My Civil War courses are in the middle of reading two essays about the 1850s and secession by James McPherson and Charles Dew. It is interesting that every year I end up having to spend the most time on two specific issues at the beginning of the semester. Even if my students claim not to [...]
Civil War Historians
Thanks to Prof. Stauffer for taking the time to write up such a thorough response to the recent criticisms of The State of Jones that can be found here and elsewhere. I would much rather move on from this controversy, but given the circumstances outlined at the beginning of his response I thought it was [...]
I came across an interesting little post at the New York Times’s Idea of the Day in which the question of rape and sexual violence during the Civil War is raised. The blog post links to an essay by historian, Crystal N. Feimster, which recently appeared in Daedelus. While the essay is worth reading the [...]
[My review of John Schmutz's recent book on the Crater is now up at H-Net] The last several years has witnessed a sharp increase in the number of studies focused on the final year of the Civil War in Virginia and specifically the Petersburg Campaign. Much of this can be traced to a renewed scholarly [...]
I‘m a little late in posting this, but wanted to point your attention to the three finalists for this year’s Frederick Douglass Book Award that is sponsored by Yale’s Gilder-Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition. The finalists are Thavolia Glymph for Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the [...]
It could have been one of those “teachable moments” where the authors of two very different studies of Civil War Mississippi discuss the problem of competing historical interpretations. Instead, the authors of The State of Jones have done all they can to avoid addressing what are clearly serious problems with their book. You can find [...]
I am just about finished reading Richard Slotkin’s new book on the Crater, No Quarter: The Battle of the Crater, 1864, and have enjoyed it immensely. The book is very different from the two previous studies of the battle in that Slotkin provides a much needed analysis of the racial components of the battle rather [...]
Congratulations to my friend, Barton Myers, who just found out that his new book, Executing Daniel Bright: Race, Loyalty, and Guerrilla Violence in a Coastal Carolina Community, 1861-1865, has won LSU’s Jules and Frances Landry Award. Barton recently graduated from the University of Georgia and is now a Postdoctoral Associate/Visiting Professor at Cornell University. The [...]