Historian of Civil War/Reconstruction. History of experience/emotions and senses. Avid book reviewer! Podcast and blog in the works; the good, bad, ugly, & fun.
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Joined May 2024
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Handlebar_Historian retweeted
In "Roads to Power, Roads to Crisis," Alec Zuercher Reichardt offers a spatial history of the American Revolution, arguing that the physical infrastructure of the British Empire directly enabled its own downfall.
#ReadtheRevolution excerpt: bit.ly/4sOcU6r
Handlebar_Historian retweeted
On this day in 1989, the Berlin Wall comes down. The infamous barrier between East and West stood for exactly 10,315 days.
Handlebar_Historian retweeted
November 8, 1861 -- American Civil War: The "Trent Affair": The USS San Jacinto stops the British mail ship Trent and arrests two Confederate envoys, sparking a diplomatic crisis between the UK and US.
Handlebar_Historian retweeted
The American victory at the Battle of Tippecanoe #OnThisDay November 7, 1811, prompted Tecumseh to ally his remaining Native American forces with Great Britain during the War of 1812, where they would play an integral role in the British military success in the Great Lakes region in the coming years. battlefields.org/learn/war-1…
Handlebar_Historian retweeted
165 years ago today the United States Navy won one of the first great Union victories of the war, seizing a stretch of the South Carolina coast, and in doing so it set off an extraordinary experiment in freedom among the enslaved people left behind.
While Grant was fighting at Belmont out west, a massive Union fleet was striking the South Carolina coast. The North's strategy depended on blockading the Southern coastline to choke off the Confederacy's trade, but to do that the navy needed bases, protected harbors where its blockading ships could coal, resupply, and shelter. One of the finest natural harbors on the Southern coast was Port Royal Sound, lying between Charleston and Savannah, guarded by two Confederate forts.
On November 7, 1861, Commodore Samuel Du Pont led one of the largest fleets yet assembled in American waters against those forts. His warships steamed in a great oval, pouring a relentless, methodical bombardment into Forts Walker and Beauregard as they passed. The Confederate gunners could not match the firepower of the fleet, and under the pounding the defenders abandoned the forts and fled. It was a decisive Union victory and one of the earliest major amphibious operations of the war.
The Union now held Port Royal and the surrounding Sea Islands, a rich region of cotton plantations, and it would remain a vital base for the blockading squadron for the rest of the war. But the deeper consequence was human. When the Union fleet arrived, the white planters fled inland in panic, abandoning their plantations, their homes, and, most significantly, the roughly 10,000 enslaved people who worked the land.
Those people were suddenly free, in a sense, before anyone knew quite what to do about them, long before the Emancipation Proclamation. What followed became known as the Port Royal Experiment. Northern teachers, missionaries, and abolitionists came south to the islands, and the formerly enslaved people began working the land for themselves, on their own plots, attending newly founded schools, and proving they could flourish as free men and women. It was, in effect, a preview of Reconstruction, a first real test of what freedom might look like, begun on the ground the navy captured on this day. The battle was about harbors and blockades. Its legacy became about freedom.
Handlebar_Historian retweeted
While the Battle of Belmont ended inconclusively #OnThisDay November 7, 1861, both sides claimed victory. Confederate forces thought they won at Belmont since they forced the Union troops to retreat to Paducah, Kentucky. Union forces believed it was their victory since the skirmish resulted in heavy Confederate losses and, according to Ulysses S. Grant’s post-war memoirs, the Confederate forces “gave up all idea of detaching troops from Columbus” after the engagement. battlefields.org/learn/civil…
Handlebar_Historian retweeted
The TV show Turn made Anna Strong a lonely spy in love with Abraham Woodhull. The real Anna Strong was 10 years older than Woodhull and had five kids at home.
Anna Smith was born in 1740 into a prominent Long Island family in Setauket, New York. At 20, she married Selah Strong, a militia captain and patriot leader. They had nine children together.
During the war, the British occupied Long Island and arrested Selah as a suspected spy. Family tradition says Anna brought him food in prison and used her Loyalist relatives to help get him released.
Then there’s the famous legend. That Anna hung a black petticoat on her clothesline to tell Woodhull that the Culper Ring’s courier, Caleb Brewster, had arrived by boat. A number of handkerchiefs next to it showed which cove he was hiding in.
That part may be true. It comes from local tradition but not from any wartime records.
Was Anna Strong a spy?
Woodhull did write that “a lady of my acquaintance” was helping him outwit the British. Many historians do think that lady was Anna.
Handlebar_Historian retweeted
On this day in 1811, William Henry Harrison’s army fought the Battle of Tippecanoe in what is now Indiana. It would become one of the most famous battles on the American frontier and help launch Harrison’s political career.
The conflict grew out of American expansion into the Northwest Territory. In 1809, the Treaty of Fort Wayne transferred roughly three million acres to the United States. Tecumseh opposed the agreement and was working to unite Native tribes against further American expansion. His brother, Tenskwatawa, known as the Prophet, led a religious movement based at Prophetstown.
Harrison, governor of Indiana Territory, marched roughly 1,000 soldiers toward the settlement. Tecumseh was away recruiting support from southern tribes and was not present for the battle.
On the morning of November 7, Native warriors launched a surprise attack on Harrison’s camp. The fighting was fierce, with warriors striking the American lines from multiple directions.
Captain Spier Spencer’s Indiana militia company, known as the “Yellow Jackets,” suffered heavy casualties, and Spencer was killed. Major Joseph Hamilton Daveiss was also mortally wounded leading a counterattack. Harrison moved his troops to reinforce the line, and after roughly two hours of fighting, the Native warriors withdrew.
The following day, Harrison’s men entered Prophetstown and burned it to the ground.
Although an American victory, the battle did not end Tecumseh’s resistance. He continued building his confederacy and eventually allied with the British during the War of 1812.
For Harrison, Tippecanoe essentially launched him to the presidency in 1840 with Jonathan Tyler. Their famous campaign slogan was “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too.”
Handlebar_Historian retweeted
Listen to @aroberts_andrew on 'The Napoleonic Wars Podcast', discussing some of the most exalted commanders in Napoleonic history and why Napoleon wasn't able to defuse the tension between them...
#NapoleonAndHisMarshals is out now! @AllenLaneBooks
open.spotify.com/episode/1Zk…
Handlebar_Historian retweeted
November 4, 1918, a week before the
Armistice, poet Wilfred Owen was killed
in France at the age of 25.
He wrote to his mother explaining the
meaning behind the title of his poem
Dulce et Decorum est:
"The famous Latin tag [from Horace's
Odes] means, of course, It is sweet and
meet to die for one's country. Sweet! and
decorous!"
tolle lege
ALT Wilfred Owen
Handlebar_Historian retweeted
One of the big “what-ifs” in history is the failed Scottish colony that brought down the crown.
The failed 1698 Scottish colony of New Caledonia in the Darién Gap stands as one of the most consequential imperial misadventures of the early modern Atlantic world, ultimately bankrupting Scotland and contributing directly to the 1707 union with England. Conceived as an ambitious effort to insert Scotland into the lucrative circuits of global trade, the Darien scheme aimed, nearly 300 years before the construction of the Panama Canal, to establish an overland transport network linking the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Its backers envisioned a commercial entrepôt that would rival Spanish and English dominance by funneling goods across the narrow isthmus, effectively transforming Scotland into a major player in transoceanic exchange.
Yet the reality proved catastrophic. Poor planning, inadequate supplies, disease, and the hostility or indifference of neighboring Spanish forces and Indigenous groups doomed the colony from the outset. The settlers, unprepared for the tropical climate and cut off from reliable resupply, suffered devastating mortality rates. Financially, the scheme drained an extraordinary proportion of Scotland’s available capital, entangling merchants, nobles, and ordinary investors alike in its collapse.
The memory of the colony’s failure did not disappear with its abandonment. Elements of the episode have been preserved in the oral traditions of surrounding Indigenous communities, offering a rare non-European perspective on the encounter and its consequences. In this sense, the Darien venture exists not only as a failed imperial project but also as a cross-cultural historical imprint.
Ultimately, New Caledonia represented Scotland’s largest and final attempt to join the imperial competition in the New World. Its collapse underscored the structural limitations facing smaller European powers in an increasingly competitive Atlantic system dominated by larger empires. In doing so, it helped push Scotland toward political union with England, reshaping the trajectory of British imperial expansion in the eighteenth century.
Handlebar_Historian retweeted
The most traveled road and bridge in the revolution is located in Trenton. Who knew??
Handlebar_Historian retweeted
Two days before the 1864 election, this is what voting at the front looked like. ⏎⏎ William Waud sketched Pennsylvania soldiers casting ballots at Army of the James headquarters outside Petersburg. #SiegeOfPetersburg
Handlebar_Historian retweeted
We are opening our entire collection of Revolutionary War, Civil War, World War I, and World War II records this Veterans Day! Enjoy FREE ACCESS through November 15th. fold3.com/go/freeaccess/
Handlebar_Historian retweeted
BOOKNOTES: "So Badly Routed: The Battle of Fisher’s Hill in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, September 22-24, 1864" cwba.blogspot.com/2026/11/bo… @SavasBeatie
Handlebar_Historian retweeted
A visit to the Durham boats at Washington Crossing on the Pennsylvania side. We are a little less than two months away from Washington crossing the Delaware and the start of the Ten Crucial Days.
Handlebar_Historian retweeted
Today in Airpower History, November 6, 1930: Capt. Eddie Rickenbacker is awarded the Medal of Honor for his actions in World War I.
Handlebar_Historian retweeted
On @WPR, Nancy Siegel, author of POLITICAL APPETITES, discusses how women used food to participate in political life during the American Revolution.
wpr.org/news/election-cakes-…
Handlebar_Historian retweeted
STEP INTO HISTORY TOMORROW!
Join us Nov 7–8, 10am–3pm for our World War I & II Living History Weekend at Andersonville NHS. Experience demos, exhibits, and stories of American POWs’ courage and resilience.
See you there! #LivingHistory #WWI #WWII #AndersonvilleNHS
ALT Step Into History Book 4 on World War I and II with a soldier's helmet memorial and barbed wire illustration on the cover.