UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication associate professor Frank Fee spoke last week at Wilson Library about the development and struggles of news and newspapers during the civil war. He describes the evolution of communication during this time and the role played by newpapers and journalists.

This talk was in conjunction with the library's exhibit Home Front on the Hill: Chapel Hill and the University during the Civil War. The exhibit will be on view through May 8 in the Melba Remig Saltarelli Exhibit Room on the third floor of Wilson Library.

One of the most interesting of  the many Civil War anniversary projects comes from the Southern Historical Collection at UNC Chapel Hill. Civil War Day by Day will post a different document every day for the next four years, each 150 years old to the day. The collection will build day by day (beginning today, of course), and an interactive calendar will allow you to jump to any of the past days and their documents. Read more about it here.

This and other interesting Civil War links will be collected on the right side of the Past Times homepage.
 

The National Archives Civil War records have been digitized and are available on Ancestry.com. This week (through Thursday), you can search them for free.

By searching a name, you can learn when your soldier enlisted, which company he served, and what became of him. The company name is often a hyperlink to the unit itself, listing all the battles it fought and linking to a list of all soldiers in that unit. Many of the battles also link to a narrative description of the event.

Learn more about the digitized records here.

And be sure to check out this collection of Civil War portraits.

The American Civil War and all the documents associated with it have been a rich resource for historians and genealogists. The 150th anniversary of the war which begins today, marking the anniversary of the firing on Fort Sumter, promises to introduce and reacquaint us with our own American past.

There were no deaths in this opening battle, but NPR librarian Kee Malesky recounts the first death of the Civil War:

No one was killed during the actual engagement, but as the Union soldiers lowered their flag, they honored it with a 100-gun salute. A premature discharge from one cannon caused an explosion that killed Pvt. Daniel Hough of the 1st U.S. Artillery. Not technically a battle death, but it did make Hough the first person killed in the Civil War.

Similarly, the first North Carolina soldier to die in the Civil War never saw battle. The N&O's Josh Shaffer tells the story of Pvt. James M. Hudson:

Pvt. James M. Hudson died sweating and delirious from pneumonia inside a Raleigh horse stable converted into the state's first military hospital - gone and forgotten before he could so much as stain the knees of his uniform.

Chapel Hillians may see a familiar face tonight (Jan. 3) when they tune in to the PBS documentary "American Experience: Robert E. Lee."

Joe Glatthaar, Stephenson Distinguished Professor of History at UNC, was interviewed for the program, which airs  at 9 p.m. on WUNC TV, channel 9 on Time Warner Cable and channel 4 on satellite TV.

Glatthaar ("GLAD-har") who teaches in the College of Arts and Sciences, wrote "General Lee's Army: From Victory to Defeat" (The Free Press, 2008); "The March to the Sea and Beyond: Sherman's Troops in the Savannah and Carolinas Campaigns (New York University Press, 1985); and other books about the Civil War. He co-edited Encyclopedia of American Military History (Oxford University Press, 2000).
 

Civil War reenactors and visitors at the 144th anniversary activities at Bennett Place in Durham on Sunday, April 26, 2009.

Lots of readers took issue with N&O columnist J. Peder Zane's call for the Confederate monument at the State Capitol to come down and his subsequent column about his critics. Read the columns here and here. We had some e-mail issues at the paper this week, and several other letters on this topic were lost. I hope those readers and others will post their thoughts here.

Of the several statues surrounding the state Capitol on Union Square, a grand total of two portray lifelike movement. One is the ultra-realistic Vietnam memorial, in which two soldiers half-carry, half-drag a wounded comrade while scanning the sky for a rescue chopper. The other honors a son of the Confederacy who earned a dubious distinction indeed.

Bennett Place in western Durham, site of the largest Confederate surrender of the War Between the States, is trying something new this weekend: Reconstruction.