The following video was uploaded to YouTube a couple of days ago. I know nothing about the woman who produced it, but I think it is a wonderful example of how the Web2.0 world has shaped the Civil War Sesquicentennial. As opposed to the centennial years, when relatively few historical institutions exercised control over how [...]
Civil War Sesquicentennial
Thanks to The Journal of the Civil War Era for making available online a forum from their most recent issue on the future of Civil War historiography. The essays are all worth reading and I especially enjoyed Stephen Berry’s “top ten” predictions on how broader trends within the field will shape Civil War studies in [...]
One of my first posts all the way back in 2005 focused on what I saw as the inevitable decline of our Civil War round tables. I suggested that without a resurgence of interest in the Civil War era that animated Americans in the early 1960s these groups would disappear one by one. In light [...]
I am making my way through a small collection of essays in Thomas Brown’s Remixing the Civil War: Meditations on the Sesquicentennial (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011). Fitz Brundage opens his essay on African American artists, who have interpreted the Civil War in recent years, with a reference to Willie Levi Casey. You can see [...]
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 [...]
Update – 01/24: Yesterday the bill was stricken from the Senate’s calendar. Update: Head on over to Robert Moore’s site for some thoughtful commentary on Lincoln’s connection to the Shenandoah Valley. Turns out that the Lincoln family’s roots are deep. The Virginia General Assembly is considering a bill that would designate the third Monday in [...]
Over the past few days I’ve been putting together some thoughts for a panel on the Civil War sesquicentennial that I am taking part in this coming April at the annual meeting of the OAH in Milwaukee. I shared my proposal a few months ago and am now trying to fill in some of the [...]
It should come as no surprise that a National Air and Space Museum exhibit centered around the Enola Gay and the dropping of the Atomic Bomb would cause controversy in the mid-1990s. Many of the veterans of WWII were still alive and the issue itself tugged at how Americans saw themselves as moral leaders on [...]
