I've produced a story for CBS-8 that will air this morning on CBS-8 This Morning between 6:00 and 7:00am, with a repeat tonight in the CBS-8 News at Six.
Today is the 150th anniversary of the day the Confederate Secretary of War in Montgomery sent a message to his commander in South Carolina, giving him permission to fire on the Federal Ft. Sumter.
He used a brand new high tech method to send his message: a telegram, the first electronic communication method in the world.The wording of the telegram sounds so quaint and archaic:
Early the next morning the first shot was fired and Fort Sumter fell to the Confederacy. The American Civil War was underway.
As I've written about on this blog before, Alabama and others Southern States have walked on eggshells trying to determine how to recognize the 150th anniversary without celebrating the war and slavery. More Americans died in the four year war than any other conflict in our history, before or since.
The telegram was sent from a spot steps from a Montgomery slave market, and no one denies slavery was at the very least a partial cause of the war, if not the cause.
In the report on CBS-8, we talk with an archivist who has connections here in Alabama and there in South Carolina at Ft. Sumter too. And we were given a tour by one of the owners of the building on Montgomery's Dexter Avenue from which the telegram was sent.
The Winter building is up for sale now, and there are some exciting plans for a development in the coming months.
(right) Owner John Bowman and Archivist Bob Bradley
(left) From inside the Winter Building.
[The Monday Morning Media Memo is a regular feature of this blog, usually about more modern media. I numbered this morning's MMMM #150 in honor of the anniversary, though it is the 140th I've written in the years I've been posting them here.]
(The anniversary is the subject of lots of news magazine stories this week)
No comments:
Post a Comment