Immigration, the Civil War, and Blogging Reconstruction with Patrick Young

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Hey all!! I am very happy to welcome Mr. Patrick Young to the show! Patrick is an immigration attorney and immigrant rights advocate. He has represented thousands of immigrants before the immigration courts, the INS, and the Department of Homeland Security. He was co-counsel on two successful Federal lawsuits and he wrote the winning brief in the United States Court of Appeals case that established the standard of eligibility for political asylum in New York. He is the co-author of the Master Exhibit on Human Rights in Peru published by the U.S. Department of Justice. Patrick was the founding Chairperson of the Long Island Immigrant Alliance and he served seven terms as the Chair of the Board of the New York Immigration Coalition. Patrick is the Downstate Advocacy Director of the New York Immigration Coalition. He served for three decades as the Program Director at CARECEN and he was the co-founder of the Long Island Civic Engagement Table, which works to increase civic activism in immigrant communities. He is Special Professor of Immigration Law at Hofstra University School of Law and in 2012 he was named Director of Hofstra's Immigration Law Clinic. He blogs on the immigration website Long Island Wins and he is the author of the history series The Immigrants’ Civil War. He recently started The Reconstruction Era Blog. Patrick and I met years ago in the history blogosphere, when it was in its infancy, and had a ton of great back-and-forths on 19th century topics. We get down to business…and especially cover blogging all this stuff. We discuss:

  • Blogging history, generally speaking, and what it does for the discipline

  • The recent Earl Hess publication, “The Internet and Civil War Studies” in Civil War History

  • Jews in the Civil War and U. S. Grant’s infamous general orders targeting Jews in the Department of Tennessee

  • Why the Reconstruction Era so often winds up as a brief coda to Civil War history in high school and college classes

  • The rebirth of Reconstruction Era history in the public sphere

  • The Henry Louis Gates documentary: Reconstruction: America After the Civil War


We discussed a number of publications including Eric Foner’s latest book, The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution…which of course is now on my must-read list. Pat is really open to engaging with the public…you can find him blogging away and opening his site up for comments at his all NEW blog - The Reconstruction Era and as always discussing immigrants in the Civil War at Long Island Wins

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With compliments,

Keith