“[T]he enemy of Civil War history is everything people think they know about the conflict.” — Ed Ayers. Thanks to everyone for the emails and comments about my most recent op-ed in the New York Times Disunion column. Yesterday I took some time to catch up on some old posts. What I value most about [...]
Civil War Historians
This morning I voted online for the next president of The Society of Civil War Historians. I’ve been a member for a few years now and even had the opportunity to address the organization back in 2008. The SCWH recently established a new book prize, a new journal, as well as a biennial conference. I [...]
Description: A hundred and fifty years ago the first shots of the American Civil War were fired. It was a war that was to result in the deaths of perhaps three quarters of a million people. Yet the United States in 1861 was the world’s first modern democratic nation — a place in which virtually [...]
A number of you have emailed me about the possibility of purchasing signed copies of Remembering the Battle of the Crater: War as Murder. I just agreed to do a book signing at the Abraham Lincoln Book Shop in Chicago on July 28. You should be able to secure a signed copy through their Virtual [...]
No other academic press series has taught me more about the Civil War era over the past twelve years than Gary Gallagher’s Civil War America, which is published by the University of North Carolina Press. He managed to bring together some of the most talented historians, many of who studied under Gallagher at either Penn State [...]
A couple of weeks ago I was asked by an editor at one of the Civil War journals to write an essay on the black Confederate controversy. I decided to reflect a bit on what the controversy tells us about the differences between academic and popular history as well as the rise of the Internet [...]
If you haven’t read Brian Matthew Jordan’s reflections on David Blight’s Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory ten years later head on over to The Civil War Monitor and do so. It’s an incredibly thoughtful piece and much of it I agree with. Blight’s book has had a huge influence on my [...]
The last few posts on the important place that slavery occupied in the Deep South’s secession documents [and here] has been entertaining and informative, but as we all know it quickly gets old as both sides begin to rehash the same arguments. In the end, white southerners made it perfectly clear as to how slavery [...]
