War Memoirs Research Articles

The Story of My Campaign: The Civil War Memoir of Captain Francis T. Moore, Second Illinois Cavalry

The Story of My Campaign: The Civil War Memoir of Captain Francis T. Moore, Second Illinois Cavalry

Soldiers' Stories of the Falklands War: Recomposing Trauma in Memoir

This article will analyse the role of soldiers' own accounts in the construction of the Falklands War as disproportionately traumatic. The war was Britain's first following the development of a diagnostic model for post-traumatic stress disorder and this greatly influenced the value given to veterans' experiences. Writing memoirs of war was seen as a therapeutic practice. This article uses two case studies, Ken Lukowiak and Vince Bramley, to re-evaluate the role of catharsis in memoirs of warfare and to turn the historian's attention to what happens next when soldiers tell or sell their stories of war.

Book Notes

Book Notes Patrick A. Lewis Profiles of Paducah People. By Allan Rhodes Sr. and John E. L. Robertson Sr. (Paducah: Image Graphics, Inc., 2008. Pp. 160 paper) Part encyclopedia and part who's who, this volume continues the tradition of Kentucky's local directories that give short biographies of the prominent citizens of a county. This volume contains entries [End Page 147] covering a range of individuals from politicians and church leaders to restaurant owners and football stars, and it will be a useful resource for genealogists and local historians. Patriotic Envelopes of the Civil War: The Iconography of Union and Confederate Covers. By Steven R. Boyd. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010. Pp. x, 132. $36.95 cloth) This book does double duty as an analysis of the themes and messages conveyed by both Union and Confederate letter-writers during the Civil War and as a valuable visual guide to the envelopes themselves. Accompanying Boyd's text are twenty-three pages with full-color images of the envelopes discussed. Taken as a whole, this should prompt lively discussion about the political culture of the war both in and outside the classroom. Refugitta of Richmond: The Wartime Recollections, Grave and Gay, of Constance Cary Harrison. Edited by Nathaniel Cheairs Hughes Jr. and S. Kittrell Rushing. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2011. Pp. xviii, 251. $46.00 cloth) Hughes and Rushing's edited and annotated edition of the Civil War memoirs of this Virginia resident will likely find a home with readers familiar with Mary Chesnut's more famous diary/memoir. Like so many Confederate memoirs published recently, this will prove valuable for understanding as much about the postwar process of remembering and forgetting as it will wartime life in the rebel capital, thus making it doubly valuable. The Dark Days of Abraham Lincoln's Widow: As Revealed by Her Own Letters. By Myra Helmer Pritchard, edited by Jason Emerson. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2011. Pp. xviii, 186. $19.95 cloth) In his The Madness of Mary Lincoln (2007), Emerson drew on much of the evidence he has compiled, edited, and annotated in this volume. This companion to that monograph contains both the [End Page 148] voice of Mary herself as well as an account of the (largely successful) contemporary efforts to silence her. Those wishing to retrace Emerson's detective work will find this illuminating. The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, vol. 16: Sports & Recreation. Edited by Harvey H. Jackson III. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. Pp. xx, 383. $45.00 cloth; $22.95 paper) From debutante balls to NASCAR, this volume covers the diversity of recreation and sport in the South. That diversity, indeed, is the central theme running through the entries, as it encompasses the leisure activities of the many racial, ethnic, and cultural groups that make up (and have made up) this region most commonly remembered for its homogeneity. [End Page 149] Copyright © 2011 Kentucky Historical Society

Animated Recollection and Spectatorial Experience in Waltz with Bashir

This article explores the ways in which Waltz with Bashir (2008), Ari Folman’s animated war memoir, combines a commentary on memory with a moral stance on war. The authors argue that the film exemplifies the capacity of animated documentaries not only to show what is otherwise difficult or impossible to represent in non-animated documentaries, but to serve as a vehicle for fostering new relationships between the viewer and the documentary text. In this vein, the authors argue that Waltz with Bashir synthetically produces a rich, consistent, and thus trustworthy sense of reality for its viewers not despite but because of its unique aesthetic choices – its innovative animation techniques and mixing of reality with fantasy. Accordingly, the authors weave together analyses of the film’s content and form with accounts of their reception, discuss how the film evokes certain somatic responses with individuals, and consider the political significance these responses may engender.

Dark Nightmare: The Shooting of William Alexander as Canon Scott Saw it

Frederick G. Scott's World War I war memoir, The Great War As I Saw It, contains the sole unofficial eyewitness recording of a court martial execution that we possess. The case of William Alexander 20726, executed in October 1917, for desertion in the face of the enemy compelled Scott to devote more printed space to it than to the death of his own son, Henry. A discussion based upon a close reading of Scott's memoir and an exposition from archival sources of Alexander's case demonstrates the ways in which Scott evades the case's disturbing implications echoes wider aspects of Canada's early memorialization of the Great War.

Campaigning with Uncle Billy, The Civil War Memoirs of Sgt. Lyman S. Widney, 34th Illinois Volunteer Infantry

Campaigning with Uncle Billy, The Civil War Memoirs of Sgt. Lyman S. Widney, 34th Illinois Volunteer Infantry

A Michigan Polar Bear Confronts the Bolsheviks: A War Memoir , ed. Gordon L. Olson. by Godfrey J. Anderson (review)

A Michigan Polar Bear Confronts the Bolsheviks: A War Memoir , ed. Gordon L. Olson. by Godfrey J. Anderson (review)

Fearless Confessions: A Writer's Guide to Memoir (review)

Reviewed by: Fearless Confessions: A Writer's Guide to Memoir Gaynell Gavin (bio) Sue William Silverman . Fearless Confessions: A Writer's Guide to Memoir. University of Georgia Press. In her most recent book, Fearless Confessions: A Writer's Guide to Memoir, Sue William Silverman shifts her focus from crafting memoir to instructing other authors on writing memoir. Silverman, known primarily for two memoirs, Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You (University of Georgia Press) and Lovesick: One Woman's Journey through Sexual Addiction (Norton), is also an essayist and a poet (Hieroglyphics in Neon, Orchises Press). As in her previous books, Fearless Confessions demonstrates the range of Silverman's voice, which is conversational and engaging throughout, never lapsing into the dry instruction-manual voice that could have endangered this book. Interwoven inseparably from her observations about how to write memoir is Silverman's articulate and spirited defense of the genre's literary legitimacy, proposing that, in some instances, a first step to writing in this genre is to recognize it as a genre. Silverman prefaces her book with the observation that memoir, especially when written by women, is often belittled as "confessional." Positing that the "slice of a life" presented in a memoir is not merely recollection but is also interpretive in nature, she develops this premise with step-by-step illustrations. [End Page 164] Fearless Confessions provides a guide not only to students, emerging writers, and faculty members who teach memoir writing but also to more established writers interested in exploring the genre. Writers will find lessons and examples that they can use, from the first words of their stories—Silverman's "first bite"—and onward. She demonstrates use of sensory imagery "in unexpected ways," crafted "to create mood and emotion." The result is individualized revelation rather than generic statement of one's story. While use of sensory detail or discovering and developing theme in one's writing will hardly be new concepts for more experienced writers, Silverman deepens these concepts explicitly, demonstrating, for example, use of image to mirror the writer's interior life. In addition to explication, she offers examples from her own and other writers' works. Further, she includes numerous writing exercises. Through explication, example, and writing exercises, Silverman presents use of plot (discovered, rather than invented, in memoir), theme, metaphor, dialogue, and voice. Her discussion of voice is particularly artful regarding the skillful intertwining of a voice narrating events, which, borrowing from Blake, Silverman terms the "Voice of Innocence" and a more mature, reflective, interpretive voice (her "Voice of Experience"). Silverman's focus on crafting voice will prove invaluable to both new and experienced writers. In "Confessional and (Finally) Proud of It," the final chapter, Fearless Confessions returns to its introductory focus on validation of memoir as a genre, developed in greater depth here. Exploration of the genre's history, including examination of some of the harshest criticism directed at it, strengthens this validation. Acknowledging existence of badly written memoirs, Silverman nonetheless demonstrates the better critical reception of memoirs written by men, particularly the war memoir. Agreeing that "men writing of war deserve to be heard," she asks, "But aren't children who are raped and hurt by parents, or wives beaten by husbands, also injured, also held captive, also tortured? Aren't their stories equally important?" Other writers' voices join Silverman's to strengthen validation of this genre, beginning with Patricia Hampl's: "To write one's life is to live it twice, and the second living is both spiritual and historical." In this spirit, Silverman considers writing memoir analogous to rebirth. The book's appendices include her excellent essay, "The Meandering River: An Overview of the Subgenres of Creative Nonfiction," and selections of compelling essays, "both spiritual and historical," by varied writers. Distinguishing writing memoir, an art form, from therapy, Silverman proposes that "the purpose of therapy is to advance our recovery, while writing artfully for an audience requires that we make sense of our lives in a way that speaks to others." Hers is a book for writers seeking to convey interpretive, narrative recollection of lived experience in their work. Silverman quotes Vivian Gornick's observation that writing memoir is going...

‘Over by Christmas’: British popular opinion and the short war in 1914

That the British public thought that the First World War would be ‘over by Christmas’ in 1914 is such a common feature of war fiction, memoirs and histories that it has scarcely been questioned, let alone seriously examined. The phrase has become shorthand for naivety among a generation of young men who are supposed to have rushed to join the army rather than missing all the ‘fun’, the politicians and generals who sent them to the front and the journalists who cheered them on. This article investigates how common it really was and attempts to place it in the wide context of public reactions to the war, using newspapers, letters and diaries to uncover the feelings of the time rather than post-hoc reflections. As with former givens of 1914, such as ‘war enthusiasm’, what emerges is a more complex picture than simple naïve faith in the imminent success of British and Allied arms. Treating predictions of peace as part of a coping strategy for soldiers and civilians at war, we should not be surprised to find predictions of peace by various specific dates, and particularly by Christmas, throughout the Great War and beyond. This article questions the ubiquity of the idea of the war ending before Christmas in 1914 and the singularity of that year for optimistic predictions.

Exaggerating the Efficacy of Diplomacy: The Marquis of Lansdowne's ‘Peace Letter’ of November 1917

Few historians would disagree that the fifth marquis of Lansdowne's greatest achievement was the Anglo-French entente of 1904. As with the ‘Peace Letter’ of November 1917, however, in which Lansdow...

The Return of Mata Hari: A Woman Redeemed (Sinclair Hill, 1927)

Frederick Britten Austin explicitly referred to reports of Mata Hari's execution in his June 1924 Strand magazine short story, ‘The Fining Pot is for Silver,’ adapted by Mary Murillo and directed by Sinclair Hill for Stoll's 1927 release, A Woman Redeemed. Both scenarios feature a dark, heartless woman, Marta Rugini, a trusted member of an organisation of foreign agents intent on power and destruction. In the following article, I shall examine the film's selective re-working of the legend for a contemporary audience and contextualise its themes with reference back to memories and memoirs of the First World War (more or less fictionalised) and forwards to fears that the Treaty of Versailles would not for long guarantee peace in Europe. In addition to the film's reliance on literary and historical sources for its plot, I am concerned here with settings, costuming and locations as indicators of the character whom the 1917 prosecution lawyer dubbed ‘perhaps the greatest woman spy of the century.' The day after Mata Hari's death, the Paris correspondent for the Daily Express announced her the ‘World's most sinister adventuress,’ adding that the story of her career ‘outrivals any novel in point of dramatic interest and romance.’

"Everything is Fair in War": The Civil War Memoir of George A. "Lightning" Ellsworth, Telegraph Operator for John Hunt Morgan

"Everything is Fair in War": The Civil War Memoir of George A. "Lightning" Ellsworth, Telegraph Operator for John Hunt Morgan

A Dirty, Indolent, Priest-Ridden City: British Soldiers in Lisbon during the Peninsular War, 1808-1813

Between 1808 and 1813 Lisbon was the gateway for British soldiers entering the Peninsular War. For many British soldiers the Iberian Peninsula was not only their first combat experience but also their first time abroad, with their military service as part of a broader experience of travel and cross-cultural contact. British letters, diaries and memoirs of the Peninsular War have long been used by historians as the basis for military and campaign histories; rarely have they been appreciated as travel and ethnographic accounts, allowing us to explore how British soldiers described, experienced and understood the foreign physical and cultural environments of Portugal and Spain. This article investigates British soldiers' attitudes to Lisbon and its inhabitants. Their writings illuminate the relationship between war, travel and identity; British views on Portugal and the Iberian Peninsula more generally; and the mentalities and cultural values of a broad cohort of young Britons in the early nineteenth century. Most soldiers wrote largely critical and hostile accounts of their time in Lisbon, identifying markers of cultural difference and in so doing revealing their own notions of what it meant to British and civilized.

Little to Eat and Thin Mud to Drink: Letters, Diaries, and Memoirs from the Red River Campaigns, 1863–1864 , and: Confederate Guerrilla: The Civil War Memoir of Joseph Bailey (review)

Little to Eat and Thin Mud to Drink: Letters, Diaries, and Memoirs from the Red River Campaigns, 1863–1864 , and: Confederate Guerrilla: The Civil War Memoir of Joseph Bailey (review)

The War Memoirs: Some origins of the thought of W. R. Bion

The work of W. R. Bion changed the shape of psychoanalytic theory in fundamental ways, one of the most important of which was Bion’s insight into the nature of normal projective identification. No other psychoanalytic theorist has Bion’s ability to represent the horrors of psychic abandonment and the converse, the absolute necessity of the presence of another mind for psychic survival. Through a discussion of Bion’s War Memoirs 1917–1919 (Bion, 1997), Attacks on linking and A theory of thinking (1993), this paper explores the link between war, masculinity, the maternal and Bion’s sensitivity to the significance of everyday interpersonal contact. It is argued that Bion’s apocalyptic experiences as a teenage tank commander gave him shattering insight into the extent to which mind is inter‐mind, self is inter‐self. Bion’s life writing has the quality of survivor insight: ‘And only I am escaped alone to tell thee’ (Job 1: 14–19), as he returns repeatedly to the events of the day when he ‘died ’, 8 August 1918. His insight into the elemental passions nature of love, hate and mindlessness are borne of his experiences on the battlefield, and exquisitely crystallized in his repeated explorations of an encounter with a dying soldier.

American Soldiers' Lives: The Civil War (review)

Reviewed by: American Soldiers' Lives: The Civil War Thomas W. Cutrer American Soldiers' Lives: The Civil War. By Paul A. Cimbala. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2008. ISBN 978-0313-33182-4. Maps. Photographs. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. xxi, 264. $65.00. With Bell I. Wiley's classics The Life of Johnny Reb and The Life of Billy Yank, James I. Robertson's Soldiers Blue and Gray, Reid Mitchell's Civil War Soldiers, James McPherson's For Cause and Comrades, Gerald F. Linderman's Embattled Courage, and a half a dozen similar books already on every Civil War scholar's [End Page 274] bookshelf, another treatment of the life of the common soldier in America's Civil War would seem to be superfluous. Why must anyone again ask the questions, "Who were these men?" and "Why did they fight?" In his Preface to Soldiers Blue and Gray, James I. Robertson answers, "This is a work that could be written a dozen different times without repetition." In common with his predecessors who have sought to write the collective biography of the officers and men of the Union and Confederate armies, Paul A. Cimbala, a professor of history at Fordham University and author of several fine books on Civil War America, follows the familiar formula of presenting chapters on why men volunteered, the training they underwent, camp life, combat and its aftermath, the transition to peace, and how the war lived on in the memories of its survivors. And like his predecessors, Cimbala has endeavored "to allow these extraordinary individuals to tell their stories in their own words." Nevertheless, although his volume in the "American Soldiers' Lives" subset of Greenwood Press's "Daily Life through History" series does, indeed, cover much of the ground broken by those scholars who went before, his book is not entirely derivative or redundant. The reason is the extraordinary volume and richness of the primary literature of the Civil War. With scores of new journals, letters, and memoirs being published every year, this subject is constantly being refreshed if not reinterpreted. Cimbala's contribution to this genre is the result of a remarkable amount of fresh research, largely from primary materials unavailable to scholars only five years ago. Robertson estimated in 1988 that two Civil War memoirs were being published weekly. Since then, the pace has only quickened. A scan of Cimbala's bibliography shows that of the more than three-hundred published volumes of correspondence, diaries, and memoirs that the author has cited, fewer than thirty were published before the Centennial. Overwhelmingly published since 1990 and in a large majority since 2000, these are books to which Wiley and his immediate followers had no access. This bibliography, although extensive, is far from exhaustive. As Cimbala writes, it "only hints at the firsthand accounts available" to those who would better understand the participants in America's Iliad, and at that he has chosen to consult no collections of less than book-length, ignoring those abundant and often rich letter collections published in journals, and, unlike Wiley, he has eschewed manuscript sources altogether. So although the outlines of this book are as familiar as any oft repeated tale, the details are as fresh and vivid as when Wiley published Johnny Reb in 1943. Cimbala has a deft eye for the apposite quotation and a fluid writing style that makes this book both a gateway to the subject for readers new to Civil War studies and at the same time worth the while of the most knowledgeable specialist in the field. [End Page 275] Thomas W. Cutrer Arizona State University Tempe, Arizona Copyright © 2009 The Society for Military History

The Case of Tony Hillerman: An Interview

This interview with Tony Hillerman took place in December 1990, in our old home in Albuquerque. It was the first time we met. After that I often visited him in his beautiful new home in North Valley. We became friends. I taught his work at the University of Florence, supervised graduation theses on his novels and their critical reception, reviewed his translations into Italian, and wrote and lectured on his role in the development of American mystery writing. We often talked of having him and his wife, Marie, come visit us in Florence a plan that regretfully never materialized. The last time I saw him, on November 30, 2007, we discussed the possibility of my translating his memoirs of World War II into Italian. In the course of later phone calls, he sadly admitted that, due to his failing health, he was having increasing difficulties in working on this as well as other projects. I will always bitterly regret that, for some stupid reason, on October 25, 2008, 1 postponed calling him until the next day. For the next day Tony was no more. This interview the first of many conversations we had in almost two decades of friendship has never appeared in English. I offer it in its original form and in its entirety, as a belated adieu to an extraordinary storyteller and a marvelous man.

The Embattled Self: French Soldiers’ Testimony of the Great War (review)

Reviewed by: The Embattled Self: French Soldiers’ Testimony of the Great War Eugenia C. Kiesling The Embattled Self: French Soldiers’ Testimony of the Great War. By Leonard V. Smith. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2007. ISBN 978-0-8014-4523-1. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. xi, 214. $39.95. Leonard Smith reassuringly concludes his excellent little study of French soldiers’ Great War writings by declining to propose a replacement “metanarrative” for a discarded one of tragedy and victimization (p. 202). He assures the reader that French war memoirs [End Page 967] and novels were not uniform products of machine-age war but individual voices describing a range of experiences and expressing conflicting moral attitudes. In other words, we can use war literature to learn what Great War soldiers did and how they thought about it—and we can do so without grappling with “metanarrative.” Smith’s study focuses on four themes in French war literature: rites of passage (mobilization, combat, and reintegration into civil society); “mastery” of war’s defining experiences (death, mutilation, killing); soldiers’ “consent” as an explanation for their continued participation in the four years of slaughter; and novels as the preferred medium for bringing closure to wartime trauma. Smith’s chapter on rites of passage begins with predictable themes. Mobilization brings both separation from civilian society and certification of manhood. The initiation to war is frightening, painful, and sometimes even mutilating, but it makes boys into men and men into warriors. Survival, moreover, is its own triumph. While the themes are predictable, such is the enormity of the Great War that actual rites of passage do not fall into conventional patterns. Each of the examples Smith describes seems particular to an individual rather than representative of any universal experience. Indeed, twice he notes that wartime rites of passage shifted the focus from group to individual (pp. 35–36), that “liminality brought individuality back to center stage” (p. 42). Thus, these are not true rites of passages which, as Smith notes “were collective…and their meanings were understood in advance by both the initiates and the broader society” (p. 60). Just as the rites of passage were ambiguous, the fighting itself was too awful and overwhelming to allow the development of a uniform narrative. Indeed, Smith argues, “in creating themselves through stories of death, mutilation, and killing, narrators and narratives produced not mastery but a fascinating textual world of contradictions, ambiguities, and peculiarities” (p. 62). The result of these “endlessly inventive attempts” is a fascinating puzzle for the historian (p. 62). Particularly interesting is Smith’s observation that Great War memoirs are remarkably silent on the matter of killing (p. 90). The fact of such reticence is clearly important in its own right, but it does not encourage those of us hoping to find in the war literature a better understanding of how the soldiers fought. Smith’s study of “consent” continues his long-term project of replacing the soldier as victim with the soldier as a conscious member of the political community of the Third Republic. The poilu’s commitment to the cause reflected “a powerful combination of republican logic and nationalist affect” (p. 125). One cannot help but be moved by Smith’s description of the pride evinced by the survivors of one unit at a decoration ceremony at Verdun in June 1916. The last chapter suggests how the novels of the interwar period closed out the war in such a way as to silence the many conflicting voices of the wartime literature. Sadly for our understanding, the war had been reduced to a tragedy suffered by its participants mostly in silence. This is not an easy book, but no one should be put off by Smith’s language of témoignage and “temporality.” Lucid prose renders complex arguments accessible and the text a genuine pleasure to read. That one finishes it with questions merely acknowledges the inherent intractability of the Great War. Thanks to Smith’s Embattled Self we may, however, tackle that conflict with a greater confidence in our sources. [End Page 968] Eugenia C. Kiesling United States Military Academy West Point, New York Copyright © 2008 The Society for Military History

Confederate Guerrilla: The Civil War Memoir of Joseph Bailey (review)

2??8Book Reviewsg7 housed the less affluent residents of the city, many of whom were African American , at first slaves, then servants after the Civil War, and later blue collar workers. The author uses a wide range of primary sources including Sanborn insurance maps, city directories, and personal interviews to ferret out the fragments of information on alley dwellers that can be found in the historical record. The historical narrative is spiced with firsdiand accounts and brief stories about individual alley dwellers taken from personal interviews, period newspapers, and court records. The book also includes information on how to use Sanborn insurance maps and historic "bird's eye views" of cities to research historic buildings and cityscapes, which is particularly useful. Beasley's book seems primarily aimed at readers who live in or otherwise have a close connection widi the city of Galveston. While the book covers its subject very thoroughly, Beasley's story of die Galveston alleys could have been more meaningful. The research is impeccable, but more social history and fewer details of alley planning and physical conditions would have made the book more interesting . If die author had included more background on alley life in die United States in general during die periods covered, the specifics about alley life in Galveston would have had more significance for the reader. In addition, the more fascinating social realities of alley life such as prostitution, labor strikes, and crime are only touched upon and could have been developed further. The issues surrounding race, poverty, and segregation are of the most interest , but are not elaborated upon. The addition of more context about the status ofand discrimination against African Americans during slavery, the Civil War, and Jim Crow—the eras which the book focuses on—would have created more relevance . The book presents very detailed information about Galveston alleys and the people who inhabited them, but that information exists mosdy in a vacuum. The Alleys and Back Buildings of Galveston provides a detailed and thorough study for anyone interested in Galveston alley architecture and culture, and I recommend it for those who have a specific interest in historic Galveston. The illustrations are excellent. The book also provides good examples of methods of using primary historical documents to research historic structures. Texas Stale University-San MarcosPeter Dedek Confederate Guerrilla: The Civil War Memoir ofJoseph Bailey. Edited by T. Lindsay Baker. (Fayetteville: University ofArkansas Press, 2007. Pp. 168. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN 9781557288387. $ 29.95, cloth.) One of the most fascinating aspects of the War Between the States is the guerrilla fighting that occurred throughout the Confederacy and the Border States. The level of barbarism in which both sides freely indulged is amazing, especially since the guerrilla fighters were often close neighbors to one another. Accounts of this fighting are part of the narrative that Joseph Marion Bailey— captain in the Sixteenth Arkansas Infantry, guerrilla fighter, and then as the war ended, lieutenant in the First Arkansas Consolidated Regiment—dictated late in g8Southwestern Historical QuarterlyJuly life while living in Texas. Bailey's narrative is deftly edited by T. Lindsay Baker, professor of history at Tarleton State University. Joseph Marion Bailey was born in Polk County, Tennessee, in 1841 and moved with his family to Carroll County, Arkansas at age twelve. When hostilities began in 1861, he joined a home guard unit, and later traveled widi the Joe Wright Guards to Missouri. After joining the Sixteenth Arkansas, Bailey participated in the Batdes of Wilson Creek, Pea Ridge, Farmington, Iuka, and Corinth, Mississippi, and die siege on Port Hudson in Louisiana. When the Confederates surrendered at Port Hudson, Bailey expected as an officer to endure imprisonment in a Federal prisoner-of-war camp, but he and a comrade elected instead to escape back into Arkansas. From September 1 863 through October 1 864, he served as a guerrilla fighter in northwest Arkansas and southwest Missouri. His guerrilla service forms the core of his narrative and is die most thrilling part to read. It was during his guerrilla period that Bailey wed Mary Matilda Baines, but it was also the period when the Federal presence in his home county intensified; therefore, shortly after his marriage...

Introduction

Introduction Melvin I. Urofsky Beforetalking aboutthis issue, letme con­ gratulate Elizabeth Brand Monroe, who was awarded the 2008 Hughes-Gossett Award for the best article in the Journal in the preced­ ing year. Professor Monroe’s “The Influence ofthe Dartmouth College Case on the Ameri­ can Law ofEducational Charities” appeared in early 2007 (vol. 32, no. 1), and the judges be­ lieved its importance lay in shedding light on how a case normally associated with contract law actually had great impact in other areas as well. This issue, like many of its predecessors, covers a wide area of Supreme Court history. Some ofthe material will be familiar to many of our readers, while other material will intro­ duce them to relatively new ideas about the Court’s history. While we all know that the Court consisted solely of white men until the appointment ofThurgoodMarshallby Lyn­ don Johnson and of Sandra Day O’Connor by Ronald Reagan, Todd Peppers reminds us that during the first several decades that the Court employed clerks, nearly all ofthem were white males as well. William O. Douglas hired the first woman clerk, Lucille Lomen (OT 1944) and did so reluctantly: During World War II, the men joined the armed forces, so Douglas hadto take eitherMs. Lomen or no one. Butthe first African-American clerk, William Cole­ man, was welcomed by Felix Frankfurter, and went on after his year with the Court to have a distinguished career as a lawyer. One of the joys of editing the Journal is that not only can I badger my friends into writ­ ing for it, but also, when I come across some­ thingunexpected, we can move quicklyand get it for our readers. I was down in Louisville do­ ing research when one ofthe law librarians told me about some relatively unknown materials in the John Marshall Harlan Papers there. We talked about them for a while, and last year we published Harlan’s Civil War memoirs, edited by Peter Scott Campbell. In this issue, Peter has edited another of Harlan’s reminiscences, which seemed to have been written late in his life at the request ofhis children. Edward Carter, ofBrighamYoungUniver­ sity, and his collaborator James Phillips pro­ vide us with some new research on the for­ mative years of George Sutherland, one ofthe most important Justices of the early twentieth v vi JOURNAL OF SUPREME COURT HISTORY century, who grew up as a non-Mormon in Utah. Galen Thorp’s piece focuses on William Wirt, a man who, although he is relatively un­ known today, argued literally dozens of cases before the Supreme Court as Attorney General as well as in private practice, including the Burr treason trial, Gibbons v. Ogden (1824), and CherokeeNation v. Georgia (1831). Thorp wrote this exhaustive study while a student of Professor Richard J. Lazarus at Georgetown University Law Center. With younger histori­ ans turning out such good work, the profession can look to the future with optimism. Bruce Altschuler takes a new look at a classic case, Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer (1952), the famous Steel Seizure Case. This decision is often cited as evidence that thejudiciary—“the least dangerous branch”— can, when necessary, rein in the efforts of a President to overreach his constitutional au­ thority. In his article, Altschuler asks whether, after more than a half-century, the case still retains the vitality attributed to it. Normally we do not publish the type of long articles that frequently appear in law re­ views. But when Theodore Vestal sent us his piece on how the Warren Court got caught up in Cold War diplomacy, we knew we should have it, and with Vestal’s agreement, we de­ cided to run it in two issues. Part One appears here, and Part Two will appear in the first issue of 2009. This is not a side ofthe Court that is often seen, but a great deal of recent scholar­ ship points to the influence that the Cold War had on the Warren Court in the 1950s and early 1960s. As always, enjoy! ...