I am very excited to share what promises to be one of the most educational and entertaining conferences to come down the pike in quite some time. From March 14-16, 2013 the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College will host a three-day conference titled, “The Future of Civil War History: Looking Beyond the 150th.” Peter [...]
Civil War Historians
It’s been a while since I last updated my list of books received as review copies and those purchased. As always, thanks to those of you who have gone through my affiliate account with Amazon to purchase items. Thanks to you I rarely have to shell out my own money for new titles. This list [...]
We’ve heard quite a bit in recent years about the need to step back from our tendency to draw a sharp divide between the war years and Reconstruction. Historians such as Mark Grimsley and James Hogue have reminded us that the violence did not stop after 1865. Just as importantly, many of the crucial political [...]
Next week I head down to Charleston, South Carolina for the Civil War Trust’s annual teachers institute. This is my third year working with CWT and it’s always a rewarding experience. My talk is on the history of Civil War monuments and how they can be integrated into the classroom. As a preface to my [...]
I have plenty to share about this past week’s CWI at Gettysburg College. It was an honor to be asked to speak and I had a wonderful time meeting and talking with the participants. Peter Carmichael has done a fabulous job as the institute’s new director and I look forward to returning in 2014 to [...]
Yesterday I finished reading Yael Sternhell’s wonderful book, Routes of War: The World of Movement in the Confederate South, which explores various aspects of mobility in the Confederate South. The author argues that what could be seen on the roads throughout the South tells us quite a bit about Confederate nationalism, the collapse of slavery [...]
The question of how far we’ve come in expanding and correcting certain elements of our collective memory of the Civil War has come up on a number of occasions on this blog and elsewhere. I have stressed the extent to which we have moved beyond a strictly Lost Cause narrative of the war to one [...]
I am making my way through Andrew Delbanco’s short book, The Abolitionist Imagination (Harvard University Press, 2012), which features his essay of the same name as well as responses by John Stauffer, Manish Sinha, Darryl Pinckney, and Wilfred M. McClay. The reading is difficult, especially the literary analysis of antebellum literature. As a historical interpretation [...]
