This is one of those days when I desperately wish I was in the classroom teaching my course on the American Civil War. Yesterday the Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond released Visualizing Emancipation, which allows you to track individual emancipation events on a timeline. As it stands you can track different types [...]
Civil War Historians
I think Gary Gallagher makes a pretty good case for why black soldiers were not present at the Grand Review in Washington D.C. in May 1865. He argues that their absence had little to do with scheming politicians and military brass, who hoped to keep it an all-white affair. The parade was made up primarily [...]
I was hoping that yesterday’s post would not turn into another round of the same old back and forth over the cause of the war, but that is exactly what happened. Unfortunately, most of what is usually offered in such discussions lacks any serious analysis and/or context. I was hoping to encourage readers to share [...]
To commemorate the sesquicentennial of the Civil War and Emancipation, the Gilder Lehrman Center’s 2012 David Brion Davis Lectures on the History of Slavery, Race, and Their Legacies features a roundtable discussion with five major historians and writers, moderated by GLC Director, David W. Blight. The group takes up questions of the changing character and [...]
I recently offered some brief thoughts about Robert K. Krick’s concerns about historians, who are supposedly weary of Confederate memoirs. While I focused my remarks on a specific claim made by Krick about how historians interpret Robert E. Lee’s wartime popularity, his broader point about postwar accounts is worth a brief mention as well. The [...]
At one point during my visit to Professor Blight’s Civil War Memory seminar at Yale I looked over at Brian Jordan and suggested that he should start a blog. The next day I logged on for the first time to his new weblog, Grand Army Blog. Now, I am not going to take full credit [...]
I am about half-way through and thoroughly enjoying Keith D. Dickson’s new book, Sustaining Southern Identity: Douglas Southall Freeman and Memory in the Modern South (Louisiana State University Press, 2012). It’s not a conventional biography of Freeman; rather, the book explores the influence of the Lost Cause and his father’s military service in Confederate ranks [...]
I think it’s time for Robert K. Krick to get a new angle. How much longer do we have to be subjected to vague references of an “anti-Lee” cabal among academic historians? In 2007 I was asked to respond to a presentation he gave as part of the University of Virginia’s commemoration of “Lee at [...]