Raleigh’s WUNC Radio aired episodes in a series, North Carolina Voices: The Civil War, during the middle of June. The series includes pieces on the impact of the war on North Carolinians and their families from the time of the Civil War until now. Thankfully, the episodes are available for streaming and downloading from the WUNC website.
Among other pieces, there is an episode with interviews the living daughters of Confederate veterans. There is also an investigation of the religious history of the Civil War (“Whose Side is God On?”), which interviews George C. Rable, author of God’s Almost Chosen Peoples: A Religious History of the American Civil War (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2010) and Reginald Hildebrand, author of The Times Were Strange and Stirring: Methodist Preachers and the Crisis of Emancipation (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995.
There are two interesting pieces about African Americans in New Bern, North Carolina:
- “Black Soldiers in the Civil War,” which interviews Richard Reid, author of Freedom for Themselves: North Carolina’s Black Soldiers in the Civil War Era (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2008).
- “African American Legacy in New Bern,” which describes how New Bern functioned as a mecca for free blacks during the Civil War. This was especially true in the case of James Walker Hood, a minister of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion church.