February 22, 2016

The Changing Face of Reconstruction

February 22, 2016/ Kathleen Thompson

As we enter into the sesquicentennial of Reconstruction many historians are questioning how to re-interpret the period and present it to the public. From a lay perspective history is often seen as stagnant, made up of names, dates, and facts to be learned and recited. But in reality, the understanding of history shifts and changes as new evidence is uncovered or a new interpretation is adopted. In historian lingo this is called historiography, essentially the history of how history has been understood and presented in the past. In terms of Reconstruction, there has been a wide swing of scholarship in the last century.

February 15, 2016

Presidents' Day Review-Remembering Lincoln

February 15, 2016/ Civil Discourse

Today is President's Day, a day commemorating not only our first president George Washington, but also all subsequent American presidents, including Abraham Lincoln (who would've turned 207 this past Friday, February 12). Although busy schedules have prevented us from putting together a full Lincoln Week like last year, we did think it would be appropriate to share all our Lincoln-related posts again on this President's Day. It would do a disservice to Lincoln to make him a marble man, to allow the glow of his current position in America's civil pantheon to overshadow the very real, very human struggles he faced during the Civil War. This collection of posts should help shine light on Lincoln the leader and Lincoln in American public memory.

February 08, 2016

A (Macabre) Family Affair: The Weavers and the Gettysburg Dead

February 08, 2016/ Kathleen Thompson

In 1863, Samuel Weaver carefully exhumed thousands of Union bodies from Gettysburg battlefield for burial in the new National Cemetery. Several years later, his son would pick up his father's work to send Confederate burials south.

February 06, 2016

"Spirit Triumphant"

February 06, 2016/ Kathleen Thompson

The "Spirit Triumphant" hovers over a fallen Louisiana soldier...

February 01, 2016

Prisoners Among the Pines: Texas' Camp Ford

February 01, 2016/ Zac Cowsert

During the Civil War, hundreds of thousands of young men found themselves prisoners of war, their fates in the hands of the enemy. For those lucky enough, parole or exchange awaited. Yet most men faced the grim reality of harsh prison camps. Some Civil War prisons were so infamous their names are still notorious today: places like Andersonville, Elmira, Libby Prison, and Point Lookout. Yet perhaps their names perhaps overshadow the fact that over 150 prison camps existed during the war.

Tucked away among the piney woods of East Texas rests a small historic park in Tyler, Texas. The park's humble appearance today belies the magnitude of the place it commemorates. Camp Ford constituted the largest Confederate-run prisoner-of-war camp west of the Mississippi River, housing some 5,550 Union soldiers over the course of the war's final years.

January 25, 2016

Confederate Iconography, The Next Steps: On Shared Authority, Historical Stewardship, and the Role of the Public Historian

January 25, 2016/ Civil Discourse

As the debate over the purpose and future of Confederate monuments and iconography in public culture continues, discussions concerning the role of the public historian in these debates have similarly intensified. Central to these debates has been the question of the proper role of the public historian in community-based, emotionally and politically charged discussions about historical memory and contemporary society...it is hardly inappropriate or overstepping for public historians to make suggestions to communities as to what to do with their public memorial landscapes, nor is it at all intrusive and imposing to try to help communities learn about the educational value of their historic monuments and memorials or about the complexities of historical memory. Additionally, pointing out to communities who are in the midst of debates about the future of memorial landscapes all that is gained AND lost if such landscapes were to be destroyed or removed is hardly “historian-centric” or merely “historians doing historian things.” Is this not the very nature of our jobs as public historians?

January 21, 2016

What to do with Confederate Memory? The Confederate Symbols Plenary Session at the American Historical Association

January 21, 2016/ Kathleen Thompson

Many historians have put in their two cents about the recent debates over Confederate memory, including our authors at Civil Discourse. In response, the AHA added a plenary session on “The Confederacy, Its Symbols, and the Politics of Political Culture” chaired by David Blight.

January 18, 2016

Thoughts from the American Historical Association: Transforming the U.S. Survey

January 18, 2016/ Kathleen Thompson

The AHA Teaching Division sponsored a session on rethinking the U.S. survey in colleges. Here are a few of the thoughts, projects, and strategies that came out of the panel.

January 11, 2016

A Beginner's Guide to Researching Your Civil War Ancestor

January 11, 2016/ Zac Cowsert

For Americans, history is a personal matter. Whatever we do or don't learn in the classroom, read in books, see in films...Americans stillexperience and understand the past personally. I suspect many public historians are familiar with Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen’s work Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life. The product of a 1994 survey, their book helps confirm and quantify the very personal ways in which everyday Americans experience the past...namely via their families. People feel most connected to the past when gathering with the families, and their most frequent “past-related” activity is looking at photographs with family and friends. Americans place greater trust in family stories than in college professors, high school teachers, or nonfiction books (personal family accounts were second only to museums). And of course, many Americans explore history through their own genealogy. Nothing helps bring history to life more than a personal connection; a realization that your family, your ancestor, lived and participated in the events of another age.

January 04, 2016

Civil Discourse's One Year Anniversary!

January 04, 2016/ Zac Cowsert

Along with the usual celebration and excitement that accompanies the New Year, we at Civil Discourse enjoyed the added bonus of reaching the one-year mark on our little blogging venture! It is a great milestone, and it's worth taking a moment to look back and see both what we've accomplished and what we'd like to achieve in the coming year.

December 14, 2015

Reforming a Nation, Saving the Union: the Problem of “Fallen” Women in Antebellum U.S. Culture

December 14, 2015/ Becca Capobianco

The complicated role that women played in nineteenth-century American culture meant that the case of female crime was more complicated, and that despite the fact that many women were vocal and influential members of reform movements, their counterparts guilty of committing crimes were often left outside of the reformative process. Yet women played a unique role in the breakdown of the systems of control enforced prior to the Civil War, and consequently were responsible for challenging the normative barriers that endeavored to keep them on the margins of public life.

December 07, 2015

Reporting from the Southern Historical Association: The Boundaries of Reconstruction

December 07, 2015/ Kathleen Thompson

What are the boundaries of Reconstruction and how can historians redefine them? This was the subject of a roundtable session at the Southern featuring Stephen Hahn, Stacy L. Smith, Elliott West, and Heather C. Richardson as panelists. Historians usually define the period of Reconstruction as 1865-1877 where Americans rebuilt the country and racial relations after the Civil War and most equate the end of Reconstruction with the destruction of black civil rights in the south. These historians challenged the audience to rethink the meanings of Reconstruction.

November 30, 2015

Righteous or Riotous? The 2nd Ohio Cavalry and The Crisis

November 30, 2015/ Zac Cowsert

As the snow fell from a wintry sky on March 5, 1863, over a hundred men gathered on the fields of Camp Chase, outside Columbus, Ohio, ostensibly for the purposes of attending church. For a “church party,” however, they were oddly equipped, armed with “clubs, hatchets, and axes.” Once the men—soldiers of the 2nd Ohio Cavalry—had assembled at their “appointed rendezvous,” they formed up into a line and made their way onto Columbus. The soldiers had been planning this foray for some time, knowing that Sunday church offered them the perfect excuse to enter town and commence their mischief.

November 24, 2015

Reporting from the Southern Historical Association: Teaching Civil Rights

November 24, 2015/ Kathleen Thompson

The Southern hosted a very unique type of session this year. Participants went to Little Rock Central High School, famous for the Little Rock Nine, to hear a panel on how to teach civil rights. I think most of us expected a panel presentation and discussion on teaching civil rights in high school and college history classes, but instead we participated in a workshop and presentation led by students of Central High School’s Memory Project.

November 09, 2015

The Fall from Little Round Top: Gouverneur Warren and the 1863/1864 Virginia Campaigns

November 09, 2015/ Kathleen Thompson

In July 1863, Gouverneur K. Warren was considered the hero of Gettysburg for finding the crucial position on top of Little Round Top and directing troops to hold it minutes before the Confederate attack hit what would have been the unprotected flank of the Union army. Less than two years later, by the end of the war, Warren was humiliated by being relieved of command and spent much of the rest of his life trying to reclaim his good name. The Virginia campaigns of late 1863 and 1864 proved Warren’s downfall as his superiors began to question his ability to fight in the aggressive style adopted late in the war.

November 07, 2015

Brother versus Brother

November 07, 2015/ Kathleen Thompson

The Maryland Monument at Gettysburg honors men from the state who fought in both sides of the conflict..

November 02, 2015

Roundtable: What Civil War Topics Deserve Greater Attention?

November 02, 2015/ Civil Discourse

In our first-ever Roundtable this summer, we asked Civil Discourse's scholars what event most influenced the outcome of the Civil War. Our answers were wide-ranging, but they would have been familiar to many of our readers: the Emancipation Proclamation, the Battle of Antietam, the fall of Atlanta, and more. Today, we shift our attention to areas overlooked or left behind by scholars, asking our panel:

What Civil War topics deserve greater attention from historians and scholars?

October 26, 2015

The Reconstruction of Billy Mahone

October 26, 2015/ Zac Cowsert

The descriptions of him are priceless. “He looked the image of a bantam rooster or a gamecock,” recalled a veteran. Perhaps it was his odd dress: “He wore a large sombrero hat, without plume, cocked on one side, and decorated with a division badge; he had a hunting-shirt of gray…while he wore boots, his trousers cover them; those boots were as small as a woman’s.” Or perhaps he was just plain odd, “the sauciest-looking manikin imaginable” and “the oddest and daintiest little specimen.” His five-foot stature and frail 125 pound frame didn’t help.

William "Billy" Mahone was a genuine character, and his life was as unique as his stature. Although a rising star in the Army of Northern Virginia by the end of the war, his post-war political career in the darkness of Reconstruction and Redemption is perhaps his true shining moment. “Bantam” Billy Mahone revealed his character not only as a fighter on the battlefield, but as a progressive on the political stage.

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