Many historians have put in their two cents about the recent debates over Confederate memory, including our authors at Civil Discourse. In response, the AHA added a plenary session on “The Confederacy, Its Symbols, and the Politics of Political Culture” chaired by David Blight.
Read MoreThe AHA Teaching Division sponsored a session on rethinking the U.S. survey in colleges. Here are a few of the thoughts, projects, and strategies that came out of the panel.
Read MoreFor Americans, history is a personal matter. Whatever we do or don't learn in the classroom, read in books, see in films...Americans stillexperience and understand the past personally. I suspect many public historians are familiar with Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen’s work Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life. The product of a 1994 survey, their book helps confirm and quantify the very personal ways in which everyday Americans experience the past...namely via their families. People feel most connected to the past when gathering with the families, and their most frequent “past-related” activity is looking at photographs with family and friends. Americans place greater trust in family stories than in college professors, high school teachers, or nonfiction books (personal family accounts were second only to museums). And of course, many Americans explore history through their own genealogy. Nothing helps bring history to life more than a personal connection; a realization that your family, your ancestor, lived and participated in the events of another age.
Read MoreAlong with the usual celebration and excitement that accompanies the New Year, we at Civil Discourse enjoyed the added bonus of reaching the one-year mark on our little blogging venture! It is a great milestone, and it's worth taking a moment to look back and see both what we've accomplished and what we'd like to achieve in the coming year.
Read MoreAs we begin the annual countdown to New Year's Day (and Civil Discourse's one-year anniversary!), let's finish our own countdown of the blog's post popular posts of 2015. Earlier this week we cracked the top ten, so today let's finish off 2015 by looking at our top five posts of the year!
Read MoreAs we approach Civil Discourse's one-year anniversary, we thought the time was right to look back on our inaugural year and countdown our top ten posts of 2015! These popular pieces not only shed light on the Civil War but also allowed us to understand the conflict from new perspectives. Without further ado, we begin our top ten countdown with posts six through ten! Lookout for our top five posts in the coming days!
Read MoreThe complicated role that women played in nineteenth-century American culture meant that the case of female crime was more complicated, and that despite the fact that many women were vocal and influential members of reform movements, their counterparts guilty of committing crimes were often left outside of the reformative process. Yet women played a unique role in the breakdown of the systems of control enforced prior to the Civil War, and consequently were responsible for challenging the normative barriers that endeavored to keep them on the margins of public life.
Read MoreWhat are the boundaries of Reconstruction and how can historians redefine them? This was the subject of a roundtable session at the Southern featuring Stephen Hahn, Stacy L. Smith, Elliott West, and Heather C. Richardson as panelists. Historians usually define the period of Reconstruction as 1865-1877 where Americans rebuilt the country and racial relations after the Civil War and most equate the end of Reconstruction with the destruction of black civil rights in the south. These historians challenged the audience to rethink the meanings of Reconstruction.
Read MoreAs the snow fell from a wintry sky on March 5, 1863, over a hundred men gathered on the fields of Camp Chase, outside Columbus, Ohio, ostensibly for the purposes of attending church. For a “church party,” however, they were oddly equipped, armed with “clubs, hatchets, and axes.” Once the men—soldiers of the 2nd Ohio Cavalry—had assembled at their “appointed rendezvous,” they formed up into a line and made their way onto Columbus. The soldiers had been planning this foray for some time, knowing that Sunday church offered them the perfect excuse to enter town and commence their mischief.
Read MoreThe Southern hosted a very unique type of session this year. Participants went to Little Rock Central High School, famous for the Little Rock Nine, to hear a panel on how to teach civil rights. I think most of us expected a panel presentation and discussion on teaching civil rights in high school and college history classes, but instead we participated in a workshop and presentation led by students of Central High School’s Memory Project.
Read MoreIn July 1863, Gouverneur K. Warren was considered the hero of Gettysburg for finding the crucial position on top of Little Round Top and directing troops to hold it minutes before the Confederate attack hit what would have been the unprotected flank of the Union army. Less than two years later, by the end of the war, Warren was humiliated by being relieved of command and spent much of the rest of his life trying to reclaim his good name. The Virginia campaigns of late 1863 and 1864 proved Warren’s downfall as his superiors began to question his ability to fight in the aggressive style adopted late in the war.
Read MoreThe Maryland Monument at Gettysburg honors men from the state who fought in both sides of the conflict..
Read MoreIn our first-ever Roundtable this summer, we asked Civil Discourse's scholars what event most influenced the outcome of the Civil War. Our answers were wide-ranging, but they would have been familiar to many of our readers: the Emancipation Proclamation, the Battle of Antietam, the fall of Atlanta, and more. Today, we shift our attention to areas overlooked or left behind by scholars, asking our panel:
What Civil War topics deserve greater attention from historians and scholars?
Read MoreThe descriptions of him are priceless. “He looked the image of a bantam rooster or a gamecock,” recalled a veteran. Perhaps it was his odd dress: “He wore a large sombrero hat, without plume, cocked on one side, and decorated with a division badge; he had a hunting-shirt of gray…while he wore boots, his trousers cover them; those boots were as small as a woman’s.” Or perhaps he was just plain odd, “the sauciest-looking manikin imaginable” and “the oddest and daintiest little specimen.” His five-foot stature and frail 125 pound frame didn’t help.
William "Billy" Mahone was a genuine character, and his life was as unique as his stature. Although a rising star in the Army of Northern Virginia by the end of the war, his post-war political career in the darkness of Reconstruction and Redemption is perhaps his true shining moment. “Bantam” Billy Mahone revealed his character not only as a fighter on the battlefield, but as a progressive on the political stage.
Read MoreAbout a month ago I attended Dolly Parton’s Dixie Stampede in Gatlinburg, TN - fully expecting to be horrified by what might ensue. But after I left I was hesitant to apply too much criticism to something that advertises itself simply as a dinner show and is very clearly meant to exist in the realm of imagination and exaggeration.
Recent events, however, have convinced me that ending the myths that endure from the Civil War is not simply the job of historians.
Read MoreWith all the discussions in recent months about eliminating Confederate symbols such as the Confederate flag, some have called for the removal of Confederate monuments and memorials as well, everything from the local monument in the town square to the Stone Mountain carving. How far go we go in deleting Confederate memory from American soviety?
Read MoreIn the past few months, the public has been swept up in debates about the place of Confederate memory and identity in American culture and society. While the debates started mainly around the use of the Confederate flag in South Carolina in the wake of the tragic shooting there this summer, the discussion has spread far beyond that. For Americans, opening up the “can of worms” that is Civil War memory brings forward emotional arguments along the same fault lines of the 1860s because of how deep the war’s legacy runs in our national story. One of the arguments that I came across a few times was whether or not Confederate veterans were considered veterans of the United States; which, if they were, would impact other arguments about use of Confederate symbols at cemeteries and other memorial events or the place of Confederate monuments in society.
Read MoreSo what is the legacy of the Civil War in East Tennessee? The short answer is, not a good one. War came to East Tennessee in the form of guerilla conflicts that harassed the lesser-developed portions of the United States in 1861.
Read MoreFour hundred cavalrymen splashed across the icy waters of the Rappahannock River in central Virginia, moving north into enemy territory. The Confederate cavaliers, undeterred by the bitter cold and snowfall nearly eighteen inches deep, consisted of some of the Old Dominion’s finest: portions of the First, Second and Third Virginia Cavalry. At the gray-clad column’s head was twenty-eight year-old Fitzhugh Lee, nephew to Robert E. Lee and already a grim veteran of war’s horrors. On this day, February 24, 1863, Brigadier General Fitz Lee led his men across the Rappahannock in reconnaissance, seeking to determine what movements, if any, the Union Army of the Potomac was undertaking around Fredericksburg. The mission’s directive had come from Robert E. Lee himself.
Read MoreIn June, Alexander Rose (known for Washington’s Spies which AMC turned into its drama series Turn) released his newest book, Men of War: The American Soldier in Combat at Bunker Hill, Gettysburg, and Iwo Jima. A direct successor of John Keegan’s groundbreaking The Face of Battle, Rose seeks to create the American version by focusing on American troops in the three iconic battles listed in the title. Like Keegan, Rose wrote the book determined to find the common participant’s experience of the battles, instead of a traditional, top-down military history of the tactics and maneuverings of the armies.
In July, the New York Times published a highly critical review of Men of War written by Andrew J. Bacevich. Bacevich tears Rose apart, even stating that were was no creativity or genius in the work. While every book deserves some critiques, his review sparked discussion and debate among historians, prompting a response on H-War from Rose himself.
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