Secrets of a Cemetery, Part V: A Brother's War

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Secrets of a Cemetery, Part V: A Brother's War

The Civil War is often called a war of brother against brother.  Imagery of American fighting American and family fighting family during the war arouse sentiment of sadness and horror at the thought of families ripped apart by war.  While there are instances of family members fighting on opposite sides of the conflict, more often family members were fighting side-by-side for the same army.  Recruitment within towns and counties meant brothers, fathers, sons, uncles, cousins, and close friends often ended up in the same regiments, or fought in different units at the same time.  As a consequence, many families faced multiple tragedies during the war. 

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Secrets of a Cemetery, Part IV: The United States Colored Troops

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Secrets of a Cemetery, Part IV: The United States Colored Troops

For five men buried in the National Cemetery, the Civil War was the opportunity for a completely new future.  African-American men were not allowed to enlist until the second half of the war (black troops would see their first action in Virginia at Spotsylvania in 1864) but by the end of the war there were 166 black regiments in US service consisting of 180,000 troops.  For these Colored Troops and the rest of the enslaved population, the Civil War was the road to emancipation. 

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Secrets of a Cemetery, Part III: Beyond the Field of Battle

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Secrets of a Cemetery, Part III: Beyond the Field of Battle

When one thinks of battle casualties, combat deaths come first to mind.  Many more men were wounded than killed instantly; those that did not die within a short time on the battlefield were carried to field hospitals where overworked, undertrained, and undersupplied doctors tried to keep up with the stream of men coming off the field. 

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Secrets of a Cemetery, Part II: The Toll of Battle

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Secrets of a Cemetery, Part II: The Toll of Battle

Battle and violence are essential elements of war, and as a result many men become casualties.  These deaths were often sudden, gruesome, and disturbing and many occurred with little note taken of them.  Each grave in the cemetery obviously represents a death, and each deserves attention.  However, there are a few extraordinary stories that demonstrate both the courage of soldiers and the horrible nature of war.

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Bloody Field, Peaceful Field

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Bloody Field, Peaceful Field

Walk the field at Spotsylvania's Bloody Angle and you are struck by the peaceful beauty of the area.  Today, not a shadow of the violence, pain, and intensity remains on the fields where so many fell almost 150 years ago. But should battlefields be a place of peace?  Should fields which once soaked up the blood of countless men become beautiful, or does such a transformation detract from telling the story of their sacrifice and suffering? 

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Roundtable: Most Influential Books

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Roundtable: Most Influential Books

It's been a quiet week at the blog, as spring break and the recent National Council on Public History's annual conference in Baltimore have taken our time. Still, we've found the time to put together our third roundtable question, where we ask our authors:

What Civil War book has most influenced you? Why?

Our answers vary from the personal to the professional, but we hope the offer insight into the works that have shaped us as scholars, storytellers, and historians.

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"A Very Spicy Little Sheet": The Knapsack, A Soldiers' Newspaper and the Politics of War

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"A Very Spicy Little Sheet": <i>The Knapsack</i>, A Soldiers' Newspaper and the Politics of War

A Union officer once remarked, “Does not a newspaper follow a Yankee march everywhere?” In the fall of 1863, the soldiers of the Fifth West Virginia Infantry found themselves stationed at Gauley Bridge in their newly-minted home state. It proved to be a relatively peaceful posting and, apparently true to Yankee form, the men promptly set about establishing a regimental newspaper. Forming the rather grandly named Fifth Virginia Publishing Association, the Association soon began issuing copies of the four-page Knapsack every Thursday morning at five cents a copy. Although only published for a few months, the paper illuminates much about soldier life and the politics of war.

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"In Their Own Country:" The Curious Case of the 8th Virginia, Antietam, and Home

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"In Their Own Country:" The Curious Case of the 8th Virginia, Antietam, and Home

September 17th, 1862 would captivate the nation; indeed, the fighting along Antietam Creek in rural Maryland may have been the most important day of the American Civil War. Yet one regiment of the Union Army was instead focused on what was happening on a small river in western Virginia.

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The Changing Face of Reconstruction

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The Changing Face of Reconstruction

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.

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Presidents' Day Review-Remembering Lincoln

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Presidents' Day Review-Remembering Lincoln

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.

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

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

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.

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Prisoners Among the Pines: Texas' Camp Ford

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Prisoners Among the Pines: Texas' Camp Ford

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.

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

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

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?

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

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

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. 

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A Beginner's Guide to Researching Your Civil War Ancestor

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A Beginner's Guide to Researching Your Civil War Ancestor

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.

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Civil Discourse's One Year Anniversary!

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Civil Discourse's One Year Anniversary!

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.

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