Walt Whitman was ambivalent about alcohol. Many Whitman biographers believe his father was alcoholic, and a friend recorded that Whitman attributed his little brother’s developmental deficits to alcohol…
Walt Whitman gives beauty to the soldiers dying under his care in the hospital. The goriest, most wrenching passage in his Memoranda During the War…
Walt Whitman called Washington, D.C. a city of “romance,” “of things begun.” It might seem an odd description by a man who spent countless hours witnessing…
Monica Weber Babcock shares with us the mystery of her great-great-grandfather, a Union Civil War veteran. Monica is the author of the poetry collection Heartscape (available from Amazon) and…
This mourning cockade, with photo of Lincoln mounted in a portable metal frame, would have been worn on a hat, probably by a woman. More…
My article on Thomas Morris Chester, Black news correspondant in the Civil War, is posted at New York Times: Disunion. A few words (that didn’t fit…