attitude toward those who engage in such behavior, rather than a direct quote. I regret the error and should, instead, have used the following, verbatim excerpt from a letter President Lincoln wrote in June 1863, as Robert E. Lee's army was on the march north to the fateful battle of Gettysburg. Mr. Lincoln...

A private burial for Walter Burke Davis Jr., a writer and historian best known for his books on the Civil War, was held Aug. 21 in Greensboro, N.C. Mr. Davis, whose 47 books included novels and biographies, died Aug. 18 in a Greensboro hospital. The former resident of Meadows of Dan in Patrick County, who also wrote fiction and nonfiction for young readers, was 93.

Unless lawmakers remove the Confederate flag from the State House grounds, the road to the College World Series could become longer for Clemson, South Carolina and the state’s other schools. An NCAA subcommittee is re-examining the flag issue after the head of the Black Coaches Association questioned why Clemson hosted regional and super regional games before advancing to Omaha this past season. In 2002 the NCAA implemented a two-year moratorium prohibiting schools in South Carolina from hosting any pre-assigned championships. A year later the NCAA extended the ban indefinitely. Now BCA executive director Floyd Keith wants college athletics’ chief governing...

She was called the diarist, the grande dame, the confidante of the Civil War. She moved in the highest circles, and was personally acquainted with Varina Davis, wife of the president of the Confederacy. Mary Boykin Chesnut was all that and more: She brought the war to life as did no other of the time. For her writings and her insight at the most critical time in the history of the United States, she is a heroine of the Confederacy. She was born to Southern aristocracy: Her father was Stephen Decatur Miller, a lawyer and later governor of South Carolina...

Confined to her bed in Atlanta by a broken ankle and arthritis, she was given a stack of blank paper by her husband, who said, "Write a book." Did she ever. The novel's first title became its last words, "Tomorrow is another day," and at first she named the protagonist Pansy. But Pansy became Scarlett, and the title of the book published 70 years ago this week became "Gone With the Wind." You might think that John Steinbeck, not Margaret Mitchell, was the emblematic novelist of the 1930s, and that the publishing event in American fiction in that difficult decade...

The sound and smell of the brutal cannon barrages at the Battle of Fredericksburg must have been overwhelming. The deep, rich booming of the 12-pound, smoothbore Napoleons. The high-pitched "crack, crack" of Parrott rifles. And the acrid, sulfuric stench of black powder at each explosion. "A chicken could not live on that field when we open on it," said a Confederate cannoneer atop Marye's Heights to Lt. Gen. James Longstreet as they looked down upon advancing wave after wave of blue-coated Union soldiers. Soon, visitors to the Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park will get a taste of what it...

A questionnaire attached to Jesse "Tobe" Blankenship's 1877 request for a Civil War pension asked why he, a Lawrence County man, fought for the Union. "My father was threatened to be hung by a Southern officer — do not know his name," he answered. A mountain man with eight sons, Hudson Blankenship was neutral on the Civil War. At the time, it was the equivalent of declaring himself a Unionist. His refusal to become an informant for the Confederate Army nearly cost him his life. The threat inflamed teenaged Tobe Blankenship, said Moulton's Gladys Blankenship LuAllen, Tobe Blankenship's great-granddaughter. "It...