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Welcome to Civil War Memory. I blog about subjects related to how Americans have chosen to remember and commemorate their Civil War. Topics cover a range of issues from Civil War historiography to issues in public history and the teaching of history on th
Recent Posts Tagged With 'civil war historians'
Sgt. Richard Kirkland For All Of Us
I‘ve been thinking quite a bit about Sgt. Richard Kirkland lately. Last week Peter Carmichael referenced Kirkland in his speech marking the anniversary of the battle of Fredericksburg. Carmichael used the Kirkland story and his monument on ...
History Channel Does Reconstruction Right
Our tendency to distinguish between the Civil War and Reconstruction obscures the fact that fundamental questions of freedom, national identity, and citizenship were left unanswered. According to historian, Vernon Burton: At stake during the Civil W...
Will Greene’s Civil War Petersburg
I know I promised to stay away until January, but I don’t really consider this to be a violation of my blogging hiatus. My review of Will Greene’s book, Civil War Petersburg: Confederate City in the Crucible of War (University of Virgin...
Teaching Civil War Memory
Today is the first day of the new trimester and I am once again teaching a course on Civil War Memory. I have two sections with a total of 12 students. Hopefully, the small sections will make for even more interesting discussions. This is a ref...
Acquisitions 11/23/09
I try to keep this running list of new titles confined to this blog’s subject matter. Professor Holton was one of my professors while in graduate school at the University of Richmond. I worked with him on an independent study and got a chan...
Shelby Foote on American Exceptionalism
The following commentary by Shelby Foote comes at the tail end of Ken Burns’s The Civil War “We think that we are a wholly superior people – if we’d been anything like as superior as we think we are, we would not have fought that war....
“The Mythology of Hard War”
This is the final week of my survey course on the American Civil War. One of the subjects we’ve been looking at is the introduction of what Mark Grimsley describes as “Hard War” policy by the United States in 1864. The class was...
Gabor Boritt Looks at His Own Past
As many of you know Gabor Boritt recently retired from his position as director of the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College. Boritt is the author of numerous edited collections, an excellent study of Lincoln’s economic outlook as well as a...
It’s A Book Giveaway!
As part of the month-long celebration of Civil War Memory’s 4th Birthday I’ve decided to give a little back in the form of a book giveaway. It’s easy to enter. Just leave a comment after the post and in a few words share why you...
Do You Suffer From PCM Disease?
Head on over to Civil Warriors for Brooks Simpson’s response to a series of posts at TOCWOC which purports to analyze the “politically correct mythology” [PCM] that pervades academic Civil War history. You can start with James Dur...
Best of Civil War Memory (3)
Some of my favorite posts over the past four years address themes of religion. While the last few years have produced an impressive amount of new scholarship on religion in the nineteenth-century our popular memory of the war continues to be mired i...
An African American-less Civil War Sesquicentennial?
One of the sessions that I attended at last week’s SHA was a roundtable on Civil War Memory and the Sesquicentennial. It was an excellent panel consisting of Gaines Foster, Suzanna Lee, John Neff, and Robert Cook. The presentations were sho...
Virginia’s Civil War Sesquicentennial Arrives in the Classroom
From the beginning of its formation, one of the central goals for the Virginia Sesquicentennial Commission has been educational outreach. It is doing this in a number of ways from organizing conferences to creating mobile exhibits that will travel ...
Acquisitions 10/08
I had a wonderful time in Louisville at the SHA. It’s a wonderful opportunity to listen to thoughtful presentations and meet up with old friends. When I have time I will share some thoughts about one of the panels on Civil War memory and ...
Richard Slotkin’s Crater
The following review of Richard Slotkin’s new book, No Quarter: The Battle of the Crater, 1864 is now available in the latest edition of Civil War Book Review. With the publication of three books on the battle of the Crater in the past two yea...
Civil War Memory Turns Four
The following post originally appeared on December 12, 2005 Being Ed Ayers In the most recent issue of North and South there is a very interesting exchange between Ed Ayers and a letter to the editor in the Crossfire section. The writer responded to...
Acquisitions 11/02/09
Here is the latest in recent acquisitions. On Thursday I head to Louisville, Kentucky for the annual meeting of the Southern Historical Association. No doubt, I will end up lugging a bag of books home with me. Thomas A. Desjardin, Stand Firm Ye Boy...
A Blistering Review
Like many of you I’ve read John Keegan’s Face of Battle (1976) and can appreciate the contribution it made to the historiography of military history and its influence on countless Civil War historians who have written about the experience...
Civil War Memory Through Film
I am in the process of finalizing my elective for the next trimester, which begins after we return from Thanksgiving break. It’s a course that I am calling Civil War Memory. Last year I taught it as a straightforward readings course and thi...
A Civil War Military Historian Who Joined the Military
Yesterday I received an advanced copy of Wayne Wei-Siang Hsieh’s, West Pointers and the Civil War: The Old Army in War and Peace (University of North Carolina Press). It’s one of those books that I’ve been looking forward to readi...
Is the Real “Glory” Part of Our History of the Civil Rights Movement?
Just wanted to follow up with a few thoughts that didn’t make it into yesterday’s re-published post. The pay crisis scene in the movie, Glory, is a significant moment in the film. When the soldiers of the 54th Massachusetts learn that...
An Atlas Whose Time Has Passed?
The good people at National Geographic asked me to take a look at their new book, Atlas of the Civil War: A Comprehensive Guide to the Tactics and Terrain of Battle, which I was happy to do. As a kid I could spend hours studying military maps and i...
Gary Gallagher on Robert E. Lee
Gary W. Gallagher, the John L. Nau Professor in History of the American Civil War at the University of Virginia, gave this year’s Remembering Robert E. Lee lecture on Oct. 12, 2009, in Lee Chapel. The title of the talk is “Robert E. Lee...
Sherman’s March and America
Anne Sara Rubin is hard at work on a new digital project on Sherman’s March. I first heard about the project at last year’s SHA in New Orleans. It looks to be quite interesting. Related posts:VMI Will March in Inaugural Parade One of...
Gotcha History
I‘m not a fan of what I like to call “gotcha history”. It goes something like this. A book is marketed or reviewed based on the premise that its subject has been ignored or, even worse, suppressed for some nefarious reason. I sor...
John Brown Sesquicentennial Event at Harpers Ferry
If you happen to live in the vicinity of Harpers Ferry I encourage you to attend the inaugural event of West Virginia’s Civil War Sesquicentennial Commission. The event will include a panel discussion titled “Madman, Martyr, or Myth: Jo...
Ringgold Finds a Civil War General
This past weekend the city of Ringgold, Georgia unveiled a Civil War statue dedicated to General Patrick Cleburne. The connection to Ringgold seems tenuous at best as he was there only once in his life and only for a few hours at that. Cleburne too...
Gordon-Reed Wins 2009 Frederick Douglass Prize
No surprise given that Annette Gordon-Reed seems to be rounding up all of the major history book awards for her recent study, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family. Although I read this book I thought that Thavolia Glymph should have won ...
Are You Sure You Are Waving the Right Flag?
It seems strange to me that those marching and protesting in the name of limited government and states rights would choose a Confederate flag as one of their symbols. We have Libertarian-leaning economists such as Thomas DiLorenzo and Walter Willia...
Is Your Book Worth $50,000?
The Society of Civil War Historians has announced the First Annual Tom Watson Brown Book Award. The award recognizes “an outstanding scholarly book published in 2009 on the causes, conduct, and effects, broadly defined, of the Civil War.̶...
