Black Civil War veteran honored in SC

A white gravestone for a black Union Civil War veteran was dedicated Thursday, nearly a century after his death.

Henry Benjamin Noisette, whose military past was not discovered until recently by a researcher with the African American Historical Alliance, was honored during a Veterans Day ceremony at a small black cemetery in Charleston.

The African American Historical Alliance is a nonprofit group formed in 2006 to highlight the contributions of more than 200,000 black soldiers and sailors during the Civil War.

Noisette was an escaped slave from Charleston who joined the US Navy in 1862. He served on the USS Huron, a lightly armed wooden ship that intercepted blockade runners and often tested Confederate defenses along the Lowcountry’s rivers.

Assessing television, warts and all

It’s curious to see how some bloggers’ minds work. Take Bryan Caplan of EconLog, named one of the Wall Street Journal’s Top 25 Economics Blogs.

As a bit of background, Caplan is an associate professor of Economics at George Mason University. He is also the author of The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies. According to the EconLog website, Caplan’s current project is a new book, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids: Why Being a Great Parent Is Less Work and More Fun Than You Think.

Caplan generally does a pretty good job writing about economics, but every once in a while he gives a glimpse as to why university types occasionally are referred to derisively as “eggheads.”