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Relating to Syria:Not a blog or article authored by me (see link above), however, it puts into perspective the USA's own 4 year civil war....where experts estimate (and no one really knows, or can know...) 100,000 to 250,000 CIVILIAN DEATHS were caused by the war--the vast majority being in the South. Some historians estimate that as many as 50,000 civilians died of starvation as a result of Sherman's march to the sea alone.

This is the untold story of the Union's "hard war" against the people of the Confederacy. Styled the "Black Flag" campaign, it was agreed to by Lincoln in a council with his generals in 1864. Cisco reveals the shelling and burning of cities, systematic destruction of entire districts, mass arrests, forced expulsions, wholesale plundering of personal property, and even murder of civilians. Carefully researched largely from primary sources, this examination also gives full attention to the suffering of Black victims of Federal brutality.

Family TraditionSciple's Water Mill has been all in the family for nearly 200 yearsBy Nancy Dorman-Hickson Photography by Meg McKinney The honor box says a lot about Sciple’s Water Mill in De Kalb, Miss. Attached to a stand that’s filled with the mill’s stone-ground whole-wheat flour, fish fry mix, grits, and meal, the honor box means visitors won’t leave empty-handed even if the mill is closed. “Most people are honest,” says Eddie Sciple, the mill’s operator and owner. “Usually if meal is gone, there is money or an I.O.U. in the box.” People have been coming to the mill...

The NAACP in Lee County, Florida wants to picket the county over a portrait of General Robert E. Lee that hangs in the commission chambers because they deem displaying Lee's image to be racist. "It's a symbol of racism and division," Lee County NAACP President James Muwakkil said. According to Fox 4, "Muwakkil sent a letter to Lee County commissioners in early July, asking them to take down the portrait, but they voted to keep it up." On Sunday, Muwakkil fired off an email saying, "General Lee did not believe blacks should hold any positions in government." Muwakkil is reportedly...

The most popular Confederate flag, besides the Battle flag--the soldier's flag, was probably the Bonnie Blue flag that a song was made about.

It is reported that a Southern Heritage group has purchased land in Richmond, Virginia to fly a 10-by-15 foot Confederate flag on Interstate 95 in the city.

The NAACP has come forward in staunch opposition and anger about a heritage group’s plans to fly a 10-by-15-foot Confederate flag on a 50-foot pole south of Richmond, Va. — large enough to be seen from the corridor’s main highway, Interstate 95. The Virginia Flaggers say it’s to show respect for those on the South’s side who fought and died during the Civil War . . . But the NAACP sees differently. Virginia chapter executive director King Salim Khalfani told the Richmond Times-Dispatch that the flag would show Richmond as a “backwater, trailer park, hick town.”

Views on abortion are becoming more entrenched in certain regions of the country, with New England residents more convinced of the pro-choice position and the Midwest and parts of the South becoming more pro-life, according to a new Pew Forum study. While abortion views have remained relatively steady when looking at the nation as a whole, the Pew study shows greater variation in a few regions of the country. The study compares views on abortion in 1995 and 1996 to views on abortion in 2012 and 2013 for eight regional areas – New England, Pacific Coast, Mid-Atlantic, Mountain West, Great...

During my childhood of the 50s, songs like “Swanee River”, “Mammy” and “Waiting for the Robert E. Lee”, all best sung by the late great Al Jolson, were very popular in the South and throughout the USA.

Rush Limbaugh would have sided with the confederacy during the Civil War, according to MSNBC analyst Dorian Warren. Warren, a Columbia professor and fellow at the progressive Roosevelt Institute, explained that Limbaugh “represents the Confederacy. He would have been on that side that went to war around the question of slavery.”

Do you remember that kid who went on YouTube to profess his love for the Confederate Flag a year or so ago? Well, Byron Thomas has taken his love for all things Dixie Mason to Capital Hill, where he is an intern for Tim Scott, the Republican Senator from South Carolina. Given that he has just been on the job for fewer than two weeks, you would think the young man would simply get settled in and learn his job. But not Mr. Thomas. He sent out an email–which was later sent to the Huffington Post–to fellow interns and staffers...

"It’s not only a crime to drive while black; it has now become a crime to be black. If there was any hope of ridding the Black community of guns and other weapons, kiss that premise goodbye. Young black men must be prepared to meet and defeat the George Zimmermans of the world. . . The entire court was made up of people of Caucasian decent: The Prosecutors, the Defense, the Jurors, and the Judge. Not one shred of color in the entire court. Sure there were blacks on the staff of the attorneys but were obviously absent from the...

A Conversation with Thomas Fleming, historian and author of A Disease in the Public Mind: A New Understanding of Why We Fought the Civil War.Thomas Fleming is known for his provocative, politically incorrect, and very accessible histories that challenge many of the clichés of current American history books. Fleming is a revisionist in the best conservative sense of the word. His challenges to accepted wisdom are not with an agenda, but with a relentless hunger for the truth and a passion to present the past as it really was, along with capturing the attitudes and culture of the times. In...

The armies are already beginning to arrive, days ahead of the big battle. Tucked away in the rolling Adams County countryside are rows of billowy white tents. Men in blue and in gray march with shouldered muskets. Officers on horseback ride by with sabers jingling at their sides. One hundred and fifty years after the bloodiest clash ever fought on the continent, Union and Confederate forces are again gathering like storm clouds around tiny Gettysburg, this time for a bloodless re-creation of the epic battle fought there.

The fate of the Voting Rights Act before the Supreme Court may hinge on whether it's right."Is it the government's submission that the citizens of the South are more racist than the citizens of the North?" John Roberts, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, asked that in February during oral arguments over the fate of the Voting Rights Act, a 1965 civil rights law. Donald Verrilli, the government's chief lawyer, said no. Not surprisingly, the Obama administration was not willing to assert that citizens in Southern states were statistically more likely to hold racist beliefs. Without making such a...

Don’t give up on Hollywood. I just had the exciting opportunity to pre-screen Gettysburg director Ron Maxwell’s third Civil War movie premiering Friday, June 28. If you see just one movie this summer, make it Copperhead. Copperhead is worth seeing because it re-tells American history with an intimate, engaging and non-textbook approach. Away from the mighty battlefields and memorable generals we finally get to experience behind-the-scenes struggles of the Civil War through a few friends, lovers, neighbors and family members trying to speak their minds while practicing what they preach. Copperhead is based on a novel by Harold Frederic, who...

Why did he have to be from Delco? A Ridley Park man was arrested outside of the Toby Keith concert at the Susquehanna Bank Center in Camden, N.J., Saturday for shouting racial slurs and waving a Confederate flag at residents of a nearby apartment complex. Darren T. Walp, 33, was tailgating in the parking lot of the concert venue when around 6:30 p.m. he decided to scale the large, wrought iron fence that separates the parking lot from the nearby Royal Court apartment complex, according to the Camden County Police Department. Once he was on the private grounds of the...

From the time Abraham Lincoln entered the White House nearly a century and a half ago, there has been an anti-Lincoln tradition in American life. President John Tyler’s son, writing in 1932, seemed to speak for a silent minority: “I think he was a bad man,” wrote Lyon Gardiner Tyler, “a man who forced the country into an unnecessary war and conducted it with great inhumanity.” Throughout his presidency Lincoln was surrounded by rivals, even among his own cabinet. Outside the White House, his many enemies included conservative Whigs, Democrats, northern copperheads and New England abolitionists. Wisconsin editor, Marcus M....

Ron Maxwell wasn't done with the Civil War. The director behind the critically acclaimed epics "Gettysburg" and "Gods and Generals" revisits the familiar subject of the War Between the States with his new film, "Copperhead," which will host its world premiere at the State Theatre June 28 at 7:30 p.m. “I wanted to explore something more intimate," Maxwell said of the film. "My previous pictures focused on officers and leaders, but, in reality, the war was fought by teenage boys, most from small towns whose families ended up devastated by the war even if no battles were fought nearby." Copperhead...

One hundred and fifty years after twin defeats at Gettysburg and Vicksburg destroyed the South’s quest for independence, the region is again on the rise. People and jobs are flowing there, and Northerners are perplexed by the resurgence of America’s home of the ignorant, the obese, the prejudiced and exploited, the religious and the undereducated. Responding to new census data showing the Lone Star State is now home to eight of America’s 15 fastest-growing cities, Gawker asked: “What is it that makes Texas so attractive? Is it the prisons? The racism? The deadly weather? The deadly animals? The deadly crime?...