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...

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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...

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