Roundtable: What Civil War Topics Deserve Greater Attention?

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Roundtable: What Civil War Topics Deserve Greater Attention?

In 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?

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Memorable Days: The Battle of Gettysburg through the Eyes of a Free Black Woman

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Memorable Days: The Battle of Gettysburg through the Eyes of a Free Black Woman

Gettysburg. If someone can name a single Civil War battle, it is most likely the only major battle that occurred north of the Mason-Dixon Line. Many argue that this three day ordeal in 1863 was the culminating point of America’s most destructive war, the moment that turned the tide against Robert E. Lee’s legendary Army of Northern Virginia and began the uphill struggle towards reunion and a new birth of freedom. But Emilie Davis, a free African-American woman living in Philadelphia during the war, never names this small Pennsylvania town in her diary chronicling the monumental year of 1863.

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Memorable Days: The Civil War through the Eyes of a Free Black Woman

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Memorable Days: The Civil War through the Eyes of a Free Black Woman

Emilie Davis was a young twenty-something black woman living in the city of Philadelphia during the Civil War. Like many her age, she worried about school, employment, family and friends. Her activities did not make headlines, and her name is unlikely to appear in a textbook. Yet her story is important because it is the story of a cross-section of society previously unexplored. Moreover, Emilie’s story is everyone’s story, a narrative of a woman on the rise, confronting the daily realities of a nation at war at a personal level defined by relationships, experiences, and often the seemingly mundane.

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