This weekend C-SPAN aired what I think is the final session from the 2012 Civil War Institute that took place this past June. I skipped this session for a chance to run around the battlefield with Keith Harris. What I missed was an entertaining and informative panel on Mark Grimsley’s landmark study, The Hard Hand [...]
Civil War Historians
The following clip was pulled from a recent NEH panel on the legacy of emancipation. It included Ed Ayers, Gary Gallagher, Christy Coleman, Eric Foner, and Thavolia Glymph. I highly recommend viewing the entire session if you have the time, but for now check out this short clip from the Q&A. In it an African-American [...]
A couple of recent titles leave me wondering whether some version of the interpretation that the Civil War was unavoidable owing to the loss of moderate influence is making a resurgence. If so, to what extent has it been fueled by our current political culture? It’s hard not to see this at work in David [...]
I am calling for a year-long moratorium on Civil War publishing from my favorite historians. There is just too much to read. Give us a chance to catch up. William J. Cooper, We Have the War Upon Us: The Onset of the Civil War, November 1860-April 1861 (Knopf, 2012). Guy R. Hasegawa, Mending Broken Soldiers: [...]
Much of my research and commentary on the evolution of battlefield interpretation within the National Park Service has referenced the 2000 Rally on the High Ground Conference as a watershed moment. Without being too overly simplistic the working assumption has been that the most significant changes to NPS interpretation has been in reaction to Congressman [...]
I enjoyed re-visiting the panel discussion on Civil War blogging from this summer’s Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College. A number of interesting issues were discussed including the question of whether Keith Harris, Brooks Simpson, and me occupy a position of authority in the blogosphere and whether that position comes with certain expectations about the [...]
Thanks to David Thomson for the opportunity to interview with The Civil War Monitor’s new series, Behind the Lines. We talked mainly about my Crater book and toward the end I babble on a bit about blogging and social media. If you are curious the book is doing very well. Some of you are familiar [...]
This weekend C-SPAN will air a panel on Civil War blogging that took place at Gettysburg College back in June as part of the Civil War Institute. The panel included Brooks Simpson, Keith Harris, and yours truly. We got into some really interesting issues so do yourself a favor and check it out on Saturday [...]
Like many of you I was sad to hear of the passing of historian Eugene Genovese earlier today. I was never formally introduced to the historiography of slavery in graduate school; rather, I relied on various friends and other contacts to point me in the direction of important studies as my interests both widened and [...]