History Of Civil War Research Articles

The Untried Life: The 29th Ohio Volunteer Infantry in the Civil War by James T. Fritsch (review)

Reviewed by: The Untried Life: The 29th Ohio Volunteer Infantry in the Civil War by James T. Fritsch Angela M. Zombek The Untried Life: The 29th Ohio Volunteer Infantry in the Civil War. By James T. Fritsch. (Athens: Ohio Univ. Press, 2012. 380 pp. Paper $34.95, ISBN 978-0-8040- 1139-6.) Relying on extensive research, James T. Fritsch uses a captivating narrative to recount the entire history of the 29th Ohio Volunteer Infantry both in camp and on the battlefield. Fritsch’s fifteen years of research into the Abolition Regiment touches upon all of the major issues with which Civil War historians have grappled for years: men’s motivation to enlist; the uncertainty of battle, enlisted men’s connection with home, the challenges of recruiting and desertion, conditions in military prisons, the role of women in the physical supply chain and their emotional support of the troops, and life in camp and on the march. The Untried Life takes the reader on a chronological journey of the 29th Ohio’s Civil War service and achieves the goal of telling the regiment’s story “in the words of the soldiers and officers who served in it” (467). Fritsch makes [End Page 135] good use of available letters, diaries, newspaper articles, and personal papers mined from his extensive research. The distinguished regiment formed in northeast Ohio’s Western Reserve, home to antislavery Sen. Benjamin Wade and Rep. Joshua Giddings, the regiment’s founder. But Fritsch demonstrates that even though the Reserve and Giddings were associated with abolitionism, not all of the enlisted men supported abolition as a war aim. The biggest strength of Fritsch’s work is that it captures the suspense of war by creating a narrative that simultaneously considers both battle and home front. The 29th Ohio took part in some of the war’s most significant campaigns: Kernstown, Second Bull Run, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, Atlanta, and the March to the Sea. But the regiment was not always at the center of the action and spent much of its time passing dull hours in camp, repairing itself in the cold winter months, mending wounds after battle, fending off disease, and marching in anticipation of battlefield glory, only to be turned away from the fighting as they were at Antietam. No matter where the regiment went, those at home hungered for information about their boys, especially in the aftermath of battle, when residents of the Reserve waited eagerly to hear if their loved ones had survived. Civil War military service, as told by Fritsch, was not always glorious the way that volunteers imagined it would be, especially in the war’s early years. Rather, it was full of monotony, demanded patience and fortitude from enlisted men, and required that men overcome doubt or the temptation to leave their posts as the war years dragged on. Another significant contribution that Fritsch’s work makes is how he demonstrates that organizing, supplying, and maintaining an army drained small, rural Northern towns just as it drained the South. As Fritsch notes, conventional wisdom holds that the North easily whipped the South thanks to its larger population and superior industrial and financial capacity (xi). But Fritsch’s examination of the history of the Western Reserve, particularly Jefferson, which was the seat of Ashtabula County, serves as a reminder that industrialization swept slowly across the North, and that much of the region remained rural and sparsely populated, dynamics that posed challenges to sustaining the Union war effort. This book is an excellent reminder that the Civil War was an extraordinary national struggle, but equally as important, it was also an individual struggle for men in the ranks and those left at home. Angela M. Zombek St. Petersburg College Copyright © 2014 The Kent State University Press

Functional Bowel Syndrome: Also a “Crohn” Disease?

Burrill R. Crohn (1884–1983), a pioneering gastroenterologist, is best known for a manuscript published in 1932 in the Journal of the American Medical Association, coauthored with Leon Ginzburg and Gordon Oppenheimer entitled ‘‘Terminal Ileitis: A New Clinical Entity’’ [2]. In this publication, he described 14 cases of a granulomatous inflammation of the distal ileum. Although descriptions of the condition had arguably been published previously, this landmark paper described clinical findings in the largest group of patients with inflammatory bowel disease at that time, and was the source of our current use of the author’s name for the disease. Dr. Crohn was an interesting man who practiced medicine into his 90s, primarily at the Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, where he worked for over 40 years. A true polymath, he also painted and studied Civil War history. Like many of his contemporaries, who worked when the field of gastroenterology was still in its infancy, his career was devoted to the understanding and management of a variety of vexing conditions, including peptic ulcer disease, gastrointestinal cancer, and functional bowel disorders. Dr. Crohn’s premise underlying his description of functional bowel disorders, republished in this issue of Digestive Diseases and Sciences [1], is that the gastrointestinal tract is a target for ‘‘external forces’’ including stress, personal problems, and family history that ultimately predispose to the development of what Dr. Crohn termed the ‘‘neurotic stomach.’’ Based on contemporary understanding of functional bowel disorders, this expression has a certain quaintness, as it reflects the prevailing interest in psychoanalytic theory. At the time of this manuscript’s publication, Sigmund Freud’s picture had already appeared on the cover of Time, and Freud’s name comes up twice in the article, beginning with its introductory sentence. Although our current understanding of functional bowel disorders includes a number of more recently appreciated non-psychiatric factors associated with the pathophysiology of these conditions, including intestinal dysbiosis, dysregulated gastrointestinal neurotransmitters, and distorted brain-gut activities, Dr. Crohn’s article contains many insights that remain relevant to the care of these patients in the twenty-first century. The article begins by suggesting that the burden of functional gastrointestinal (GI) conditions exceed that of the other major classes of organic diseases affecting the GI tract recognized at that time (ulcers, gallbladder disease, and cancer). Of interest, current literature supports this premise. In 2008, an annual total of 11,648,000 ambulatory care visits for functional gastrointestinal disorders in the United States occurred, compared with 7,578,000 visits for the other three GI conditions combined [3]. Dr. Crohn goes on to describe organic gastrointestinal disorders as having a basis in either secretory or motor abnormalities. Although we would certainly agree with the definition of ‘‘true cardiospasm’’ (achalasia) or gastric atonia as organic motor disorders, our lines today would be blurred in terms of defining these as functional versus organic disorders. On the other hand, we would likely not classify disorders of suspected psychiatric etiology, such as rumination syndrome or anorexia nervosa, as intrinsic gastrointestinal motor diseases, while we would recognize associated motility disturbances. The original article Functional and nervous disorders of the stomach and alimentary tract by Burrill B. Crohn published in American Journal of Digestive Diseases and Nutrition, October 1934, Volume 1, Issue 10, pp. 773–777. Springer.

Gettysburg: the last invasion

From the acclaimed Civil War historian, a brilliant new history-the most intimate and richly readable account we have had-of the climactic three-day battle of Gettysburg (July 1-3, 1863), which draws the reader into the heat, smoke, and grime of Gettysburg alongside the ordinary soldier, and depicts the combination of personalities and circumstances that produced the greatest battle of the Civil War, and one of the greatest in human history.

Looking at Landscapes of War

Looking at Landscapes of War Megan Kate Nelson (bio) As I drove slowly through a suburban subdivision I thought, “This can’t be right.” I pulled over and looked at the map of the park. Then I checked my iPhone map. Yep, it was right. Battlefield Park Road, off Route 5. I pulled back out onto the road, feeling a bit like a thief casing the neighborhood. And then, suddenly, there they were, tucked between the tri-levels and the ranch houses: cresting waves of grass and dirt, covered with leaves and shady in the midmorning sun. Earthworks, heaved up by Confederate soldiers and overrun by Federals between 1862 and 1865. Erosion and souvenir hunting have taken their toll, but the works are still here; they are the ghost marks of war.1 Some visitors to Battlefield Park Road will tell you that by being there, they have direct access to the past; they stand on (or near) hallowed ground and let its history seep up through the layers of clay, dirt, and topsoil. Most historians are somewhat skeptical of this assertion, the idea that one could travel through time by standing in place. However, most do believe in the value of preserving Civil War landscapes (battlefields in particular), and many write with a sense of place, of topography and hydrology, and argue for the ways the environment shaped battles and campaigns. But most historians have not, until very recently, looked—really looked—at the landscape of war: the natural and built environments that were destroyed, created, and reshaped over four years of violent conflict. As the landscape historian John Stilgoe has urged, we need to “go outside, move deliberately, then relax, slow down, look around.” When we do this, we find that a “concatenation of wild and artificial things, the natural ecosystem as modified by people … the built environment layered over layers, the eerie mix of sounds and smells and glimpses neither natural nor crafted—all of it is free for the taking, and taking in.”2 This “deliberate movement” of looking around tells Civil War historians about not only the dynamics of the war’s military histories but also the experiences of soldiers as they changed the land by marching, camping, and fighting through it. Both Union and Confederate soldiers used landscapes of war to articulate their experiences; when we [End Page 439] look more closely at the words and images in their letters and diaries, we see more clearly the ways they sought to exert control over their lives by explaining the world around them to themselves and their loved ones. When we really look at Richmond’s earthworks, what do we see? We see, in part, the nature of Civil War battles. Men on both sides spent most of their time camping and marching, but when they reached a place that was about to become a battlefield—or had already become a battlefield, moments before—they set to work. Sometimes they only had time to dig up small mounds of dirt to protect themselves from the minié balls, shot, and shell that came whistling through the air and into their lines. But other times, as multiday battles and urban siege campaigns became more common in 1863 and after, soldiers and pioneer corps changed the land under their feet into a protective landscape of war, building larger and more complex structures, “forts” consisting of interlocking trenches and pitched dirt walls, anchored in place with bundles of twigs and tree limbs culled from nearby woodlands. We see in these earthworks the advances in killing technologies, and campaign strategies and battle tactics that relied on massed charges against defensive positions. We see the initiative that soldiers took, responding to this disastrous combination of mismatched technology and tactics by building their own landscape of protection and giving themselves the best chances of survival. As we stand beside our cars and look, then take some photographs, then look again, we also see the houses nearby, the abandoned bikes in the yard, the other tourists checking maps and saying, “This can’t be right.” There is a sense of disjunction, of both time and place. You can imagine the armies withdrawing, civilians...

Battle Hymns: The Power and Popularity of Music in the Civil War by Christian McWhirter (review)

Reviewed by: Battle Hymns: The Power and Popularity of Music in the Civil War by Christian McWhirter Elizabeth Whittenburg Ozment (bio) Battle Hymns: The Power and Popularity of Music in the Civil War. By Christian McWhirter. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012. Pp. 336. Cloth, $39.95.) Civil War music scholars often describe a need to rescue war-era music from obscurity. Christian McWhirter continues this tradition in Battle Hymns by calling for dialogue between historians and musicologists to improve the documentation of nineteenth-century American music. McWhirter describes his primary goal as constructing a social history of Civil War–era music. Two theories in his introduction frame his approach. First, popularity correlates to historical significance. Second, published period documentation best demonstrates music’s resonance with audiences. McWhirter makes bold claims about the power and prevalence of music, which unlike other nineteenth-century media is described as a universal language that was performed and consumed by Americans of all classes. Evidence from newspapers, diaries, letters, and sheet music leads McWhirter to conclude that music surpassed other forms of written and [End Page 434] oral communication in shaping American perceptions about the war. The author does not consider music’s social power unique to this period, but stresses that the mid-nineteenth century was America’s most musical era, and the Civil War was America’s first musical war. Battle Hymns’s thorough bibliography blends historical and musicological sources. McWhirter constructs a detailed narrative about increased music consumerism while skillfully supporting his claims with references to newspapers, manuscripts, and sheet music. According to McWhirter, Civil War music was a memorable and accessible media form and a cultural tool that disseminated political ideas during a time when Americans preferred music to speeches or newspapers. Civil War Americans needed to process war-spawned social disorder, and songs such as “The Bonnie Blue Flag” shaped regional responses to the war. Music functioned differently in civilian and military spheres, but white anxieties about racial difference were expressed through a shared enthusiasm for the music of blackface minstrels. After the war, commemorative songs reflected psychological needs to justify the war. As time passed, Americans refashioned songs to align with war memories. A great achievement of Battle Hymns is its synthesis of data from previous studies. The book is dense yet easily accessible to a wide audience, and in the midst of the sesquicentennial it should attract considerable attention. Although McWhirter documents a substantive Civil War song history, the book leaves some questions unanswered. Somewhat surprising is the author’s heavy reliance on centennial-era sources, which may have led him to characterize popular music as simple, homogenous, and universally intelligible. For instance, McWhirter frequently cites Willard A. Heaps and Porter W. Heaps’s The Singing Sixties (1960) as the best Civil War music source, even though his bibliography attests to the depth and breadth of more recent research (Eric Lott, Eileen Southern, Nicholas Tawa, Richard Crawford, Mark Smith, Steven Cornelius). McWhirter might have critiqued the cultural conditions from which centennial-era research emerged or balanced those references with more contemporary scholarship. McWhirter’s decision to rely on published, commercially available compositions with lyrics that were consumed by white audiences allows him to claim that music steered Civil War discourse, but the argument relies on a narrow definition of what counts as “music.” Specialists will quibble, too, with the author’s blurring “genre” with “theme” when he claims that the most popular music genres were “patriotic” and “sentimental”; both terms describe subcategories of American popular song. The terms “music” and “song” are used interchangeably, too, which unfortunately led McWhirter [End Page 435] to exclude other music forms, music produced and performed by ethnic and racial minorities, and music with nontextual characteristics. This exclusion is reinforced by McWhirter’s decision to measure the popularity of period songs by comparing sales reports to repeated mention of song titles in newspapers and other texts. These choices may have resulted in an oversimplification of national aesthetics. In his last three chapters, McWhirter relies on more recent scholarship, and the results are more critical and gripping. In chapter 8, “Veterans, Memorialists, and the King: The Revival and Legacy of Civil...

All Astir

All Astir Samuel Otter A new UK-based organization has been formed, the British Association of Nineteenth-Century Americanists (BrANCA), several of whose founding members, including Michael Jonik and Peter Riley, have a strong interest in Melville and have participated in recent Melville Society events. BrANCA plans to offer regular meetings, lectures, reading groups, an online discussion group, and a biennial conference in the UK with international participants. You can view the mission statement, see a listing of news and events, and sign up for the electronic mailing list at http://www.branca.org.uk. Along with the establishment of C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists (http://c19.psu.edu), which held its recent biennial conferences in 2010 at Penn State and in 2012 at Berkeley and whose semiannual journal J19 began publication with a Spring 2013 issue, the formation of BrANCA is welcome news for those interested in Melville and in nineteenth-century US literature. The Melville Society Cultural Project has selected two recipients in 2013 for the Walter E. Bezanson Fellowship for study in the Melville Society Archive at the New Bedford Whaling Museum. They are Joseph Meyer from the University of Arkansas, who will be researching Melville and Biblical genealogy with a focus on Clarel, and Munia Bhaumik from Emory University, who will be studying Melville in translation and mutinies in nineteenth-century literature. The Cultural Project also reports that it has received its first request to lend some of the Melville Society's recent art acquisitions for an exhibit, a request that its members happily approved. The Luther Brady Art Gallery at the George Washington University in Washington, DC, will exhibit four drawings by Matt Kish for his book Moby-Dick in Pictures: One Drawing for Every Page, as part of an exhibition inspired by the Melville Society's Ninth International Conference, "Melville and Whitman in Washington: The Civil War and After," held in Washington on June 4-7, 2013. The exhibition, titled "After Melville and Whitman," will run from April 9 through July 5, 2013, and also will include several paintings based on Melville's The Confidence-Man by the contemporary artist Doug Paisley, as well as selections from the writings of Melville and Whitman, among others. In March, the Melville Electronic Library (MEL) research associates and technical team convened for their fourth MELCamp, this year at the beautiful new Liberal Arts and Humanities building at Texas A&M University in College Station, TX. Over two dozen participants—some seasoned, some new, some [End Page 78] tech-oriented, some digital innocents—from as close as a few blocks away (Dennis Berthold, who treated the group to an authentic Texas BBQ dinner at Rudy's) and as far away as Spain (Laura López Peña)—signed on to brainstorm the newest developments and narrow the gap between traditional and digital scholarships. Laura Mandell, Director of TAMU's Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture, and her graduate assistant Liz Grumbach welcomed MELCampers with a reception Monday evening, followed by a keynote address by Wyn Kelley, Associate Director of MEL. The talk, titled "Editing Raw: From Archive to Classroom and Beyond," looked at participatory practices of editing in John Bryant's fluid-text theory, in an editing-based pedagogy for the literature classroom, and in a digital tool called Annotation Studio, as well as a mapping tool called Locast, both developed at MIT. As MEL moves to a more public phase, loading materials to a live site and eventually inviting visitors to interact with Melville texts, art, maps, and a timeline of Civil War history, the site will enable them not just to read but also to engage in editing activities. Kelley argued that finding ways for non-experts (not just scholars) to consider themselves editors could engage them deeply in Melville's texts and contexts. The events included an intense and productive series of talks and workshops. MEL Director John Bryant updated participants on MEL's newest developments and then introduced plenary speaker Laura Mandell, who spoke on "The Digital Humanities Center: Project Management, Graduate Training, Critical Thinking." Outlining the strong advantages of creating a digital humanities center for training a new generation of...

The Civil War at the Sesquicentennial: How Well Do Americans Understand Their Great National Crisis?

The Civil War at the SesquicentennialHow Well Do Americans Understand Their Great National Crisis? Gary W. Gallagher (bio) I am delighted to be here tonight to receive the Tom Watson Brown Book Prize for The Union War. Few things could be more satisfying than to receive such an honor from the principal professional organization in my field. I look around and see how far the society has come since its origins—a testament to the vitality of Civil War–era scholarship. I’ll express thanks at the outset to the Watson-Brown Foundation—and more particularly to Tad Brown—for this dinner, and to the Society of Civil War Historians and the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center at Penn State University for overseeing the myriad details relating to the prize and tonight’s program. Because I first felt the siren call of the Civil War as a ten-year-old at the outset of the centennial commemoration, I chose to revisit that time for my talk tonight. I went to National Geographic’s coverage in 1961–63 and in 2011–12 in search of comparative insights. Perhaps unsurprisingly, some interpretive emphases remain about the same, others—more important ones—do not. Both the early 1960s and the early twenty-first century underscore how, in their long relationships with the memory of the Civil [End Page 295] War, every generation of Americans has found what suits its needs and overlooked or marginalized things that do not. Our current preoccupation with race, as a profession and a society, is much in evidence as we navigate the sesquicentennial. I can date my lifelong engagement with the war to an article titled “The Civil War” in the April 1961 issue of National Geographic. Written by Ulysses S. Grant III, it struck a reconciliationist tone reminiscent of the speeches Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt delivered on the fiftieth and seventy-fifth anniversaries of the battle of Gettysburg. “Our forefathers fought to the limit of endurance for four years;” observed the preeminent Union military hero’s grandson, “when the echo of the last shot died away, they saw in the unity of their land something that overshadowed the bitterness of the struggle.” Out of the unimaginable carnage of the Civil War, continued Grant, “emerged a more firmly united country—a country that has become the leader of the Free World.”1 Just more than two years later, in July 1963, National Geographic recalled the battles of Gettysburg and Vicksburg in an issue featuring an essay by Carl Sandburg, the poet and biographer of Abraham Lincoln. Sandburg alluded to “little American burgs named for long-forgotten settlers, Gettys and Vick . . . towns with no special claim to be noted or long remembered, till events wrote them red for all time as the turning point in the Civil War.” Lincoln’s address in November 1863 further sanctified the ground at Gettysburg: “No wonder,” reflected Sandburg, “that—100 years later—we honor the great events that made us not a parcel of quarreling states, but a united Nation.”2 For anyone who might worry that Gettysburg no longer gets sufficient attention as the war’s great turning point, I am happy to say that National Geographic offers comfort. A beautiful map inserted in the May 2012 issue pronounces 1863 to be the “Turning Point of the Civil War,” and accompanying text explains that “the Union began to gain the upper hand only in July 1863 with its victory at Gettysburg, the largest battle ever fought in North America.” Thus does National Geographic sustain a hoary distortion regarding Gettysburg’s preeminence—a distortion propped up by Michael Shaara’s novel The Killer Angels, Ken Burns’s documentary The Civil War, and Ron Maxwell’s Gettysburg, the four-hour cinematic translation of The Killer Angels. Thanks to Shaara, Burns, and Maxwell, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain now enjoys a position in the front rank of Union heroes—something William Tecumseh Sherman and Philip H. Sheridan, I think it safe to say, might find odd.3 Recent issues of National Geographic also mirror the most obvious—and noteworthy—change in popular understanding of the conflict between [End Page 296] the...

Writing Horses into American Civil War History

Anthropomorphism has generally been considered a fitter device for poets and writers of sentimental literature than for historians. Yet mankind has largely moved beyond the arrogant dismissal of our fellow creatures as soulless machines, a divine gift for us to exploit without thought for their suffering or pain. Historians might now recognize that their, conventionally, most anthropocentric of disciplines needs to understand those animals that have contributed so much to shaping our past, to think with them and credit them with a perspective. Here, taking up the challenge laid down by the historian of the South African War Sandra Swart, an examination of the methodological issues surrounding the ‘writing in’ of animals into military history will identify an established tradition of ‘subaltern studies’ within the historiography of war, which has prepared the ground intellectually for the inclusion of non-human animals. Following this, a consideration of the experiences of horses during the American Civil War, informed by both contemporary records and modern equine science, will then demonstrate both the possibility, and the desirability, of according due attention to ‘animal soldiers’ in the writing of military history.

Demon of the Lost Cause: Sherman and Civil War History by Wesley Moody (review)

Reviewed by: Demon of the Lost Cause: Sherman and Civil War History by Wesley Moody Paul Ashdown Demon of the Lost Cause: Sherman and Civil War History. Wesley Moody. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2011. ISBN 978-0-8262-1945-9, 192 pp., cloth, $30.00. If Wesley Moody had stuck to the subtitle of his 2009 doctoral dissertation, from which this excellent book emerged, his intention would have been a little clearer than it is with the subtitle his publishers have given us. The former title is “Demon of the Lost Cause: General William Tecumseh Sherman and the Writing of Civil War History.” The truncated title fits better on the book jacket but gives us history without the historians, just about all of whom apparently got the story wrong, or perhaps only partially right. What is it, then, that makes writing Civil War history so precarious? Bad faith and bad data account for a lot of it, and Moody shows just how an impaired interpretation can get lodged in the historical bloodstream to poison future writers. As historiography, Demon of the Lost Cause, with or without the subtitles, considerably advances our knowledge of Sherman, memory, and mythmaking and sheds light on just what can happen when history is constructed to fit an agenda or a theory. In Moody’s careful weighing of the newspaper stories, letters, reports, memoirs, biographies, speeches, memorials, and assorted cultural artifacts associated with Sherman, a soldier emerges who looks much like a cautious careerist swept up [End Page 110] in complex and contradictory events that thrust him into controversies subject to multiple interpretations. Sherman didn’t especially want to be controversial but had a fondness for bold assertion and action that put him in the middle of grand strategies and, after the war, clashing concepts of modernity. He had a fine intellect and flair with the pen as well as a penchant for palaver, so when he got around to writing his memoirs, his defense against wartime and early postwar criticism of his leadership sometimes quickly expanded into chest-thumping grandiosity masked as forthrightness. Given the tone and the popularity of his writing, Sherman “may have succeeded in alienating more people with his memoirs than he did with his campaigns,” according to Moody (44). The counterattacks came from fellow generals, like John Schofield, and politicians with scores to settle. The claims that Sherman was a barbarian largely began in the North among disgruntled fellow warriors like Joseph “Fighting Joe” Hooker. Southerners, in turn, initially viewed Sherman favorably, attending more to his congenial postwar political stands against Reconstruction and his generous boosterism than to his bludgeoning wartime advances through wide swaths of their territory. But Sherman pushed his luck by taking on Jefferson Davis and then ranking Robert E. Lee as inferior as a general not only to U. S. Grant but also to that other Virginian, the Union general George Thomas. The Lost Cause writers needed to find their demon to contrast with the sainted Lee and the rest of the Confederate pantheon, and Sherman was the best available target. The Nashville-based Confederate Veteran magazine, broadening the attack by asserting the primacy of the western theater, accorded Sherman more coverage than any other Union general. Sherman’s alleged depredations in Georgia and South Carolina came to matter less than the insult to southern dignity, especially its unprotected womanhood. As Moody points out, however, Sherman actually benefited from the Lost Cause, which exaggerated his importance and deflected the more substantive criticism raised by Schofield and others that relegated Sherman to a lesser role in crafting the eventual Union victory. The very idea of the March as the war’s defining event then took root in the popular imagination, aided and abetted by Hollywood, especially The Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind. Moody might have added selections from the growing roster of Sherman-based novels, especially Cynthia Bass’s magnificent 1994 work Sherman’s March or E. L. Doctorow’s widely reviewed 2005 epic The March. Moody saves his major umbrage for British military historians Field Marshal Viscount Garnet Wolseley, Maj. Gen. John F. C. Fuller, and especially Capt. Basil H. Liddell Hart...

This is not how my book starts: looking back at writing and framing

Adam Arenson shares his first enthusiastic draft opening and his plan to shape a history of Civil War St. Louis around a series of one-night encounters narrated by a street barker – and why, upon further reflection, he cut out this writing he had loved. He discusses its value as an artifact of the writing and editing process that led to his first book.

Weirding the War: Stories from the Civil War’s Ragged Edges ed. by Stephen Berry (review)

Reviewed by: Weirding the War: Stories from the Civil War’s Ragged Edges ed. by Stephen Berry Frances M. Clarke Weirding the War: Stories from the Civil War’s Ragged Edges. Ed. Stephen Berry. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011. ISBN 978-0-8203-4127-9, 352 pp., paper, $24.95. This new collection of unusual tales from the Civil War era originated in Athens, Georgia, with three seasoned Civil War scholars either sitting down to a plate of meatloaf or listening to Bat Out of Hell—I’m not sure which. They got to talking about how their colleagues tend to circle around the same questions (What were the war’s main turning points? What motivated common soldiers? Should Lincoln get credit for freeing the slaves?) and decided that it was time to move away from these tired old debates and explore the byroads of Civil War history, following paths taken by those who weren’t acting as if future generations might be watching: like the war profiteers and coquettes, do-nothings and black deserters, or neglected children and broken men. If we follow the stories of these marginal characters, they reasoned, we might avoid the clichéd version of the war as the dark night of the nation’s soul, when all victims ultimately suffered for a noble end. We might then be able to reimagine subjects living lives full of paradox, happenstance, and chaos, rather than trying to shoehorn them into histories purporting to uncover the one “real war.” So they held a conference at the T. R. R. Cobb house in Athens, once home to the southern fire-eater Thomas Reade Rootes Cobb and now haunted by his ghost, according to more than one online report. What better place to discuss the crooked byways of Civil War history? Thus began “UnCivil Wars,” an annual conference series now in its third year. Participants have delved into the lives of a host of unsavory characters and practices. In the first three essays (among the best in the collection), Michael DeGruccio introduces the copious scavengers who made their way to Civil War battlefields looking for spent shells, buttons, bits of uniforms or trees, even human bones. What did they do with these remnants? Some sold them to relic hunters for profit. Others cherished them as curiosities, talismans, or symbols of conquest. If we paid more attention to material objects and less to the printed word, DeGruccio argues, we would realize that the urge [End Page 99] to preserve the war’s memory began not when veterans started publishing memoirs and setting up organizations, but with this quest to touch and own the debris of battle. This discussion of people dedicated to preserving a piece of the war’s destruction nicely complements Megan Kate Nelson’s essay on the men and women who reveled in causing or dwelling on that destruction: soldiers who experienced a rush of power or satisfaction as they demolished their enemy’s property; illustrators, photographers, and printmakers who interpreted devastated landscapes using the conventions of the sublime or picturesque; and sightseers who found inspiration while wandering among the ruins. As callous as these practices might now seem, they are positively tame when compared to the acts of vicious selfishness displayed by the men in Rodney J. Steward’s fascinating essay on North Carolina’s western Piedmont district. Steward deals with the fallout in this area from the Confederate Act of Sequestration, passed in August 1861, which empowered men known as Receivers to seize property of anyone deemed disloyal to the Confederate cause. With sweeping powers to confiscate and sell property, they often simply stole from their fellow citizens—usually the poorest and least powerful. Having sold off the possessions of widows and children, they enriched themselves rather than sending the proceeds to the Confederate treasury. This collection would be worth buying if only for these first three pieces and Berry’s terrific introduction, which immediately made me want to apply for membership in the “weirdlings,” as he calls his contributors. But there are other standout essays that provide for fascinating, if disturbing, reading as well as ideal material for classroom use. Joan Cashin’s take on...

Guest Editor’s Introduction

Guest Editor’s Introduction Adam Mendelsohn (bio) Why study Jews and the Civil War? The outcome of the conflict would have been no different if every Jewish recruit had proven as adroit in evading the recruiting sergeant as antisemites later alleged. Even if the more generous estimate of 12,000 Jewish soldiers is accurate, and encomiums to Jewish heroism unadorned, it is improbable that a single battle would have been altered by their absence. Certainly an earlier generation of historians, seeking to counteract the idea that Jews were interlopers with shallow roots in America, found it necessary to prove that Jews had stood “shoulder-to-shoulder” in the ranks with their Christian comrades, buff the reputation of Judah P. Benjamin as the “Brains of the Confederacy” (an antisemitic slight transmuted into a term of praise), and construct a Jewish cult of Lincoln.1 Although today some within the Jewish public still hunger for a celebratory narrative of Jewish involvement in the Civil War—an appetite hopefully sated by a new documentary on the subject—an emphasis on affirmation alone provides thin gruel for scholarship.2 Perhaps the most convincing reason to reexamine this subject is provided by a fertile harvest of new research that has begun to provide richer and more complex insights into the behavior of both Jewish men and women during the Civil War. Old chestnuts have been pruned to reveal nuance and texture; new turf has been turned to uncover fertile soil for further study.3 As happened fifty years ago, it has taken an anniversary to rekindle sustained interest in Jewish participation in America’s bloodiest war. This special issue of American Jewish History is the direct product of a conference organized by the College of Charleston in May 2011 to mark the sesquicentennial of the conflict. Historians of American Jewry have also been encouraged by a broadening of Civil War scholarship beyond the battlefield to encompass themes—the home front, memory, [End Page ix] mourning and commemoration, and the experience of minorities—more felicitous to their interest in social and cultural history. The majority of this new writing recognizes that Jewish matters were not central to the conflict. After all, even the best known wartime episode that had direct ramifications for Jews—Grant’s General Orders #11—merits only glancing attention in leading works of Civil War history. 4 Nonetheless Jewish responses to the war provide a useful point of comparison, for example, with recruits from other distinct religious and ethnic backgrounds.5 Unlike the majority of their compatriots, Jews were religious outsiders in armies that made few allowances for their differences: rations were heavy on pork, and troops were rallied with exhortations that often framed the conflict in Christological terms. On the home front, Jewish women often created their own sewing circles and charity committees to aid the war effort. Moreover, current historians maintain that the transformative conflict and its aftermath exerted considerable influence on American Jewish history. The United States was home to fewer than two-hundred thousand Jews in 1860 but the community was soon remade by waves of newcomers. Several have argued—myself included—that the war facilitated this mass immigration.6 Others have proposed that the war was an essential waypoint on the American Jewish march toward acceptance and integration. These arguments must be deployed with care and nuance. At the remove of one hundred and fifty years it is all too easy to gloss over the misery of a brutal war that cost over six-hundred thousand lives by drawing uplifting and ennobling lessons, or glibly saluting the sacrifices of both sides. Two of the articles in this special issue offer a counter-narrative that suggests that the messy aftermath of the war created new political and economic opportunities for Jews, but did so by upsetting a pre-war racial and civic order in the South that had provided them with an unusual degree of stability and inclusion. The already complicated legacy of the war for Jews was further complicated by the infusion of an often racialized strain of antisemitism into the American body politic during and after the conflict. The articles by Anton Hieke and Stuart Rockoff illustrate...

Archaeology, narrative, and the politics of the past: the view from southern Maryland

In this innovative work, Julia King moves nimbly among a variety of sources and disciplinary approaches--archaeological, historical, architectural, literary, and art-historical--to show how places take on, convey, and maintain meanings. Focusing on the beautiful Chesapeake Bay region of Maryland, King looks at the ways in which various groups, from patriots and politicians of the antebellum era to present-day archaeologists and preservationists, have transformed key landscapes into historical, indeed sacred, spaces. The sites King examines include the region's vanishing tobacco farms; St. Mary's City, established as Maryland's first capital by English settlers in the seventeenth century; and Point Lookout, the location of a prison for captured Confederate soldiers during the Civil War. As the author explores the historical narratives associated with such places, she uncovers some surprisingly durable myths as well as competing ones. St. Mary's City, for example, early on became the centre of Maryland's founding narrative of religious tolerance, a view commemorated in nineteenth-century celebrations and reflected even today in local museum exhibits and preserved buildings. And at Point Lookout, one private group has established a Confederate Memorial Park dedicated to those who died at the prison, thus nurturing the Lost Cause ideology that arose in the South in the late 1800s, while nearby the custodians of a 1,000-acre state park avoid controversy by largely ignoring the area's Civil War history, preferring instead to concentrate on recreation and tourism, an unusually popular element of which has become the recounting of ghost stories. As King shows, the narratives that now constitute the public memory in southern Maryland tend to overlook the region's more vexing legacies, particularly those involving slavery and race. Noting how even her own discipline of historical archaeology has been complicit in perpetuating old narratives, King calls for research--particularly archaeological research--that produces new stories and counter-narratives that challenge old perceptions and interpretations and thus convey a more nuanced grasp of a complicated past. |In this innovative work, Julia King moves nimbly among a variety of sources and disciplinary approaches--archaeological, historical, architectural, literary, and art-historical--to show how places take on, convey, and maintain meanings. Focusing on the beautiful Chesapeake Bay region of Maryland, King looks at the ways in which various groups, from patriots and politicians of the antebellum era to present-day archaeologists and preservationists, have transformed key landscapes into historical, indeed sacred, spaces. The sites King examines include the region's vanishing tobacco farms; St. Mary's City, established as Maryland's first capital by English settlers in the seventeenth century; and Point Lookout, the location of a prison for captured Confederate soldiers during the Civil War. As the author explores the historical narratives associated with such places, she uncovers some surprisingly durable myths as well as competing ones. St. Mary's City, for example, early on became the center of Maryland's founding narrative of religious tolerance, a view commemorated in nineteenth-century celebrations and reflected even today in local museum exhibits and preserved buildings. And at Point Lookout, one private group has established a Confederate Memorial Park dedicated to those who died at the prison, thus nurturing the Lost Cause ideology that arose in the South in the late 1800s, while nearby the custodians of a 1,000-acre state park avoid controversy by largely ignoring the area's Civil War history, preferring instead to concentrate on recreation and tourism, an unusually popular element of which has become the recounting of ghost stories. As King shows, the narratives that now constitute the public memory in southern Maryland tend to overlook the region's more vexing legacies, particularly those involving slavery and race. Noting how even her own discipline of historical archaeology has been complicit in perpetuating old narratives, King calls for research--particularly archaeological research--that produces new stories and counter-narratives that challenge old perceptions and interpretations and thus convey a more nuanced grasp of a complicated past. Julia A. King is an associate professor of anthropology at St. Mary's College of Maryland, where she coordinates the Museum Studies Program and directs the SlackWater Center, a consortium devoted to exploring, documenting, and interpreting the changing landscapes of Chesapeake communities. She is also coeditor, with Dennis B. Blanton, of Indian and European Contact in Context: The Mid-Atlantic Region.

Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War and Reconstruction

Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War and Reconstruction

The Lost Cause and the Meaning of History

In Virginia, where I live and work, bits of the past pierce the present in ways both startling and routine. Civil War history and Confederate flags do not just appear in museums, archives, and at the state's many Civil War historic sites. They also show up on city sidewalks and in town parks; on beach towels, car bumpers, and the mud flaps of trucks; in dorm windows; and in the statements of elected officials. The Lost Cause—what neo-Confederates today call southern heritage—surrounds us. Often, these signs of the past in the present surprise me, though I have lived in Virginia for fifteen years. On a spring trip to Richmond, I saw two white men and an African American woman waving a large Confederate flag on the sidewalk in front of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (vmfa). It was not clear what exactly these “flaggers,” as some supporters...

Armed Resistance: Cultural Representations of the Anti-Francoist Guerrilla. Hispanic Issues Edited by Antonio Gómez López-Quiñones and Carmen Moreno-Nuño (review)

Reviewed by: Armed Resistance: Cultural Representations of the Anti-Francoist Guerrilla. Hispanic IssuesEdited by Antonio Gómez López-Quiñones and Carmen Moreno-Nuño David K. Herzberger Armed Resistance: Cultural Representations of the Anti-Francoist Guerrilla. Hispanic Issues. Volume 10, Fall2012 Edited by Antonio Gómez López-Quiñones and Carmen Moreno-Nuño. Generally speaking, the more that we scrutinize the past the bulkier it tends to become. This is especially the case when we widen access to history beyond the institutional renderings of historians, whose disciplinary training often advises them to protect the past from unorthodox intrusions. Keith Windschuttle’s The Killing of History(1996) sums up this thinking with urgent passion and not a small amount of defensiveness. However, when previously unheard voices are able to enter the debate, when unknown facts emerge and perspectives change, the past can be expanded, shaped, and reinvigorated with new and diverse meanings. In other words, opening up the past allows it to be useful in ways not yet perceived. In Spain over the past three decades or so, this is precisely what has happened with the Spanish Civil War—historians, novelists, memoirists, and numerous community and professional associations formed to recover historical memory have flourished. As a result, historical terrain has been covered more broadly and more deeply than perhaps could have been imagined when Francisco Franco died in 1975. But as often occurs when knowledge about the past grows and accumulates in a general way, smaller and discrete areas outside the mainstream often lag behind. Such has been the case with the study of the maquis in postwar Spain, about whom, as Carmen Moreno-Nuño points out in her introduction to Armed Resistance: Cultural Representations of the Anti-Francoist Guerrilla, there has yet to be devoted a book-length study focusing on representations of the guerrilla in both Francoist and democratic Spain. The essays gathered together by Moreno-Nuño and Antonio Gómez López-Quiñones in their jointly edited volume of Hispanic Issuesbegin to fill this lacuna in felicitous and intelligent fashion. It is not that the figure of the maquis has been completely ignored in various forms of cultural production since the Civil War (one need only examine the record from Hemingway to Guillermo del Toro to come up with a lengthy and rich list of works) but, as Moreno-Nuño rightfully observes, the representation of the maquis has undergone significant transformations “in response to hegemonic sociopolitical models”(6) over the past seventy years. Indeed, the maquis has been ascribed a range of identities in response to an assemblage of perceived needs by one group or another in both Francoist and democratic Spain. The essays included in Armed Resistanceexplore a broad spectrum of these identities from multi-disciplinary approaches that focus on historiography, film, literature, and oral tradition. Violence and armed resistance are always vexed by political, moral, and legal issues, and many of the essays address these problems at least implicitly, though they do not make them the principal focus of their analyses. What does stand out in the collection as a whole is the awareness of how stories and their tellers inevitably serve changing purposes over time. For example, in “Deep Space, Mobilized Time: The Anti-Francoist Guerrilla—Politics and Aesthetics of Armed Resistance (1938–1997),” Ulrich Winter examines political and aesthetic symbiosis as a temporal exigency. As he puts it, it is “clear how the paradigm of armed resistance as asymmetric warfare changed between war time, post-war time, and democracy” (6). He thus sees a kind of chronotopic transformation in stories about the maquis that reveals the need to continue the myths of anti-Francoism in order to make the past continually usable. [End Page 276] Several of the essays draw upon the centrality (and contingencies) of memory in the representation of armed resistance to Francoism: for example, “The Black Sun of Anarchy: From Historical Memory to Sinister Imagination (A Meditation on the Film El Honor de las Injuriasby Carlos García-Alix),” by Santiago Morales-Rivera; “The Magic Mountains: Narratives of Historical Memory, Folk Literature, and Communities of Memory in...

Battle Hymns: The Power and Popularity of Music in the Civil War

Music in nineteenth-century America was social and ephemeral. As a result, its power and popularity remained largely situational. Such a musical climate is the setting for Christian McWhirter's Battle Hymns—an extensive, descriptive account of music during the American Civil War. The author's approach is that of a Civil War historian more than a cultural or music scholar. In thematic chapters, written in clear prose drawn from detailed archival research, the author handles such topics as the Northern and Southern quests for national anthems, popular music on the home front, music in the armies, music of and about freedpeople, and the politicization of music. Although the book does not follow a chronology, it still describes how and why popular music transformed over the course of the war as peoples' experiences with and attitudes toward the war changed. Stories on the creation of “John Brown's Body,” “Battle Cry of Freedom,” and “Dixie” revisit common subjects in American music history. McWhirter's chapter on how whites musically expressed their changing opinions of blacks and how they musically conveyed their newfound status as freedpeople situates Civil War music within its racial context. His description of how veterans used Civil War–era music to promote their legacy begins an interesting chapter that progresses through later attempts to bolster the Lost Cause using Civil War music and ends in 2009 with the University of Mississippi football controversy over using “Dixie” as the team's unofficial fight song—nicely emphasizing this history's relevance to the present.

New Reflections on Lincoln and the Constitution During the Civil War Lincoln and the Triumph of the Nation: Constitutional Conflict in the American Civil War Abraham Lincoln and Treason in the Civil War: The Trials of John Merryman

The Body of John Merryman: Abraham Lincoln and Suspension of Habeas Corpus. By Brian McGinty. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. Pp. 253, notes, bibliography, index. Cloth, $29.95.) Lincoln and Triumph of Nation: Constitutional Conflict in American Civil War. By Mark E. Neely Jr. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. Pp. 408, notes, bibliography, index. Cloth, $35.00.) Abraham Lincoln and Treason in Civil War: The Trials of John Merryman. By Jonathan White. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2011. Pp. xii, 191, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. Paperback, $17.95.) Recently, because of my interest in life, work, and politics of Joseph Holt - Abraham Lincoln's judge advocate general, head of War Department's Bureau of Military Justice, and a crucial supporter of Lincoln's wartime policies following his appointment in September 1862 - I was invited to speak at a conference in Clinton, Maryland. During one of our breaks, a fellow speaker took pains to express to me his opinion about Lincoln's suspension of writ of habeas corpus. An unprecedented power grab, he called it, shaking his head, and unconscionable, unAmerican violation of civilians' civil rights in wartime. My interlocutor went on to describe his own current research, which, he warned, would cast a number of presidents (including Lincoln) and their administrations' enforcers (such as Holt) in a severely unfavorable light. I am no stranger to this sort of exchange, having come to be known over last decade or so, with varying degrees of affection, approval, curiosity, and disdain, as the Holt lady. On this occasion, in response to my colleague's warning, I asked whether he had read recent and extremely relevant books Mark E. Neely Jr., Brian McGinty, and Jonathan W. White. When he informed me that he had not, I urged him to do so in near future, at very least, before he set into permanent print his opinions on President Lincoln, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, habeas corpus, and wartime civil liberties. I made this recommendation energetically not just because I believe these books were worth his time, but also because they are important resources for Civil War scholars generally. Each of three is illuminating in its own way. The longest and most sweeping of trio is Pulitzer Prize-winner Mark Neeh/s Lincoln and Triumph of Nation. In this book, Neely seeks to redress previous absence in literature of a single volume dealing simultaneously with wartime history of U.S. which he describes as an underestimated asset to Union cause, and Confederate which he insists was by no means... a cause of Confederate defeat. (pp. 15-16) Since constitutions were markedly similar in content, Neely explains, the historian has opportunity to see document itself tested in two different societies at same time. (p. 17) This, then, is precisely what Neely sets out to do: to explore how lawyers, justices, and government officials in both Union and Confederacy thought about Constitution, (p. 25) and to examine they made with respect to which government policies during war were constitutional and which were not. From start, Neely informs readers that rather than a sharply defined thesis on history of Civil War, his goal is to present us with several arguments (p. 17) and abundance of opinions expressed period's judges, newspapers editors, politicians, and political pamphleteers. (p. 26) In doing so, he hopes that Lincoln and Triumph of Nation can become a springboard for future studies of Constitution in Civil War and in other American wars. Neely would be pleased indeed if his thought-provoking book were to launch a new series of titles, beginning with 'Constitutional Problems Under Madison' and stretching through all our wars until we have accumulated a shelf of volumes that reconsider role of Constitution in America's wars. …

The relationship between violence and mental illnesses in Guatemala

BackgroundNumerous factors are thought to connect violence to mental illness, including civil conflict, yet very few studies of this relationship have been conducted using large, population-based samples in developing nations.AimTo...

From Battlefield to Fertile Ground: The Development of Civil War Environmental History

From Battlefield to Fertile Ground:The Development of Civil War Environmental History Lisa M. Brady (bio) In 2001, Jack Temple Kirby published his essay "The American Civil War: An Environmental View," in which he wrote, "In the nearly four decades since the [Civil War] centennial, demand for old-fashioned (shall I say?) military history and military biography has hardly abated. Environmental history, meanwhile, a sub-discipline born during the 1960s and flourishing modestly since, has yet to impact the Civil War seriously." This failure to unite Civil War and environmental histories troubled Kirby for two reasons. First, he noted that since at least the 1970s "Americans have belonged to a culture steeped in ecological language and politics," one that presumes a connection between humans and the natural world. Second, Kirby suggested that we need an environmental analysis of the Civil War because "no one alive at the dawn of the twenty-first century, from the oldest among us to our most immature students, can conceive of war without environmental danger if not disaster." Kirby argued that failing to understand the war as an ecological event ignores these important cultural and intellectual developments. He then presented "a preliminary environmental impact statement" of the war, highlighting issues such as disease, destruction of rural and urban landscapes, deforestation, and the ecological ramifications of emancipation and of the death of hundreds of thousands of people and millions of animals. He concluded that while not all the consequences of the war equaled permanent environmental degradation, the conflict resulted in a "poorer South after all" and signaled "the beginning of the end of southern rural life as it had been known for at least [End Page 305] two centuries." His final exhortation was for Civil War and environmental historians to stop ignoring each other and to begin a fruitful debate.1 By the start of the war's sesquicentennial, Kirby's was no longer the lone voice in the historiographical wilderness. A dozen or so scholars have started to add their voices to the chorus. Some might not concur with Kirby's reasons for engaging in environmental analysis of the war, or even, perhaps, with his conclusions, but these scholars' impact on the larger field of Civil War history, while still relatively small, is undeniably growing. More panel and round-table sessions at academic meetings focus on environmental histories of the Civil War; indeed, entire conferences are being organized around this new line of inquiry.2 Journals are soliciting and publishing articles that analyze the environmental consequences of Civil War battles and strategy, nature's impact on the physical and psychological health of soldiers and civilians, and the ecological debates surrounding battlefield preservation efforts. Books that examine the war through the lens of environmental history are now available, and increasing numbers of graduate students are producing masters' theses and doctoral dissertations along similar lines.3 This special issue of Civil War History demonstrates that environmental and Civil War historians are heeding Kirby's clarion call to action. I feel privileged to provide some historiographical context for the essays in this issue, an honor [End Page 306] that rightfully would have been Kirby's, had he not passed away in 2009. I will concentrate my efforts on those publications that are explicitly environmental histories, despite the growing number of articles and books by scholars in other fields who acknowledge—to varying degrees—the importance of such elements as geography, geology, weather, and disease in shaping the course of the Civil War.4 I will also limit my scope to those examples that focus primarily on the military conflict, even though environmental historians who examine the South and its broader ecological past are beginning to incorporate meaningful discussions of the war into their work.5 Though still fairly limited, the environmental subset of Civil War historiography has developed enough, I believe, to merit this more exclusive attention.6 [End Page 307] It is still new enough, however, that I feel compelled to offer a brief, perhaps overly simplistic, definition. For those unfamiliar with the field, environmental history is the study of the changing relationships human communities develop with nonhuman nature over time and place. It examines the ways...