Using North & South Magazine in the Classroom

Abstract

On our first day of class, we enter a small cemetery that borders the picturesque campus of the University of Virginia in Char lottesville. In the center of the cemetery stands a gray granite pedestal twelve feet high supporting an eight foot bronze statue of a Confederate soldier. The cemetery contains the remains of approxi mately 1,100 Confederate soldiers, all of whom died in Charlottesville hospitals between 1861 and 1865. Scattered around the memorial are a handful of gravestones. After giving the students some back ground information on the cemetery I ask them to examine the few individual gravestones. After about twenty minutes we re-gather at a particular lone gravestone that sits under a tree off in the far cor ner of the cemetery (1). Within a few moments the students realize why we are in this par ticular spot. He was so young, asserts one female student. A few seconds later, another student comes to the realization that he is two years older than this grave's occupant. I inquire what questions my students would want to ask this young boy, if they magically could. The entire spectrum of questions pours out. They want to know where he was wounded; was it a painful death; did he have family with him when he died? A few students inquire about his reasons for joining the army and whether he was from a slave owning family. Questions concerning motivation and economic background, however, are rare. Questions usually come back to the personal: Did he have a girlfriend? In that moment a connection is made between the present and the past and, in large part, my job for the remainder of the semester is to build on this basic experience. Teaching in a small private high school in central Virginia presents numerous avenues of inquiry in a course devoted entirely to the Civil War. Many major battlefields of the Eastern theatre are within easy driv ing distance, and the proximity of Richmond opens up additional ac tivities. Still, the central action takes place in the classroom. Choosing the most effective reading material is the toughest challenge. Unfortu nately, many high school students read the standard textbook?heavy, long, and written as if intended to alienate as many students as pos sible from serious study of the past. As I was planning this course for the first time in the summer of 2000, I swore that I would not subject my students to another year of textbook history. Fortunately, Civil War classrooms have a wide range of available resources, ranging from tens of thousands of published historical stud ies, letters, diaries, and other written testimony to state-of-the-art Web sites, including the Center for Digital History's Valley of the Shadow project out of the University of Virginia ( ). In addition to emphasizing the perspective of the participants themselves, I want my students to see history as a process. They should understand that history is not simply the collecting of facts followed by memorization, but an ongoing discussion built on interpretation, critical analysis, and revision. As we approach the Civil War's sesqui centennial there continue to be disagreements over such questions as the cause of the Civil War, the role of slavery, and the reasons for Con federate defeat. In seeking to achieve these pedagogical goals, I have discovered a tremendous resource for engaging my students' interest: North & South magazine(2). The articles in North & South (hereafter cited as N&S) are ideal, first, because they are the appropriate length for a nighf s as signment. They are typically written by experts, including some of the most respected Civil War historians working in universities, museums, and the National Park Service. Most importantly, the articles are that rarity in the world of popular history magazines: analytically rigorous. In some cases, articles provide an overview of upcoming or recently released book-length studies, many published by university presses. As a result, my students often get to read the latest interpretations in the field, which reinforces the point that historical interpretations evolve. The following is an overview of how N8cS functions in my class room. This overview is in no way intended to single out specific articles for special praise or to suggest that they provide the final word, but only to indicate ways to use the magazine as a classroom source. Along with N8cS and other handouts, my students read Brook Simpson's short but thorough America's Civil War (1996) as a background source. During a normal week students read one or two articles from the magazine and write twoto three-page summaries of the main theses in each. The