North Carolina Voices: The Civil War

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.