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Please indulge me for posting this long letter from Iraq; it's the "real deal" and is full of valuable information. Info from Iraq From Someone who is Doing the Run and Gun Yesterday a friend of mine who runs a small security company here in Iraq emailed me. He is standing up a protection detail and wanted my opinion on tactics and equipment running the roads of Iraq; Tactics, SOP's, hard car or soft? I have been giving it some thought and here is where I am at. I am willing to speculate I’m as well traveled in Iraq as...

<p>MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) -- Three days of tributes to Alberta Martin, the last widow of a Civil War veteran, began yesterday with her body lying in repose at the First White House of the Confederacy as re-enactors in gray uniforms stood guard.</p>

MONTGOMERY, Ala. - Alberta Martin, the last widow of a Civil War veteran, died on Memorial Day, ending an unlikely ascent from sharecropper's daughter to the belle of 21st century Confederate history buffs who paraded her across the South. She was 97. Martin died at a nursing home in Enterprise of complications from a heart attack she suffered May 7, said her caretaker, Dr. Kenneth Chancey. She died nearly 140 years after the Civil War ended. Her May-December marriage in the 1920s to Civil War veteran William Jasper Martin and her longevity made her a celebrated final link to the...

E-mail Author Send to a Friend <% printurl = Request.ServerVariables("URL")%> Print Version May 27, 2004, 9:50 a.m. Euthanizing the CSAReady for 50 different drug-control regimes? By Wesley J. Smith By now it has been widely reported that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals "upheld" the assisted-suicide law in Oregon by a vote of 2-1 in Oregon v. Ashcroft yesterday. Not so: The validity of the Oregon law was never at stake in the case. Regardless of whether Ashcroft or the State of Oregon prevailed in the case, physician-assisted suicide would have remained legal within Oregon's borders. The case is...

DINWIDDIE - An African-American man from western North Carolina marched through Dinwiddie County on U.S. Route 1 yesterday, waving his huge Confederate flag as he headed toward Richmond. Black and white children in a Dinwiddie school bus waved back at H.K. Edgerton, 56, who was born and raised in Asheville, N.C. Last year he served as president of the Asheville NAACP.His march will conclude next week in Richmond, the capital of what had been the capitol for the Confederate States of America.One of Edgerton's goals was to show support for seven workers at the duPont Company plant near Richmond who...

FLORENCE - The company that will put the likeness of Strom Thurmond's daughter, Essie Mae Washington-Williams, on a commemorative coin is the Confederate States Mint.The irony of a mint with the Confederate name producing a coin honoring Washington-Williams, who revealed last December she was the out-of-wedlock child of a man who spent much of his political career fighting integration, is not lost on the company's owner, Florence businessman Gene Brown."I think that's actually going to make the coin more valuable," said Brown, who owns the mint with Thurmond relative Bruce Elrod.The mint was the old Confederate Mint in Ridgeway.Brown said...

CHARLESTON S.C. — They seemed to rise up out of the past and go on forever. Some 4,000 Confederate re-enactors, in hues of gray and butternut, bayonets sparkling in the sun, wowed 10,000 spectators Saturday on the long, last march to bury the eight sailors of the H.L. Hunley submarine, sunk off Charleston in 1864. “Enough people have come by to fight the Civil War all over again,” mused Sonny Bowyer, 57, down from Richmond, Va., after watching the procession 40 minutes with still no end in sight. Past, present, legend, history and drama — all collided for more than...

Story Number: NNS040416-19 Release Date: 4/16/2004 3:44:00 PM By Madeleine Scott, Naval Historical Center Public Affairs CHARLESTON, S.C. (NNS) -- In April, scientists working for the Naval Historical Center, after years of extensive research, released facial reconstructions and crew-profiles of eight crew members of the Confederate submarine H.L. Hunley. The Civil War-era crew consisted of sub commander Lt. George Dixon and crewmembers Arnold Becker, Lumkin (first name unknown), Joseph Ridgaway, Frank Collins, Miller (first name unknown), Cpl. J.F. Carlsen and James A Wicks. The profiles and personal information were created from extensive genealogical and scientific research led by the Hunley...

Story Number: NNS040409-25 Release Date: 4/12/2004 11:00:00 AM By Madeleine Scott, Naval Historical Center Public Affairs CHARLESTON, S.C. (NNS) -- The eight men strong crew of H.L. Hunley, after 140 years, will finally be laid to rest April 17 at the Magnolia Cemetery in Charleston, S.C. The submarine, under preservation by the Naval Historical Center (NHC) for the last three years, disappeared during the Civil War and was not discovered until 2000 and raised in 2001. “Hunley is renowned in history as the first successful combat submarine," said overall NHC supervisor and project leader of the Hunley conservation project, Dr....

By CRISTINA RODRIGUEZ Associated Press LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — Six Confederate soldiers whose bodies were dumped into a hastily dug grave after a Civil War battle will receive a proper burial later this month, more than a year after their remains were discovered by a hunter. The reburial is planned for March 20, almost 141 years after the men were cut down while facing Union troops in 1863 during a struggle for the Mississippi River port of Helena, Ark. The remains were found in a forest in the fall of 2002, when a hunter discovered a few bones and called...

“In the autumn of 1861 he had advanced to Bowling Green, a railway junction of high strategic value to the south of the Green River, a tributary of the Ohio. Here he stood brazenly, hoping to rouse Kentucky and marshal Tennessee,” Winston Churchill wrote of Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston, commander of Confederate forces in the Mississippi Valley at the beginning of the Civil War. Churchill, a Civil War buff, recorded Bowling Green’s brief emergence to national importance in the fourth volume of his “History of the English Speaking Peoples.” But the reference is only brief, because the focus of the...

Promoting a revision of history? 10/19/03By RONALD F. MAXWELL Special to the Register George Ewert, director of the Museum of Mobile, thinks my movie, "Gods and Generals," "seeks to rewrite the history of the American South, downplaying slavery." Moreover, as a self-proclaimed champion of the brave new South, it appears that he would like to run a re-education camp for adults and a brave new school for children so that Alabamians can be taught to hate their past, to reject their ancestors, and to condemn and even to forget their history. Most disturbing, from the point of view of a...

Gentlemen: I have transcribed this article from an English paper entitled "The Globe and Traveller" of September 2nd, 1864, of which I have an original in my possession. It is a negotiation interview between Jefferson Davis and Judah Benjamin of the Confederacy, and Colonel Jaques and J. R. Gilmore of the Union. I have emboldened a part that sums up what the South was all about. Warmest Regards ...Brian Lee Merrill **************************************** The Globe and Traveller (England) Friday Evening, September 2, 1864 AN INTERVIEW WITH PRESIDENT DAVIS The Atlantic Monthly in an article in the September number gives a narrative...

<p>The Civil War burning of a Susquehanna River crossing is more than water under the bridge to a Pennsylvania congressman who estimates his district should be compensated $170 million for the century-old loss.</p> <p>Rep. Joseph Pitts, R-Pa., intends to re-spark a long-running debate on the 1863 torching of the wooden Columbia-Wrightsville bridge when Congress returns to Washington next week. The bridge was burned three days before the Battle of Gettysburg to slow the Confederate army from advancing.</p>

Richmond, Vir. - While the rain may have dampened their clothes, it did not dampen the spirit of those attending the 9th Annual National Jefferson F. Davis Memorial service conducted at his grave site in Hollywood Cemetery, on Saturday May 31, 2003 by the Jefferson F. Davis Memorial Committee of the Virginia Division, Sons of Confederate Veterans in honor of his birth date of June 3. The service commenced with the advancement of the color guard of the Captain William J. Latane' Camp 1690 under the command of Commander Jefferson Ellett which was followed by The Legion Pipes and Drums...

It was lights and camera but not a lot of action at the Old Court House Museum Monday as a film crew set the scene to document the life of Jefferson Davis. Producers, writers and directors were painstakingly recording images of possessions of the only president of the Confederacy that are part of the museum’s collection. And though Davis may be best known for his role in the Civil War, that’s not what filmmakers from Flying Chaucer Films, a company based in New Orleans and Los Angeles, are trying to relay. “We’re doing this because we seek to do a...

Southern spies preparing for a Confederate resurgence after the U.S. Civil War may have buried millions of dollars in gold at sites across Canada in the 1860s -- part of an enormous treasure that, say the authors of a new book, is only now being unearthed. Warren Getler and Bob Brewer, who co-wrote Shadow of the Sentinel: One Man's Quest to Find the Hidden Treasure of the Confederacy, say Canada was an important haven for Confederate operatives during the Civil War who went on to form the nucleus of a secret society -- the Knights of the Golden Circle --...

WASHINGTON - The Confederate States of America would currently be the world's fourth-largest economic power if the Civil War had turned out differently and the rest of history had gone the same. That's the conclusion of Demographics Daily, an online newsletter for businesses that this week released its analysis of economic data pertaining to Alabama and the other 10 states that seceded from the Union. G. Scott Thomas, editor of Demographics Daily, said he decided that April, the month the Confederacy fell in 1865, would be a good time to do the economics and demographics equivalent of "alternate history" -...

June 3, 2003, is the 195th Birthday of Jefferson Davis. There is a highway that begins in Washington, D.C. and runs through Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, California and Oregon.Some call it the largest monument to an American.That (It) is the Jefferson Davis Highway in memorial to a man who graduated from West Point Military Academy, served in the United States Army, was elected as United States Senator and the Confederate States of America's first and only President-1861-1865.This story is about a man who served his God, his family and his country....

FRANKFORT, Ky. -- Black leaders are demanding the removal of Confederate President Jefferson Davis' statue from the Kentucky Capitol, questioning its place in a state that was officially neutral in the Civil War. "It's offensive," said Raoul Cunningham, a former state NAACP official. "Even in the days when he was alive, this state did not follow him. So why do we honor him today?" Davis' statue, one of five honoring famous Kentuckians, has stood in the Capitol Rotunda since its 1936 unveiling. It was built through donations from the United Daughters of the Confederacy and a $5,000 appropriation from the...