VIEW THE "CIVIL WAR MEDICINE" TRAILER HERE!
https://youtu.be/wCXmOx6C_ZU
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Civil War Hospital Ship
The U.S.S. Red Rover, a captured Confederate vessel, was refitted as a hospital ship.
Wednesday, December 20, 2017
Wednesday, September 13, 2017
"Civil War Medicine" Documentary Trailer Completed!
The trailer for the "Civil War Medicine" documentary series is here!
We spent months on the research, recorded the voiceovers and music live, worked with 11 different institutions for the amazing images.
If you would like to make a tax-deductible contribution to completion of the four-part "Civil War Medicine" documentary series, you can use the PayPal button on this website.
We hope you enjoy the trailer! You can see it at https://youtu.be/wCXmOx6C...
Tuesday, September 12, 2017
Prisons of the Civil War: An Enduring Controversy
By Michael E. Haskew, 2-13-17
All the horrors of prison life were experienced by hundreds of thousands of captives, Union and Confederate, during the Civil War.
The June 19, 1861, editorial in the Charleston Mercury newspaper warned: “War is bloody reality, not butterfly sporting. The sooner men understand this the better.” During the four-year course of the Civil War, the entire country—North and South—would come to the same grim realization. There were seemingly endless lists of thousands of soldiers killed or wounded in battle or dead of disease. Thousands more, both Union and Confederate, languished in prisoner of war camps, enduring...
Ann Bradford Stokes
From: s3.amazonaws.com
Stokes (1830-1903), an illiterate African American woman born into slavery in Tennessee, served as a “contraband” (escaped slave) nurse on the hospital ship USS Red Rover, the first Union Naval
ship, from January 1863 to October 1864. She also received regular wages of a “first-class boy.”
Notably, she was among the first women to serve as a nurse in the United States Navy and the first to serve on a U.S. military vessel. In 1890, after years of unsuccessful petitions for a pension, Stokes reapplied for a pension based on her 18 months of service in the Navy instead of as a widow of a deceased soldier. Since she was...
The Mystery of the Glow-in-the-Dark Civil War Soldiers
By Lauren Davis, 4-7-12
The American Civil War Battle of Shiloh left 16,000 soldiers dead and 3,000 soldiers wounded, and some of those wounded soldiers are part of an odd mystery. Some of the soldiers had eerily glowing wounds, which healed more quickly than the non-glowing wounds. So what strange battlefield science was at work?
It took two days and nights for the medics to reach all of the wounded soldiers in Shiloh, and some of the soldiers noticed that their wounds glowed in the darkness. Because the glowing wounds healed more quickly and cleanly, the mysterious force was termed "Angel's Glow."
It wasn't until 2001 that this 1862 mystery...
Ann Preston: First Woman Medical School Dean
By Maggie MacLean, 10-10-2012
Ann Preston (December 1, 1813–April 18, 1872) was a doctor and educator of women in Pennsylvania. One of the most notable achievements of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in the 19th century was the role it played in the entrance of women into medicine. Ann Preston was one of those pioneer Quaker women doctors.
Through her leadership and her persuasive influence, Dr. Preston promoted educational, professional and social changes that eventually established the right of women to study medicine and removed the barriers which blocked the path of those women who aspired to become competent and successful...
Black Women After the Civil War: African American Women in Postbellum America
By Maggie MacLean 9-14-16
After the Civil War, African American women were promised a new life of freedom with the same rights provided to other American citizens. But the newly freed women in the South had little or no money, limited or no education and little access to it, and racism impacted every area of their lives. The transition from enslavement to freedom was a difficult and frightening one for most black women who emerged from enslavement knowing "that what they got wasn't what they wanted; it wasn't freedom, really."
The Civil War promised freedom to African American women, but as the Confederate Army and slaveowners fleeing from...
Friday, August 18, 2017
Documentary Production Update
Great production progress has been made on the "Civil War Medicine" documentary trailer.
We recorded all of the voiceovers at Philadelphia Post; some live in the studio; some remote. The actors were from Pennsylvania, Delaware, Oregon and Wisconsin. They all did a great job. Musicians recorded piano, fiddle, banjo and drums live.
The unusual historical images you will see onscreen were provided by many excellent American museums, libraries, National Parks--the list is quite long! These are a few shots of the Philly Post studio where we recorded. Stay tuned for the trailer's release before Labor D...
Monday, June 19, 2017
Black Soldiers, Blue Uniforms – Blood On The Snow
By John Walker, 6-3-16
Confederate survivors of the Battle of Franklin shivered in their thinly held lines outside Nashville as the Black soldiers made their advance.
As the exhausted Confederate survivors of the Battle of Franklin shivered in their thinly held lines outside Nashville, Union General George H. Thomas prepared to launch a devastating, if much delayed, frontal assault.
Although several overzealous Union Army field commanders organized African Americans into ad hoc militia units early in 1862 and several black regiments were mustered into service later that year, it wasn’t until after President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation...
Terrible Virus, Fascinating History In "Rabid: A Cultural History of the World's Most Diabolical Virus" by Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy
By NPR Staff, 7-19-12
Here's your vocabulary word for the week: zoonosis. It describes an infection that is transmitted between species. For example, the disease that the husband and wife team of Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy have written about in their new book, "Rabid: A Cultural History of the World's Most Diabolical Virus".
Wasik is a journalist; his wife is a veterinarian, so the rabies virus seems like a natural topic for conversation. "Veterinarians spend a lot of time thinking about rabies, even though in this country, we hardly ever see it," Murphy tells NPR's Robert Siegel. "So I've been bringing home stories about rabies from my...
Monday, May 8, 2017
Production Update: We're Doing Research at The Library Company of Philadelphia
By Carole Adrienne
We've been selecting more images for the documentary series and trailer at one of my favorite research facilities.
The Library Company of Philadelphia, founded in 1731 by Benjamin Franklin, is an independent research library concentrating on American society and culture from the 17th through the 19th centuries. Free and open to the public, the Library Company houses an extensive non-circulating collection of rare books, manuscripts, broadsides, ephemera, prints, photographs, and works of art.
This place is heaven for the serious researcher. The staff is brilliant and enthusiastic, the facility is comfortable, beautiful...
Wednesday, May 3, 2017
How a Government Worker Discovered Clara Barton’s Missing Soldiers Office
By Matt Blitz, 11-13-15
On the day before Thanksgiving 1996, General Services Administration carpenter Richard Lyons was conducting a final review of a decrepit building at 437 Seventh Street, Northwest, that had recently fallen into government possession and was now set for demolition. Coming in from the cold rain, he entered the dusty old building alone. On the first floor (which was once a shoe store), he checked for infrastructure damage, trash, and whether anybody had made it their temporary home. Then, he moved to the second floor and did a similar sweep. He moved to third floor. “There were no lights… it was dark,” Lyons tells Washingtonian,...
Field Hospital Flag Exhibited in Atlanta Aided Stretcher-Bearers, Witnessed War's Horrors
By Phil Gast, 5-23-16
(Photographs courtesy of Atlanta History Center)
Before he became a renowned landscape and marine painter, Harrison Bird Brown created signs and banners. During the Civil War, his business in Portland, Maine, produced a U.S. Army field hospital flag that had a distinctive yellow background and contrasting green “H” for hospital (style specified in January 1864 Army regulations). One of Brown’s flags is among only a dozen such banners believed to have survived the Civil War.
Gordon Jones
The flag was donated last year to the Atlanta History Center, where it is displayed near the “Agonies of the Wounded” case at the center’s...
