The more things change, the more they remain the same. For example - the fashion choices that signal partisan loyalty. Today that’s often expressed in baseball caps and tee-shirts bearing slogans and messages. But they didn’t have baseball caps or colorful tee-shirts back in the days of the Civil War, 160 years ago. They did, nonetheless, publicly mark their partisan preferences through their clothing.
Amy Murrell Taylor is a historian of the American South whose work focuses on the era of the Civil War, Emancipation, and Reconstruction. She has studied the significance of clothing for an essay in the Register of the Kentucky Historical Society. It’s entitled “Texts and Textiles in Civil War Kentucky.”