Searching for Black Confederates with Kevin Levin

Kevin Levin author photo.jpg

Greetings all!

I am super stoked to be welcoming Kevin Levin back to the show - Kevin was my very first guest way back in 2016…and since then he has finished and published his outstanding study of the myth of Black Confederate soldiers. If you have order this book - do so right now: Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth. You’ll also want to check out my review on the book.

Kevin writes and speaks exclusively about the Civil War in history and memory - you can check him out on C-SPAN, NPR, Al-Jazeera, BackStory With the American History Guys, and Vox, and in The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Wall Street Journal. He’s also the author of Remembering the Battle of the Crater: War as Murder and the editor of Interpreting the Civil War at Museums and Historic Sites

Today we focused on his new book and discussed:

  • The origins of and evidence supporting the myth of black Confederate soldiers

  • What black folks actually did in Confederate armies and the relationships with their white masters

  • The value of studying the myth despite critics who claim that such study lends credibility to wingnuts

  • Why reasonable people might find such a myth compelling

  • Blogging and the process of writing history

  • Haters (we’ve all got ‘em…but Kevin’s are the most interesting)

  • Social media as a useful tool for historians

Have a listen!!

And be sure to check out Kevin’s website Civil War Memory…as he will most certainly be talking about what’s coming next. Catch him on Twitter too!

And please, be sure and subscribe to The Rogue Historian Podcast on Apple Podcasts or your favorite app so you never ever ever ever miss a show. That would be dumb.

With compliments,

Keith


The Rogue HistorianKeith HarrisKevin Levin, Black Confederates, Civil War, Social Media, Blogging, UNC Press, Civil War memoryComment