Book Missing Since Civil War Returned to Virginia School

And this time, all the black students told to play slaves

(NEWSER) - Note to teachers: Perhaps it would be a good idea to skip the mock slave auctions while covering the Civil War. Parents are in an uproar after yet another elementary school engaged in such a lesson, this time in Norfolk, Virginia, on April 1. Jessica Boyle told all the black and mixed-race students in her fourth grade class to step to one side of the room, while the white students took turns "buying" them. The class is about 40% black and 40% white, the Washington Post reports. More»

Virginia could overtake North Carolina in number of soldier deaths

(NEWSER) - With the 150th anniversary of the Civil War approaching, North Carolina and Virginia have commissioned official recounts of how many soldiers each state lost in battle. What sounds like a humdrum exercise is producing surprising results, reports the Wall Street Journal : North Carolina has long laid claim to losing the most men in uniform: 40,275, according to the 1866 count. That number will surely decline by thousands. Virginia, meanwhile, is at 31,000 and still counting, far exceeding its original total of about 15,000. More»

Author Joy Masoff read about it on the Internet

(NEWSER) - A Virginia 4th-grade textbook has come under fire for claiming that thousands of slaves fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War—something an overwhelming majority of historians say isn’t true. The book’s author, Joy Masoff, isn’t a trained historian, and says she did most of her research on the Internet. She attributes the claim—which critics say is often used to downplay slavery as a cause of the war—to a website from the Sons of Confederate Veterans. She tells the Washington Post she’s sticking by it. More»

(NEWSER) - Ben Stein loves Wal-Mart—just don’t put one smack-dab in the middle of a historic Civil War battlefield in Orange, Va. The 1864 Battle of the Wilderness was a turning point in the conflict, Stein writes in the American Spectator, and the “battlefield is incredibly important environmentally and historically and emotionally. It reeks of the blood of men fighting for causes they considered sacred.” More»