The book of essays pulled from the New York Times’s Disunion column has been out for a couple of weeks now. It’s a pretty hefty volume that includes over 100 essays on the period between 1861 and the beginning of 1863. My only complaint is that the table of contents does not list individual essays, [...]
Civil War Memory Class
It’s one of those days where I can’t help but miss central Virginia and the opportunity to bring my students to Chancellorsville for the 150th anniversary. Chancellorsville was the first Civil War battle that I attempted to interpret for those students who took my Civil War class. Interpreting a battlefield rarely involved the close analysis [...]
Next year I will be teaching a course that explores the Holocaust and historical memory as well as how our own Civil War has been remembered. I am excited and horrified given what little I know about the Holocaust and WWII. Perhaps I would feel this way about any historical subject next to my knowledge [...]
It is one of the most unusual memorials on any Civil War commemorative landscape North or South. I vividly recall my own loss for words during my first trip to Mount Auburn Cemetery in 2011. It is a stop at the top of my list for next year’s Civil War Memory class and thanks to [...]
It looks like next year I will once again be teaching my Civil War Memory course. I’ve already begun to think about readings as well as class visits to Boston. The class was very popular in Virginia and I especially enjoyed our tours of Richmond, including Monument Avenue, Hollywood Cemetery and Tredegar. At this point [...]
This first video is perfect for a course on Lincoln and/or Civil War memory. It provides a nice overview of how Lincoln has been interpreted in Hollywood movies and television since 1915. The only reference that I was unfamiliar with is the recent short animation, Robot Chicken: Jedi in Chief, in which George W. Bush [...]
I came across this short video today that focuses on a new historical marker on Sherman’s March that was recently unveiled in Savannah, Georgia. For those of you in the classroom who may be pressed for time this video can be used to introduce your students to some of the basic questions surrounding Civil War [...]
If I were heading back into the classroom to teach my course on the Civil War and historical memory I would begin by showing this video from the Virginia Historical Society’s exhibit, An American Turning Point: The Civil War in Virginia. If you haven’t seen it you are missing one of the more innovative exhibits [...]
