History Of Civil War Research Articles

Mao and the Sino–Soviet Partnership, 1945–1959 by Zhihua Shen and Yafeng Xia

Reviewed by: Mao and the Sino–Soviet Partnership, 1945–1959 by Zhihua Shen and Yafeng Xia Olavi Arens Shen, Zhihua, and Yafeng Xia. Mao and the Sino–Soviet Partnership, 1945–1959. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015. The authors provide a well-researched volume on a crucial decade-and-half period in Chinese history that centers on the relationship of Mao Zedong and the Peoples' Republic of China with the Soviet Union. Zhihua Shen and Yafeng Xia, who previously have written extensively on the subject matter, have used both Chinese and Russian archival material for the study and have critically assessed existing western literature on the topic. At Yalta, Stalin obtained concessions from Roosevelt at the expense of China as the price for the Soviets entering the war against Japan. Among the concessions were the Chinese Changchun Railway (Chinese Eastern Railway), Dalian (Dairen), and Lüshun (Port Arthur). As a result of joint US and Soviet pressure, the Chinese Nationalist government of Jiang Jieshi was forced to agree to the concessions when it signed the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship and Alliance (1945). Shortly after the proclamation of the People's Republic of China in 1949, Mao visited Moscow, where he was able to renegotiate with Stalin a new Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Alliance, and Mutual Assistance in which Stalin renounced Russia's traditional points of interest in Manchuria. In return, Stalin gained Chinese recognition for the independence of Outer Mongolia. In an interpretation that I have not encountered previously, the authors suggest that Stalin's interest in Korea and his authorization of Kim Il-sung's plan to attack South Korea played a role in Stalin's decision to concede control of Manchuria to China. During the Korean War, Chinese intervention was supported by massive Soviet aid in the forms of military equipment and Soviet air force units to provide air cover [End Page 222] for Chinese forces. The war cemented the Sino-Soviet alliance. However, the figures the authors cite (that the Soviet air force shot down 1,097 enemy planes and that Soviet anti-aircraft downed 212, while Soviet losses amounted to 335 airplanes and 120 pilots) are questionable (p. 87). The heyday of Sino-Soviet cooperation occurred during the early years of Nikita Khrushchev, who was willing in 1954–1958 to aid Chinese economic development in a major way. Soviet aid in credits amounted to $1.3 billion (other sources say $2.65 billion). A major part of the aid was military—through advisers and equipment, the Soviets enabled China to build a navy and an air force. The aid eventually included the initiation of a peaceful nuclear energy program in 1954 that blossomed when Khrushchev agreed to provide aid for a Chinese nuclear weapons program (1957). In 1958, Khrushchev had second thoughts and pulled back the aid. The authors do not see the 1956 Secret Speech by Nikita Khrushchev and Mao's reaction to it as the beginning of the rift between the two nations (Mao said of the speech that Stalin was 30 percent wrong and 70 percent right). Indeed, the Chinese played a role in helping the Soviets pacify Eastern Europe in 1956. Mao was becoming an increasingly important political actor in the world communist movement. The relationship between the two began to deteriorate after the Moscow Conference of 1957. Personality played a role. Mao clearly felt superior in intellect to Khrushchev. Khrushchev was the head of a recognized great power that conducted world diplomacy with the United States and espoused a policy of peaceful coexistence and peaceful competition with the capitalist countries. Mao's Peoples' Republic of China was still unrecognized by many states, including the United States. Because of China's history of struggle and civil war, Mao saw revolutionary struggle against world capitalism as natural. At this point, Mao foolishly embarked on the Great Leap Forward and the Peoples' Commune Movement, which were advertised as distinctly Chinese shortcuts to communism. The failure of these approaches only embittered Mao toward the Soviets. Foreign policy issues with regard to Taiwan and India exacerbated tensions even further. Mao horrified the Soviets and the East Europeans by nonchalantly dismissing the destructiveness of nuclear war...

Upon the Fields of Battle: Essays on the Military History of America's Civil War ed. by Andrew S. Bledsoe and Andrew Lang

Upon the Fields of Battle: Essays on the Military History of America's Civil War ed. by Andrew S. Bledsoe and Andrew Lang

Unredeemed Land: An Environmental History of Civil War and Emancipation in the Cotton South

Unredeemed Land: An Environmental History of Civil War and Emancipation in the Cotton South

Statues and Status Quo. Time of Monuments in the United States

In 2015, an armed young white man entered the church in Charleston and killed nine African-Americans. He was guided by racist motives, modeled on Confederate soldiers, and had previously been willing to photograph himself with the Confederate flag. This event once again triggered a discussion in the United States not only about the ideological but also material heritage of the Confederacy states, including the monuments ubiquitous in the cities of the South: memorials to Confederacy leaders but also to anonymous soldiers. These monuments have become the subject of stormy disputes. Some of them were removed by the authorities (New York, New Orleans), some were overthrown in grassroots actions by activists (including Durham and Chapel Hill, referred to in the article); however, a large group was defended by the Republican state authorities. The article - written from the perspective of visual culture studies - aims to recognize the specificity of the monument's medium in the context of these disputes. It argues that the most important characteristic of the medium considered obsolete today (static, unchangeable, heavy, physical, public, etc.) is its ability to present itself as natural, eternal, "historical". These monuments do not only serve to distort the history of civil war in the states of the South (particularly by erasing slavery from it). At the time of their creation - several decades after the war - they were tools of an aggressive policy of segregation and were intended to emphasize the domination of whites and the permanence of pre-war racial divisions. The analysis of a contemporary artistic "monumental" intervention - Kehinde Wiley's Rumors of War, unveiled in December 2019 - will help in recognizing the specificity of the monument's medium. This work, from the perspective of art criticism falling into the traps of politics of representation, from the perspective of visual culture studies turns out to be an important guide, entering into a complicated dialogue with the monuments of five Confederate leaders still present at the Monument Avenue in Richmond, the capital of the secessionists.

War Matters: Material Culture in the Civil War Era

The Civil War remains a pivotal event in southern history, with many themes resurfacing throughout its long academic life. Yet, one area that Civil War historians tend to ignore is material culture, which could open an entirely new vein of interpretation while also underscoring the intersections between race, class, and gender on the battlefield and home front. War Matters offers a refreshing analysis of the economic, social, political, and cultural nuances of the Civil War era through the use of material culture. Editor Joan E. Cashin and her fellow contributors focus on objects as small as pocketbook bibles and as vast as battlefields in order to deepen our understanding of the ongoing debates in the field and to familiarize us with newer themes.

Contested Loyalty: Debates over Patriotism in the Civil War North ed. by Robert M. Sandow, and: Our Country: Northern Evangelicals and the Union during the Civil War Era by Grant R. Brodrecht

Reviewed by: Contested Loyalty: Debates over Patriotism in the Civil War Northed. by Robert M. Sandow, and: Our Country: Northern Evangelicals and the Union during the Civil War Eraby Grant R. Brodrecht David Graham Contested Loyalty: Debates over Patriotism in the Civil War North. Edited by Robert M. Sandow. Foreword by Gary W. Gallagher. The North's Civil War. ( New York: Fordham University Press, 2018. Pp. xii, 310. $65.00, ISBN 978-0-8232-7975-3.) Our Country: Northern Evangelicals and the Union during the Civil War Era. By Grant R. Brodrecht. The North's Civil War. ( New York: Fordham University Press, 2018. Pp. [vi], 278. Paper, $40.00, ISBN 978-0-8232-7991-3; cloth, $140.00, ISBN 978-0-8232-7990-6.) The Fordham University Press series The North's Civil War has provided stellar scholarship on the northern Civil War experience for many years. While the Civil War–era South lures many social and cultural historians, as well as scholars of memory studies, Fordham University Press continues to highlight important work on the Union and its multifaceted war effort. Two of the most recent contributions to the series maintain this invaluable tradition and drive Civil War scholarship forward. Contested Loyalty: Debates over Patriotism in the Civil War Northedited by Robert M. Sandow and Our Country: Northern Evangelicals and the Union during the Civil War Eraauthored by Grant R. Brodrecht provide insight on several understudied aspects of the American Civil War. Taken together, these two books demonstrate exciting developments underway in the field of Civil War history. In Contested Loyalty, editor Sandow presents ten thought-provoking essays by some of the most talented Civil War historians writing today. The essays examine the significance of the concept of loyalty to different groups of people during and after the war. The essays underscore the notion that loyalty did not mean one thing. Rather, how people interpreted the concept of loyalty during the war depended, in part, on their position in society. One of the strengths of this collection is its clear elucidation that the idea of loyalty during the war was complicated. Each essay serves as an individual case study of how the varied interpretations of loyalty "played out in everyday life" (p. 8). Several essays also point to the limits of national loyalty. By highlighting voices of dissent, the authors show that loyalty was not simply accepted by all in the North. Most Civil War scholarship on loyalty centers on the Confederacy. The essays featured in Contested Loyaltyseek to correct this imbalance, and they do so effectively. The necessity of this research is made even more apparent when the ubiquity of the term loyaltyduring the Civil War era is uncovered. Loyalty was on the lips of many in the North, and the frequent debates over the term warrant further investigation. The essays are roughly organized into thematic groups. The first three essays look at loyalty in the context of national and state politics. Two authors connect the concept of loyalty to the legacy of Reconstruction. The third essay, by Jonathan W. White, provides an enlightening glimpse into the meanings of loyalty through a discussion of the debates in the Pennsylvania legislature about compensation for Confederate raids. The next two chapters explore the understudied topic of college education and its impact during the Civil War era. Sean A. Scott provides a different interpretation of northern Protestant clergy in [End Page 697]his essay, arguing that not all clergymen fit into the categories of loyal and patriotic. The next group of chapters focuses on conversations about loyalty and their implications for notions of labor. This section includes Judith Giesberg's important challenge to the narrative of unquestioningly supportive northern women. Giesberg analyzes northern women's pursuit of improved pay and job security as evidence that northern women's loyalty to the Union cause was not as simple as the traditional narrative suggests. The final section of essays examines the impact of race and ethnicity on loyalty, with the perspectives of Irish Americans and protests by African American Union regiments serving as case studies. Perhaps the greatest strength of the book is its powerful demonstration that...

Maryland, My Maryland: Music and Patriotism during the American Civil War by James A. Davis

Reviewed by: Maryland, My Maryland: Music and Patriotism during the American Civil War by James A. Davis Ann Ostendorf Davis, James A. – Maryland, My Maryland: Music and Patriotism during the American Civil War. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2019. Pp. 390. In Maryland, My Maryland, musicologist and Civil War historian James A. Davis interrogates the life of the song “Maryland, My Maryland” to better understand how music creates patriotism. This case study of the creation, performance, and reception of the song weaves between a telling of the events of the war, with particular attention given to Marylanders’ roles in and experiences of the conflict, and the diverse and changing meanings Americans attached to and extracted from the anthem. In addition, Maryland, My Maryland considers the ways personal, local, regional, and national identities shaped, and were shaped by, music. The author aptly refers to this study as a “musical microhistory,” and achieves his stated goal of clarifying “how the song’s nascent meanings resulted from its usage in volatile and ever changing situations and how musical meaning was negotiated between performer, audience, setting, and social exigency” (pp. xviii). The book is divided chronologically into seasonal sections. Each section begins with a description of the wartime events and is followed by a consideration of the connections between these events and the song during that season. For example, Chapter 2, titled “Spring 1861,” first examines the Pratt Street Riot, a confrontation between Northern soldiers moving through Baltimore and pro-Confederate civilians, and then considers how this event motivated James R. Randall to write the poem which became the song’s lyrics. The chapter “Fall 1861” explains how the first major fighting of the war triggered fervent emotional responses among Marylanders and how that led Hetty Carey to set the poem to the music of “Lauriger Horatius” (better known later as “O Tannenbaum”). The 12 chapters continue in this vein, with an epilogue considering the role the song played in constructing the Lost Cause myth and how that myth shaped the song’s reception well into the twentieth century. The author does more than merely narrate the history of the song alongside the history of the war. Rather he tethers the two together, describing the feedback loop between the song and the events of the war. The conduit for this loop, of course, were the diverse Americans challenged by the tumultuous time and place in which they lived. The song meant drastically different things depending upon the person, place, and time of its use. Though ostensibly a Confederate anthem used as a generic symbol of attachment to the cause, it carried other meanings as well. A Confederate soldier retreating through Maryland, a Northern newspaper editor critiquing Lincoln, or a wounded Maryland soldier languishing in hospital each found the song meaningful though in wildly different ways. As Davis writes, the song’s “fluctuating popularity with specific audiences mirrored the volatile progression of the conflict as a whole” (p. xvii). The author illustrates how music in general, and “Maryland, My Maryland” in particular, promoted patriotism through a detailed consideration of how individual Americans—North and South—attached meaning to and extracted significance from the song. As such, this is also a study of patriotism. Davis interrogates how [End Page 386] an anthem can aid in the attachment of an individual to a “locus of identity—such as a specific place, a definable belief system, or a historical icon—toward which one’s patriotism can be directed” (pp. xvii). And just as patriotism during the war remained in flux, so too did the meanings attached to the song. These fluctuating meanings concern Davis the most. In addition to tackling the history and cultural genealogy of the piece, Davis also weaves into this work the history of the state of Maryland. As a border state positioned between the capitols of the two competing sections, Maryland experienced the Civil War in a distinctive way. At the same time, the author situates Marylanders experiences of the war (and the song) alongside those from other places. He is sure to note how different people may have heard and used the song differently depending upon where they were from...

Union Demobilization and the Boundaries of War and Peace

Union Demobilization and the Boundaries of War and Peace Andrew F. Lang (bio) Editor's Note: The following represents the acceptance speech for the Watson Brown Prize for the best book published on the Civil War era in the calendar year 2017. Tad Brown, president of the Watson-Brown Foundation, awarded the prize to Andrew F. Lang for his book In the Wake of War: Military Occupation, Emancipation, and Civil War America, published by LSU Press. These remarks were given at the annual banquet of the Society of Civil War Historians (SCWH), held during the Southern Historical Association annual meeting on November 9, 2018, in Birmingham, Alabama. The SCWH judges and administers the book prize. ________ When I received the advance copy of In the Wake of War in late 2017, I scarcely imagined standing here tonight to accept the Tom Watson Brown Award. This honor will long rank among the most cherished of my life and career. Many of you in this room helped make this book possible, and I am profoundly grateful for your collegiality and friendship. Notable gratitude is due to the Society of Civil War Historians, Tad Brown, and the Watson-Brown Foundation for their generous support of our profession. Many thanks also to the Richards Civil War Era Center and Barby Singer for their tireless efforts in coordinating this award and dinner. I owe a great debt to the 2018 prize committee—Orville Vernon Burton, Nicole Etcheson, and Earl J. Hess—for recognizing and endorsing my work. I am further grateful to Michael Parrish, my series editor and now coauthor, and John B. Boles, the advisor of the doctoral dissertation on which the book is based. Mike and John have always encouraged me to think big, make bold contributions, and respect the delicate boundaries of the past. In the Wake of War links the American Civil War to a military ethos that long preceded secession and patterned the contested peace after Appomattox. The book interrogates contemporary perspectives of the Mexican-American War, Civil War, and Reconstruction, linking the broad [End Page 178] era to a prevailing culture of martial republicanism. In each conflict, U.S. soldiers appraised military occupations against competing attitudes on race and nation, the citizen-soldier tradition, and suspicions of standing armies. Indeed, nineteenth-century martial republicanism demarcated the boundaries between war and peace, exposed the tensions between occupation and democracy, and framed the murky processes of state-sanctioned social and political change. Among many other topics, the book engages the origins of Reconstruction's military history, contextualizing the era's limited purpose, its moderate scope, and its unsatisfactory conclusion. Tonight I would like to explore how the demobilization of Union armies in 1865 anticipated the complex world of Reconstruction and informed the disputed meaning of the American Civil War era. "After a contest of four years of unexampled proportions," announced Charles Pinckney Kirkland, a prominent New York City attorney and influential Republican politico whom Abraham Lincoln greatly esteemed, "the glorious end has come; reason, right, justice, liberty, humanity, have triumphed." When he wrote in June 1865, Kirkland believed the United States had extinguished the cancer of slaveholding, "the great disturbing cause of [t]his country's peace, the source of all the discord, heart-burnings and dangers of the Republic for the last half century." Slaveholding rebels had been vanquished, their unholy republic now extinct. Unburdened from slavery's draining yoke, the Union now stood in the world as a sovereign nation of, by, and for the people. For Kirkland, the triumph of popular democracy mandated a national restoration in which white southerners accepted the illegitimacies of secession and slavery, while demanding from unionists "reason, justice and mercy" in binding the nation's wounds. "As such we now owe a stern duty to ourselves, our posterity, our country and the world" to fashion an eternal peace.1 Loyal citizens of the Union implored, as President Lincoln prayed in his second inaugural address, that "this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away." Republics could not tolerate perpetual states of war, much less endure the chaos of insurgencies. Without defining the rigid boundaries of war—in this case the collapse of the...

Union Heartland: The Midwestern Home Front During the Civil War ed. by Ginette Aley and J. L. Anderson

Reviewed by: Union Heartland: The Midwestern Home Front During the Civil War ed. by Ginette Aley and J. L. Anderson Tim Roberts Ginette Aley and J. L. Anderson, eds., Union Heartland: The Midwestern Home Front During the Civil War. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. 2013. 196 pp. $39.50. One challenge instructors of Civil War history face is to complicate students’ assumptions that the war pitted “The North” against “The South.” Important books have appeared emphasizing the significance of regional differences in the Civil War South.1 Likewise, scholars have sought to rekindle interest, first emphasized by Frederick Jackson Turner, in American regional history.2 But until the appearance of the book under review and a few recent monographs, little Civil War scholarship has focused on what people called “the Northwestern United States,” meaning the antislavery states west of Pennsylvania (2).3 [End Page 173] Union Heartland begins to rectify the situation by presenting seven essays that seek to identify what may have been unique about the Civil War’s impact on the most agricultural part of the Union. An important essay by R. Douglas Hurt provides detailed evidence about the extent and variety of the war’s boon to midwestern agriculture. Military demands for horses, hogs, and grains encouraged farmers (male and female) to expand land development and invest in laborsaving technology; the Civil War spurred northern industrialization by first expanding farming output. Another valuable essay is Brett Barker’s study of local Republican efforts to squelch Democratic war dissent through boycotts and acts of violence against antiwar newspapers. Barker’s point is that while official actions by the Lincoln administration to suspend northerners’ civil liberties may have been measured, as previously argued by Mark E. Neely, unofficial or vigilante censorship of the Democratic press was perhaps widespread and warrants further study.4 Three of the book’s essays show a variety of midwestern women’s wartime experiences. Ginette Aley emphasizes women’s sense of alienation over the departure and uncertain fate of husbands and fathers. She notes that while gender norms of the day generally “defined a woman’s life almost entirely” in terms of her family, women in remote areas of the North were particularly affected (126). Nicole Etcheson and J. L. Anderson then show different outcomes of midwestern women’s sudden solitary circumstances. Etcheson studies how soldiers’ wives who moved in with or near their husbands’ in-laws effectively remained subordinated to their husbands as a result. Anderson, meanwhile, emphasizes women’s new expressions of autonomy in managing farms and family because of “the vacant chair” (148). The book’s other two essays reflect how not all midwesterners were consumed by the war’s sacrifices of family or civil liberties, or even economic windfalls. Michael P. Gray describes the circus-like atmosphere of civilians’ enthrallment with Confederate officers imprisoned on Johnson’s Island near Sandusky, Ohio. Julie A. Mujic, on the other hand, studies University of Michigan students’ class essays, debates, and newspapers to explain how the (male) students rationalized their failure to join the Union military. For these students, “staying in school became the equivalent of fighting the rebels,” and their classes, they asserted, prepared them to lead the country in the anticipated murky postwar era (58). Mujic’s essay could benefit from an epilogue to trace whether any of the students she studied actually played public roles during Reconstruction, but her work shows another layer of [End Page 174] midwesterners’ reactions to war, in addition to the other “battles” elucidated elsewhere in this diverse and welcome collection. Tim Roberts Western Illinois University Macomb, Illinois notes 1. William W. Freehling, The South vs. the South: How Anti-Confederate Southerners Shaped the Course of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Daniel Crofts, Reluctant Confederates: Upper South Unionists in the Secession Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2014). 2. Edward L. Ayers, Patricia Nelson Limerick, Stephen Nissenbaum, and Peter S. Onuf, All Over the Map: Rethinking American Regions (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). As Aley notes, however, this book omitted the Midwest as a significant American region. 3. Jennifer Weber, Copperheads: The Rise and Fall of Lincoln’s Opponents in the...

Two Charlestonians at War: The Civil War Odysseys of a Lowcountry Aristocrat and a Black Abolitionist by Barbara L. Bellows

Reviewed by: Two Charlestonians at War: The Civil War Odysseys of a Lowcountry Aristocrat and a Black Abolitionist by Barbara L. Bellows Edwin C. Breeden Two Charlestonians at War: The Civil War Odysseys of a Lowcountry Aristocrat and a Black Abolitionist. By Barbara L. Bellows. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2018. Pp. xiv, 330. $38.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-6909-4.) Barbara L. Bellows's biography of two nineteenth-century Charlestonians stems from a single conversation her subjects shared in circumstances rich with historical irony: a free man of color, born in Charleston, South Carolina, and [End Page 458] now a Union soldier, guarding a member of one of the Lowcountry's leading white families, now a Confederate prisoner of war on Morris Island. Using that chance encounter as a starting point, Bellows crafts a personalized story of how two natives of the cradle of secession navigated different yet intersecting paths through disunion, Civil War, and Reconstruction. Born a free person of color in 1823, Joseph Barquet worked as a mason in Charleston until the late 1840s, when he left for New York after serving in South Carolina's Palmetto Regiment during the U.S.-Mexican War. Barquet eventually settled in Illinois and became an outspoken advocate for abolition and equality for all black Americans. When the United States government allowed African Americans to volunteer for military service in 1863, Barquet joined the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, returning to fight in his native Charleston, including in the famed 1863 assault on Morris Island's Battery Wagner. After the war, Barquet was active in Illinois Republican politics but became frustrated and disillusioned as the party increasingly embraced the politics of white supremacy. Barquet had returned to Morris Island to serve as prison guard in 1864, when he encountered Bellows's second subject, Thomas Pinckney. Born into one of South Carolina's most influential Revolutionary-era families in 1828, Pinckney studied as a physician but was more eager to manage the family's plantations along the Santee River than to pursue medicine. When war came, Pinckney, a skeptic of secession, captained an independent home guard unit that was later consolidated into the Fourth South Carolina Cavalry. After participating in the failed Confederate challenge to the Combahee River raid, Pinckney's regiment was ordered to Virginia, where he was taken prisoner and eventually transferred to the Union prison on Morris Island. Unlike Barquet, Pinckney remained generally aloof from Reconstruction politics and instead focused on establishing a new work order for the family's Santee plantations, bargaining with freedpeople and working with other planters to ensure continued white control of the post-emancipation world. By her own admission, Bellows uses "old-fashioned storytelling" that prioritizes narrative over systematic analysis (p. 9). Frequently, she humanizes her subjects by ascribing thoughts or emotions that, however plausible, also go beyond the documentary record. Most such instances are well crafted and reasonable, while others test readers' patience, such as an unsourced description of Barquet being "mesmerized" (p. 31). Perhaps most frustrating is that only Pinckney's account of the two men's Morris Island encounter remains, a limitation that Bellows acknowledges. No single thesis fuels the book, though Bellows does argue that her subjects' lives illustrate the inherent contingency of history, as well as the more specific complexities of Civil War history. However true, more incisive insights probably would have resulted from an analytical approach that maximized the comparative potential of the book's dual biography format. Regardless, that is not the book Bellows aimed to write, and what she has written is a fine example of southern biography that deftly weaves together military, social, and political history. Barquet's struggle for personal and communal security—before and after the war, and in and out of the South—provides a deeply personal glimpse of white supremacy's lasting and sprawling impact, the poignancy of which is amplified by Barquet's service in [End Page 459] perhaps the most famed African American military unit. Pinckney was committed to preserving that racist order, yet his story still possesses its own sympathetic threads. One of the book's most engaging themes is Pinckney's recurring failure to live...

Where Valor Proudly Sleeps: A History of Fredericksburg National Cemetery, 1866–1933 by Donald C. Pfanz

Reviewed by: Where Valor Proudly Sleeps: A History of Fredericksburg National Cemetery, 1866–1933by Donald C. Pfanz Edward John Harcourt Where Valor Proudly Sleeps: A History of Fredericksburg National Cemetery, 1866–1933. By Donald C. Pfanz. Engaging the Civil War. ( Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2018. Pp. xviii, 253. Paper, $26.50, ISBN 978-0-8093-3645-6.) This history of Fredericksburg National Cemetery appears in the new series Engaging the Civil War, which highlights public history and engagement with broader audiences. Donald C. Pfanz, a thirty-two-year veteran of the National Park Service (NPS), walks the ground where Civil War history happened, taking the reader on a journey into the history of Fredericksburg National Cemetery, with QR codes at the end of each chapter providing convenient reference points for additional images and resources. Pfanz traces the history of Fredericksburg National Cemetery from 1866 through 1933, when control passed from the army to the NPS. He excels in detailing haphazard wartime burial arrangements and the subsequent postwar harvesting of the dead, mining the private papers of those involved, local newspapers, and the records of the Office of the Quartermaster General. The postwar burial parties often found it impossible to identify the unburied dead [End Page 710]and had to piece together the identities of the hurriedly buried (often in mass graves) from buttons, scraps of paper, and other ephemera. It was not atypical for body parts to be scattered or so jumbled together that the remains of up to ten men were entombed in the same coffin. Pfanz reflects on the meaning of so many anonymous graves in an age when dog tags and DNA testing have rendered the concept of the unknown soldier almost obsolete. Fredericksburg, the fourth-largest Civil War national cemetery after those at Vicksburg, Nashville, and Arlington, holds by far the largest number of unidentified dead—12,770 of the 15,257 bodies resting there are unidentified. Just 16 percent of the remains gathered from within a thirty-mile radius of Fredericksburg—taking in the battlefields of Chancellorsville, the Wilderness, Spotsylvania Court House, Mine Run, and North Anna River—have been identified. Perhaps it is because so many of the dead are unknown that so few people attend the site's annual Memorial Day program. Chapter 11, one of the strongest chapters, captures the personal stories of some of the few whose identities are known. In other chapters, readers are given a rich descriptive account of the cemetery's origins and development as well as exhaustive material descriptions of the refinements, monuments, buildings, headstones, trees, shrubs, flowers, and hedges. Pfanz's first NPS post was at Fredericksburg, and he lived on-site in the superintendent's lodge; his experience gives the descriptive chapters a sense of devotional attachment to hallowed ground. The meticulousness of this work provides a record that will shape and inform the narratives provided to visitors to the cemetery for decades to come. Pfanz's overriding objective seems to be to encourage public engagement with Civil War cemeteries and to stimulate thought about "the grief produced by war's calamities" (p. 181). But he has achieved more than this: although he eschews a broader interpretive framework (citing none of the burgeoning secondary literature on the subjects of Civil War dying, burial, and commemoration, for example), Pfanz nonetheless provides scholars with the richest descriptive account of any of the Civil War national cemeteries. Edward John Harcourt Liverpool John Moores University Copyright © 2019 The Southern Historical Association

High Private: The Trans-Mississippi Correspondence of Humorist R. R. Gilbert, 1862–1865 ed. by Mary M. Cronin

Reviewed by: High Private: The Trans-Mississippi Correspondence of Humorist R. R. Gilbert, 1862–1865 ed. by Mary M. Cronin Elsa A. Nystrom High Private: The Trans-Mississippi Correspondence of Humorist R. R. Gilbert, 1862–1865. Edited by Mary M. Cronin. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2018. Pp. xii, 323. $50.00, ISBN 978-1-62190-445-8.) Rensselaer Reed Gilbert remains a shadowy figure, even in these days of widespread digitization of primary sources. Yet his work fills a useful niche in the Civil War history of the trans-Mississippi West, a theater not fully covered in the historiography. Mary M. Cronin has compiled a selection of Gilbert’s articles, which he published in several southern newspapers between 1862 and 1865, along with his Civil War reminiscences, which he published as [End Page 917] compilations between 1886 and 1894. High Private: The Trans-Mississippi Correspondence of Humorist R. R. Gilbert, 1862–1865 begins with a brief history of Gilbert’s personal life, but details are few (even his birthplace has been open to question). The book has no images of Gilbert or his family, although Cronin does the best she can to flesh out his life with available sources. Gilbert was one of the few New England Yankees who embraced the Confederate cause in the 1860s. He had some medical training as a young man but seemed driven to become a writer of folksy opinion pieces laced with humor. (I suspect that he moved south because there was no scarcity of would-be humorists in New England, and Gilbert hoped that the wealthy but less populous South would provide a fertile ground for his efforts.) Although he did fulfill his dream of becoming a newspaper correspondent, and later started a few newspapers of his own in the South, he never gained the financial success he sought. When the war began, Gilbert was living in Texas, and he left the Union along with his adopted state. Although he never shared his private thoughts in print, Gilbert believed in the Confederate cause strongly enough to enlist in the Texas infantry at the age of forty-one. When he was discharged a few months later for poor health, he was hired by the editor of the Houston Tri-Weekly Telegraph to write a series of articles, in which he combined local news with humorous tales of camp life, under the pen name High Private. He was not a war correspondent and had never been near a battlefield. The few months he spent with Company B of the Sixth Texas Volunteer Infantry provided him with a basic knowledge of military life, which he utilized in his humorous articles. He also witnessed and commented on the self-aggrandizement and greed of many in the military. Our knowledge of Gilbert’s beliefs and values comes only from his published material, which raises questions. Did he write what he believed or what he thought people wanted to read? Surely, he burned his bridges with a national reading audience after he supported the Confederacy. Yet Cronin’s Gilbert provides a picture of the Texas home front during the war worth reading. And he rightly foretold the rise of the New South in his later work. Elsa A. Nystrom Kennesaw State University Copyright © 2019 The Southern Historical Association

A Campaign of Giants: The Battle for Petersburg. Volume 1, From the Crossing of the James to the Crater by A. Wilson Greene

Reviewed by: A Campaign of Giants: The Battle for Petersburg. Volume 1, From the Crossing of the James to the Crater by A. Wilson Greene Wayne Wei-siang Hsieh (bio) A Campaign of Giants: The Battle for Petersburg. Volume 1, From the Crossing of the James to the Crater. By A. Wilson Greene. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. Pp. 720. Cloth, $45.00.) A. Wilson Greene’s greatest potential contribution to the field is as profound as it is straightforward; a comprehensive and well-researched campaign study of the military operations that culminated in the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia simply does not exist at the moment. In this first of three projected volumes, Greene ably covers the Petersburg campaign from the crossing of the James to the Battle of the Crater. For scholars interested in a wide variety of topics, there is much useful information in Greene’s volume. For those interested in race and emancipation, Greene ably covers the effect that racism had on military operations, especially in the charnel pit of the Crater, where Confederate troops mercilessly gave Federal African Americans no quarter. Greene also ably covers the effects of military operations on Petersburg’s civilians, but as the title forthrightly attests, this volume is first and foremost a campaign study, and it will unavoidably be of greatest interest to military historians. The relative lacuna in the literature on the Petersburg campaign (at least compared to the literature on other campaigns of comparable significance) produces few places where Greene can intervene in points of great historiographical controversy. He does, however, flag in his own preface a distinctive assessment of Grant’s leadership, which Greene describes as “in many respects . . . disappointing. Readers may be as surprised as I was to discover the many shortcomings in Grant’s leadership once his troops crossed the James” (xiv). In a field where Grant’s military reputation remains ascendant—perhaps too much so—Greene offers a somewhat subdued voice of dissent. In Greene’s volume, Grant appears distant and even disengaged, allowing his senior subordinates such as George Meade and Benjamin Butler great discretion in their generally poor management of operational details. Greene [End Page 486] is too careful and judicious a historian to come even close to returning to the Grant-as-butcher canard, but he does aver when discussing the Union armies’ missed opportunities to take a lightly defended Petersburg in mid-June 1864 that “it is curious that Grant showed such scant interest in overseeing the culmination of his brilliant maneuver from Cold Harbor” (216). This tone is echoed throughout the volume; Greene modulates that criticism, however, by acknowledging that most of Grant’s biographers have seen this behavior as consistent with Grant’s command style and his responsibilities as general in chief of all the Union armies. On this point, Greene may underrate the importance of Grant’s responsibilities beyond the Virginia theater. One must remember the sheer complexity of the larger Union war effort Grant had to supervise, with far-flung military forces in disparate theaters operating across a continent. Moreover, focusing on individual command personalities such as Grant seems to be an increasingly arid avenue of inquiry in the first place and reveals a gap in the bifurcated approach that still dominates much military history of the Civil War. On the one hand, Greene’s analytical focus on the problem of assessing Grant’s performance—even his volume’s title—stands in the battles-and-leaders tradition of Civil War history. On the other hand, the volume also benefits from the obvious influence of social history in the ample space it gives to the perspective of the common soldier, backed by prodigious research in a wide variety of sources. In sum, Greene’s opus is very much of a piece with what I have in other places described as scholarship that focuses on brave men and brave deeds. In its capacious approach, it rebuts charges of romanticization—it is hard to come away from Greene’s treatment of the grisly combat in the Crater as someone overly fond of war—but at its most fundamental level, Greene analyzes the campaign’s...

Ari Kelman and Jonathan Fetter-Vorm. Battle Lines: A Graphic History of the Civil War.

A<scp>ri</scp> K<scp>elman</scp> and J<scp>onathan</scp> F<scp>etter</scp>-V<scp>orm</scp>. <i>Battle Lines: A Graphic History of the Civil War</i>.

Stephen G. Young

Stephen G. Young

Unified Narrative of American Civil War History as an Element of Memory Policy

Unified Narrative of American Civil War History as an Element of Memory Policy

Landscapes of Hope: Nature and the Great Migration in Chicago

Book Review| October 01 2018 Landscapes of Hope: Nature and the Great Migration in Chicago Landscapes of Hope: Nature and the Great Migration in Chicago. By Brian McCammack. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017. 364 pp. Images, notes, and index. $49.95 (cloth). Erin Stewart Mauldin Erin Stewart Mauldin Samford University Erin Stewart Mauldin is Assistant Professor of History at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. She is co-editor of the Companion to Global Environmental History (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), and her monograph, Unredeemed Land: An Environmental History of Civil War and Emancipation in the Cotton South, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of American Ethnic History (2018) 38 (1): 82–84. https://doi.org/10.5406/jamerethnhist.38.1.0082 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Erin Stewart Mauldin; Landscapes of Hope: Nature and the Great Migration in Chicago. Journal of American Ethnic History 1 January 2018; 38 (1): 82–84. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/jamerethnhist.38.1.0082 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressJournal of American Ethnic History Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2018 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2018 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Henry Fleming against his cowardice in The Red Badge of Courage

Language is a means of communication in Literature. People can understand and analyze any story by using language. They can also find out the content of story from different country. Readers can also compare story from one country to another country. They can also translate story from different country with their own mother tongue. One example is The Red Badge of Courage. We can get many lessons and ideas from this American novel. It is a war novel, which focus on American Civil War. Henry Fleming is one of main characters in the novel. Regarding to the history of Civil War, we still have many questions from the content of it. How about the main character‘s dreaming in civil war? Can his bravery influence to his friends? What is the moral value from this war novel? People can get many imaginations and lessons from the main character, Henry Fleming. Descriptive qualitative is a method in discussing this novel. Reading, understanding, and analyzing are the necessity things to do. The idea and opinions from novel and reference books are sources in getting idea. We can take this novel is as a zero to hero novel regarding to the main character‘s activities. All soldiers in his troop surprise when they see a brave-heart person, Henry Flaming. Furthermore, Henry shows that he can beat his cowardice to be a brave man. His wound is a proof of being a hero in his troop. His questions of being a brave soldier show up after he beats all trials in civil war. Self-confidence in Henry Flaming is a way to show that a soldier must have bravery in leading a troop.

Transforming conflicts from the bottom-up? Reflections on civil society efforts to empower marginalized fishers in postwar Sri Lanka

We analyze the efforts of an international consortium of academics and activists to understand and address a transnational fisheries conflict in South Asia. The so-called REINCORPFISH project (2010–2016) focused on an asymmetrical conflict between trawler fishers from the Indian state of Tamil Nadu who frequently transgress into Sri Lankan waters and northern Sri Lankan fishers, whose livelihoods are affected by these intrusions as well as by a long history of civil war. Guided by notions of bottom-up governance and empowerment, the consortium engaged in action research focusing on three types of remedial activities: (a) facilitating dialogues between fishers from both countries, (b) supporting the creation of a unified fisher organization in northern Sri Lanka, and (c) engaging in an advocacy program promoting assistance for the northern Sri Lankan fishers. Although the consortium succeeded in creating widespread attention of the problem, we analyze how the project’s rationale of bottom-up governance was thoroughly challenged by divisive national and transboundary politics. The fisheries conflict intertwined with geopolitical power play, military bluster, and ethnic tension, as well as with governmental suspicion toward NGO activity of any kind, marginalized civil society and compromised its assumed role as an agent of change. We therefore demonstrate how supporting marginalized resource users through action research requires handling a multiplicity of coexisting conflicts (resource, ethnic, and geopolitical) and that studying or dealing with such conflicts in isolation is both conceptually and practically flawed.

Ordered West: The Civil War Exploits of Charles A. Curtis ed. by Alan D. Gaff, Donald H. Gaff

Reviewed by: Ordered West: The Civil War Exploits of Charles A. Curtis ed. by Alan D. Gaff, Donald H. Gaff Aaron Astor Ordered West: The Civil War Exploits of Charles A. Curtis. Edited and with an introduction by Alan D. Gaff and Donald H. Gaff. Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2017. ix + 560 pp. Maps, illustrations, bibliography, notes, index. $49.95 cloth. Civil War historians in recent years have begun to focus more attention on the campaigns in the Far West and Southwest, revealing the connection between federal army campaigns against both Confederates and Native Americans. Particularly noteworthy events like the Sand Creek Massacre or the Battles of Glorieta Pass or Valverde produced military records that have invited [End Page 223] such inquiry. Thanks to Alan D. Gaff and Donald H. Gaff, a new source is available to historians of the Civil War and Reconstruction era in this theater. Ordered West is an edited set of memoirs written by Lieutenant Charles A. Curtis of the Fifth US Infantry. Curtis was an unlikely source for the Southwest because he was a college-educated man from northern New England, and he returned to his native region after his military service. A student at Lewiston Academy and Bowdoin College in Maine, Curtis entered the federal army in 1861 and impressed Union officers then establishing a defense of Washington. Surviving a friendly-fire wound, Curtis was commissioned into the Regular US Army and ordered to the Far West. After his service completed in 1865 he returned to Vermont and became president of Norwich University, a military academy and college. While serving there he published his memoirs in serial form in three installments of the Montpelier (VT) Argus and Patriot between 1877 and 1880. Curtis’s memoirs produced little attention beyond Vermont when released. Curtis was a quartermaster and so spent most of his time managing the mundane responsibilities of securing food and supplies for his garrisoned troops. He did not participate in any noteworthy battles or confront even a single Confederate soldier. Nor did he witness the most notable postwar campaigns against Native Americans, though he did interact with Navajos and Apaches engaged in military campaigns against other companies in New Mexico. Without a compelling battle narrative or “Indian fighter” tale to regale his eastern readers, Curtis’s memoirs passed into history unnoticed. Still, Gaff and Gaff have compiled and edited those memoirs in highly readable form. Ordered West includes several photographs, annotations, and maps, though the maps could have been more detailed to highlight the natural features in the narrative. Curtis was a talented writer himself, with a keen eye for topography, wildlife, and especially cultural interaction between Spanish-speaking New Mexicans, Native Americans (Apache, Navajo, and Mojave), and mostly Anglo-American military personnel (with a few German immigrants in the ranks too). Curtis follows events chronologically, describing in rich detail his voyage from Kansas City across the Great Plains and along the Santa Fe Trail through southern Colorado and New Mexico. Most of his account addresses his travels between Santa Fe and Las Cruces in New Mexico, with important side journeys to the Jemez Mountains. The last portion of the book includes his narrative of travel into Arizona Territory and his stay at Fort Whipple near Prescott. He concludes with his journey into California and back to the East Coast by sea. Readers of Great Plains Research will find much to enjoy in Ordered West. It fills an important gap in the Civil War literature on New Mexico and Arizona Territory, and it reveals the attitudes of Union officers about the Native peoples of the Southwest in the years before the bloody campaigns of the late 1860s and 1870s. Aaron Astor Department of History Maryville College, Tennessee Copyright © 2018 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln