RCM History Tours

06/18/2024

06/13/2024

Happy Birthday Thomas Courtney!

06/01/2024

Harford County Md. Couldn’t pass sharing some sweethearts at the Fly in @ the local airport.

05/25/2024

We were honored to deliver the $1,855 check to Shenandoah Valley Battlefields National Historic District to preserve and protect the Gen. Turner Ashby Monument - the funds were raised during our Jackson’s 1862 Valley Campaign conference! ☺️

Thank you Kirsten Heder of the Donor Engagement Dept. of SVBF for meeting with Karen Lowry for the photo!!

05/20/2024

Women of Sharpsburg - June 22, 2024
Come here Living History Interpreter ZSun-nee Kimball Matyema portraying Christina(Teeny) Watson member of Tolsons Chapel. she will be at the museum from 11-1 and Ed Beeler will tell the Nancy Reel Michael Story of what Nancy and her family went trhough after Antietam. This starts at 1pm. The Museum will be open from 10-4
See exhibits on household items that were used in time past.

05/08/2024

Antietam with Roy

05/08/2024

05/08/2024

A new book explores every facet of the September 1862 battle.

05/08/2024

An oldie but a great spot. Roy, by the way is a great friend I met giving him some tours years ago. I don’t think he’s seen this one.

Antietam with Roy

05/07/2024

Secret of Black Rock Mountain by Robin Murphy

04/27/2024

Throughout the Civil War, many false racial beliefs were imposed on medicine, some of which we are still struggling against today. These had serious consequences for the first African American units in the U.S. Army: The United States Colored Troops.

White officers and surgeons falsely believed that African Americans were immune to “tropical diseases,” did not feel the pain as severely as white soldiers and were not as fatigued by manual labor.

These false assumptions, combined with disproportionately sparse medical supplies, staff, and facilities, contributed to “a mortality rate from illness of two and one-half times per one thousand men greater than for white soldiers.” Failure to vaccinate was an additional issue, with USCT soldiers far more likely to contract and die from smallpox than their white comrades.

Sources:
The National Park Service, "Civil War Series: The Civil War's Black Soldiers," History E-Library, accessed January 29, 2020, < https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/civil_war_series/2/sec17.htm>; Herbert Aptheker, "Negro Casualties in the Civil War", The Journal of Negro History, Vol. 32, No. 1. (January, 1947), via JSTOR, accessed January 29, 2020, .

Terry Reimer, "Smallpox and Vaccination in the Civil War," National Museum of Civil War Medicine, The Surgeon's Call, November 9, 2004, accessed January 29, 2020, .

Image credit:
Detail from "Quarters of Chief Ambulance Officer, 9th Corps in front of Petersburg, Va.," Library of Congress

03/25/2024

03/22/2024

ZOUAVE SPOTLIGHT: BOSTON'S ZOUAVE DRUM CORPS CADETS

A youthful drum major is surrounded by a group of drummer boys outfitted in Zouave uniforms. One theory holds that these finely attired young fellows were inspired before or just after a series of performances by Elmer E. Ellsworth’s crack drill team, the Chicago-based Zouave Cadets, in the summer of 1860. According to the July 28, 1860, issue of the New England Farmer, a Boston publication, “The perfection and novelty of their drill astonished and delighted all classes of our citizens, and their gentlemanly bearing and conduct won for them hosts of friends. They have given our military men some new ideas, and we may yet see a company formed upon their plan in this city.”

Carte de visite by James Wallace Black of Boston, Mass. Ronald S. Collection.

03/11/2024

Dr. Mary Edwards Walker

While some of the stories of wartime service of women may have questionable veracity, the service of Dr. Mary Edwards Walker stands alone in a class of its own.

In 1855, Walker graduated from the Syracuse Medical College and became one of only a handful of female doctors in the United States. After the Battle of Bull Run in 1861, Dr. Walker traveled to Washington D.C., hoping that the Union’s urgent need for surgeons would outweigh their unwillingness to legitimize a woman doctor. Despite her optimism, she was denied a commission but set about anyways as a volunteer surgeon in the makeshift soldiers’ hospital in the US Patent Office. In 1862, she worked as an unpaid field surgeon near the front lines at Fredericksburg and Chattanooga.

In September 1863, Dr. Walker became the first female U.S. Army surgeon following her commission as a "Contract Acting Assistant Surgeon (civilian)" by the Army of the Cumberland. In 1864, she was captured by Confederate troops while attempting to treat civilians within enemy lines. After spending four months at the notorious Castle Thunder prison near Richmond, Virginia Dr. Walker was freed in a prisoner exchange. During the remainder of the war, she served at the Louisville Women's Prison Hospital and at an orphan asylum in Clarksville, Tennessee.

After the war, Dr. Walker was awarded a disability pension for muscular atrophy that she suffered while in prison in Castle Thunder. Based on the recommendation of Major Generals Sherman and Thomas, President Andrew Johnson signed a bill on November 11, 1865, to present Walker with the Medal of Honor for Meritorious Service. The citation describes her service below.

"...[she] devoted herself with much patriotic zeal to the sick and wounded soldiers, both in the field and hospitals, to the detriment of her own health, and has also endured hardships as a prisoner of war four months in a Southern prison while acting as contract surgeon..."

She remains the only woman to receive the Medal of Honor. Dr. Walker spent the remainder of her life advancing the cause of women's rights.

02/25/2024

02/25/2024

ANTIETAM (Md.) BATTLEFIELD THEN & NOW — 125th Pennsylvania veterans (and some family members) at their monument on its dedication day in the West Woods on Sept. 17, 1904 — the 42nd anniversary of the battle. It’s paired with my “Now” image from June 6, 2017.

CLICK ON LINK and grab slider to travel from “Then” to “Now.” https://civilwarthenandnow.blogspot.com/2017/06/antietam-125th-pennsylvania-monument.html

01/22/2024

On a news feed this morning.

Entomologist Floyd W. Shockley wants to mentally prepare you for a historic—and loud—event this spring: two cicada groups emerging simultaneously. The last time Brood XIX, which has a 13-year cycle, and Brood XIII, which has a 17-year cycle, emerged in the same year was in 1803, when Napoleon was presumably so fed up by their mating calls that he sold the Louisiana Territory to Thomas Jefferson. The cicadas’ bacchanal will begin in late April. Then they won’t appear together for another 221 years.

Diversion from all the campaign chirping.

01/08/2024