On September 17, 1863, two armies shifted into position along northwest Georgia’s Chickamauga Creek.  Since late June, Maj. Gen. William S. Rosecrans’ Union Army of the Cumberland had shoved Gen. Braxton Bragg’s Confederate Army of Tennessee to the southeast.  Weather conditions for men in the field had been hot and dry enough to stir up stifling clouds of dust.  But that night, as soldiers steeled themselves for impending combat, the weather suddenly turned cold.  A howling north wind blew through the dark creek bottoms and over rolling wooded hills like a bloodthirsty banshee.  Having thrown away their blankets in the summer heat, many soldiers on both sides shivered and huddled for warmth.  Temperatures collapsed over thirty degrees into the forties, not counting wind chill. The next day was gray and cold.  At the closest outpost of the Smithsonian Institution’s national weather observation program, afternoon highs had plummeted 24 degrees, from 80 degrees on September 17 to only 54 degrees the next day.  That night, the mercury again fell into the forties.[1] The vicious two-day battle that followed took place on frosty morning ground under a cold, clear sky. At night, stars twinkled and water froze in canteens.  In defiance of orders, many soldiers built fires to keep wounded comrades from freezing to death.

Historical writing in the eighteenth century has not received much attention from scholars of the period in recent years. Nevertheless, the long revolutionary era witnessed an unprecedented explosion of historical cultural production, both in the form of traditional histories and in other emerging cultural forms such as early American poetry, fiction, and art. Before the Revolution, there was as yet no sense of a shared “American” or “colonial” history, i.e., one that incorporated the histories of all of the British American colonies into a coherent narrative. Therefore, when the new nation found itself on the other side of the War for Independence, Americans had the beginnings of a nation but no national history.

Cultural nationalists in the early republic, which included historians, antiquarians, writers, and artists of all kinds, understood the importance of crafting a national history as a way of fostering the shared national sentiment they believed crucial to the new republic’s survival. Politicians and military officials such as George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Henry Knox, and others also keenly understood the importance of developing a new national history. As early as 1786, Washington “regretted” that a “comprehensive view of the war” had not yet been published. As a result, these public officials offered encouragement and support (as well a bit of caution) in the 1780s to those seeking to craft the first histories of the Revolution and the new nation.[1]

The torso discovered on the bank of a pond just outside of Philadelphia was headless and limbless.  The head had been severed at the fourth vertebra, one arm had been chopped off at the joint, the other cut crudely through the shoulder; the midsection had been sawed midway so that the distended bowels protruded.  Blood leaked from the exposed orifices and the trunk had been wrapped in heavy brown paper marked, “Handle with care.”

While the sex of the victim was readily discernable, his race was not.  Some believed it to be the body part of a “Chinamen,” others a “Spaniard or an Italian”; the ambiguity around whether the torso might belong to a white man would spur a feverish hunt for whomever might be responsible.  Without the use of well-placed surveillance cameras, CSI teams, fingerprint or DNA evidence, investigators zeroed in on two suspects: a 37-year-old black Maryland migrant named Hannah Mary Tabbs and an 18-year-old “mulatto” named George Wilson.

Ralph Keeler is the most extraordinary American that you’ve never heard of—a performer, traveler and writer who blazed a trail through the heart of literary scene on both sides of the continent in the decade after the Civil War. His astonishing adventures—and, particularly, his equally enigmatic end—can be traced through the pages of America’s Historical Newspapers.

A potted biography can hardly do justice to the vicissitudes of Keeler’s short life: as a runaway child, Keeler became part of a minstrel troupe that travelled around the country, including a stint along the Mississippi River in a showboat. Leaving that life behind to pursue an education, he made his way to Europe where he enrolled as a student at Heidelberg University. Returning to America after the Civil War, he gravitated to San Francisco—at that moment, the capital of Bohemian life in the newly reunited nation. It was an apt choice: Keeler’s flamboyant personal style soon captured the attention of the city’s literati, and he became friends with writers like Mark Twain, Bret Harte and Charles Warren Stoddard. At first he worked as a teacher: notice of his address to the “The State Teachers’ Institute,” in his role as “Principal of the Foreign Evening School,” appeared in the Weekly Alta-California, the city’s leading newspaper, in May 1867.