Transcripts For CSPAN3 The Civil War Civil War Places 20240714

This is a panel on the book civil war places. We have a couple copies up here that people will be thumbing through. And were going to have something very unusual for me, were going to have a screen behind us. He is smiling because i dont do anything this venturesome. To have actual images of when i give a talk. This is something of a departure for me. Heres how the structure is going to work. Im going give very brief introductions for the four people who are sitting here at the table with me and ill do all of them at once. And then im going to go in the order in which these images are going to appear and have each of our Panel Members talk about why they decided to be part of this project. And why they selected the image that they selected. Theyll talk for a little while about the image and then well see where the conversation goes after that. Youll be able to have questions. Let me introduce everybody up here. Ill start with carol riordan, the professor of American History at penn state university. Carol and i taught together there for a long time. Shes the author of pictua ver important book on civil war memory, the military side of it. With a sword in one hand, the problem of military thought in the civil war north. And shes a coauthor with tom vossler of two books to the battles fields of gettysburg. Next down the line is edward airs, the tucker boat right professor of humanities at the university of richmond. Ed and i were long time colleagues at uva. He and i was there when i went. A delight to be there with ed. His most recent publication as you know is the thin light of freedom, the civil war and emancipation in the heart of america which won the 2018 lincoln prize. Want to make sure i have the order here. Next in line is the fred c professor of southern studies, Louisiana State university and the author again as you know from todays program most recently of the calculus of violence, how americans fought the civil war. The author or editor of six books. Among them, house of abraham. Lincoln and the todds, a family divided by war and a book of essays that had a Significant Impact on what goes in our world. Weirding the war, stories from the civil wars ragged edges. Now im supposed to deal with this. There is the dust jacket of the book. And im going to say right now because i am proud to do so that the all of the images in this book were taken by my son, will gallagher who is a photographer in austin, texas. It was a wonderful opportunity for will and me to spend a good deal of time together. It was grate joy to work on this book with him. I got that out of the way. Here were going to start. Ill start with steve berry. His essay leads off the book. And this is an image of the inside of the church on the battlefield. So steve, ill ask you the two questions that i said i was going to ask. Why you agree to be part of the project. Why did you select this place . Before you do that, i really almost forgot to tell you where this book came from. I need to do this and particularly because i want to give credit to jay matthew who is the coeditor of the book with me. Matt and i coedited a book called lens of war to which a number of senior historians contributed essays on one image taken during the war that really spoke to them for whatever reason. And carol contributed to that book. Ed couldnt. We asked him to. He had too many obligations. Erin did and steve did and i did. Matt and i talked about something we might do as a followup. Matt asked a group of our friends and other senior scholars if they think about one Place Associated with the civil war, very different place. Not a great battlefield. Not all of gettysburg, not a citien that durd the war but a particular place that they believed would allow them to talk about theyre relationship with the war, how we could look at the war. They could go anywhere they wanted with it. We wanted the essays which would run to ten pages to be as personal as they wanted them to be. You could come at it as a scholar or a much more personal level than that. But the idea was to find people who had a place that would make them want to take the time from very busy lives. These are mostly very senior people with a great many thing onz their plates or ask them to do something that is not going to make their Bank Accounts any better whatsoever. So theyre really doing it as a favor or because they think there is something really useful. We put together our list of contributors, not one person turned us down among our roster. This is really matts idea. He is the with unthat said we talked about var yuts thinious. How about getting people to focus on one place and thats what we did. And now thats what well talk about and steve apologize for being cumbersome. Not at all. I was delighted to get the invitation. I think the point that gary makes is one that came home quickly is how personal this would be. If youre an academic, oftentimes too often youre in the ivory tower or saying why something is important or needs to be important to everybody. And you dont get to confess why something is important to you. You dont get to return sort of to your headwaters of what made you want to be a historian in the first place. And this was an opportunity to do that. To return to what you care about personally. To write about it in the i voice. I love that idea. And when i thought about what i would choose, for some reason i thought about the fact that wars are fought outside but made inside. So theyre made in the u. S. Congress. Theyre made in kitchen tables and parlors. Theyre made in state legislatures. Thats where wars get made. They get fought outside. So i thought how weird would it be to do an interior . And almost immediately, i thought shil yoe church. It has a story. All of the battles of the civil war have their own story. Sometimes think theyre like, you know, like the Founding Fathers of the x men of the revolution. Each one has a different power. Right . From franklin and coats to yankee ingenuity. They have the personalities, actually, and the way they get in our story. Gettysburg is the great test. Shiloh is the loss of this innocence. The church was formed by a separate methodist congregation after the 1844. So it starts in 1851. They left a church named union to form this little pro slavery church. And then that church is in the middle of every aspect of the battle. So his body is this. They use it as a hospital and morgue and headquarters of both bodies and then destroyed. Mostly to take relics, people traveling to the shiloh battlefield. So church was all but destroyed into tooth picks. They rebuilt it. Its a good facsimile and erected it in 2001. And my favorite part of this process is actually working with will and asking him, you know, this is what is in my head. And i want this church to be a place where you dont know if everybodys left or if everybody is about to come in. If its sunup or sun down, if the lights come in the window, because the sunsetting or not, it would look like a place of possibility. Maybe we wouldnt make a war or maybe we would. The image that he just got it is such a beautiful picture. Its yale a fantastic process. It says four to six. Im four to six inches from this thing. One of the more rewarding things i did as an academic and waits a treat to be involved. Im next. Aaron, youre next up. Okay. I said yes because this sounded like a lot of fun to be honest. And not everything we do is just fun. Although generally it is like 99 fun. I think the i made an atlas many years ago. I worked on the valley of the shadow that ed talked about. I thought i knew enough about gis and blundered my way into saying well i can make the maps for this atlas that oxford published. And that took a lot more energy than i anticipated. Turns out im not a cartographer. Were trained as historians to write. And thats what we do. We read and write and know how words work and we understand chapters and those are the important parts. It has different grammar and structure to it. It took a long time to figure that out which is why im proud of the atlas, most are not frame on and put on your wall beautiful unlike this one which every photograph is really extraordinary. But ive been thinking about geography and about place and so this idea of not just the photographs that we all know from gardener and brady and the other people, which was lens of war, but to sort of commission something new that required that we think seriously about what things look like. Which we dont get. We dont get a lot of training in visual material. We had that great panel here on material culture. Anthropologists and other people get trained to do this. I think some of us learn our way into it about thinking what a picture does and how a picture works to convey information. And it interprets the thing its representing. Were much more natural with text. So i sort of took it as an interesting challenge. And so the picture and the essay that i wrote, this is a picture of vixburg looking back and south towards the city and roughly where a lot of the installations were. And the title asks, i dont know if the title is on there. I wanted something that would convey or get a reader into the arguments about hindsight and confederate defeat and inevitability and try to challenge those. I mean i think ed talked about this in the in his comments when he was talking about the likelihood of slavery going away in 1860. Right there. There was a period when historians presented pakt of a kind of teetering south or a south driven to anxiety at fear about the collapse of slavery. People felt quite confident of what they were doing and of the way they constructed their society and of what the future looked like. It is the place of defeat, right, the linchpin in the Union Success that the twin victories of gettysburg and vixburg and vixburg is the more important one for opening up the mississippi and also cutting off the transmississippi confederacy to the rest of the confederacy. I want to pull us back and stand where con fed rats stood and see what looks like a proposterousness of imagining a union that would mountain offense theyve could somehow conquer this place that they called the gibralter of the confederacy. So the picture, at least right now that is if you imagine this is a picture taken before july 4th, 1863. Might help us get into the mind of those people who led the confederacy who led the Southern States out of the union and into a new nation that they anticipated would survive and flourish when we know the end. But thats not what they knew. I think thats one of the great difficulties. Hindsight is a useful tool and a superpowerful drug. I tell my students, you have to dose yourself very carefully with that. The more you take, the more it is impossible to think youre way out of the possibilities and the potential of what history shows. And so i hope this picture sort of pulls us back from that a little bit. You can see that there is a real variety of the tickets from the intimate interior of steves which will use and use different cameras and different lenses. And we asked him to offer his thoughts on this project at the end of the book. I talked about the images and challenges and what he enjoyed and what was difficult. He used a drone to get this one. To get the perspective that aaron wanted here. So there is a very great range of kinds of images in this book. As well as a great diversity of places and we will move on to carols image here which is the third one. Ill hand you i when asked to be an part of this, it was easy to say yes because gary didnt give me a chance to say no. It was perfectly fine is what that comes down to. As gain to think about it, as soon as i came to penn state in 1991, i started doing programs down here at gettysburg. I started doing staff writes down here at gettysburg. I built my retirement home here in gettysburg. So to be really easy to pick my backyard as my favorite place and go from right there except he gave me one requirement. I couldnt pick gettysburg. Of course that represents a new challenge. If not my backyard, where . Steve elude earlier to what got us started. What is that foundational moment . How many in the audience are from the pittsburgh area . I saw a steelers shirt. So some have been through the soldiers and sailors memorial hall. Its in the oakland section of pittsburgh. Its on the outskirts of the university of pittsburgh. A very busy area. Lots of traffic except for this one large block where theres a lot of open green space and a lot of openness, a Little Island of silence in an otherwise busy place. The bus stop was in front of soldiers and sailors memorial hall. Youre waiting for the bus and looking up at this lawn and these large statues that are just beckoning you to come forward, i already had that little bit of a historical itch that i needed to scratch anyway. And i began to pester my grandmother to let me go in. One day she finally d she took me into soldiers and sailors memorial hall. What things were in there . All those kinds of things that just can get your mind moving in all kinds of different directions. There is the display of relics. And they were not big fancy relics. A piece of wood from shiloh. Piece of wood from culps hill. And, of course, hike a lot of places, a battle log from a lot of cannonballs in it. You could touch it and that was cool. Those are the things that got me intrigued and got me started. It is also something i walked away from after a while. Some of you know that my bachelors degree is in biology. The course i took to end up where i am today goes a lot of different ways. But one things that really intrigued me is on the walls around the exterior of the building, there is a north hall and east hall, west hall, but they would not name a south hall. It listed the Allegheny County recruits in various pennsylvania regiments. I knew i had an ancestor. And my grandmother helped me figure out he was in the cavalry. I couldnt wait to get back there and find my certainly connection to the civil war. My great, great grandfather. I had to find him. I went and saw the 14th pennsylvania cavalry and looked at the plaque. I looked at every name on it and found a name that had the right last name but the wrong first name. Years later once i ended up finding the thing called the official record of the civil war and then the baits history, the pennsylvania volunteers, i began to learn something about the thing called research. The people of Allegheny County voted to raise the fund to do it. Would we do Something Like that today i wonder . But they did. A visit there is what started all of this and brought me here today. I think i mentioned the other night that the problem with oral histories is that people remember things differently. I have absolutely no mem riff telling carol she could not write about gettysburg and i find it very difficult to imagine that i would tell carol she couldnt write about gettysburg because i know there are many places here that resonate. But ill defer to you and pretend i did tell you that because i have good manners. Im going to skip an image because i think that ed should go next. Were now in richmond with eds image. Thanks. I didnt really have to think twice. Nor were promises given or extracted. Garz qui mentioned, i missed out on lens of war. And so i felt specially eager to be a part of this book. Anything that gary zshgs he does right. I knew it would be firstrate. And so i thought i would try to live up to standard. I think it is strange image to have chosen. Everybody has the evocative stories. But i surprised myself by choosing. This i realize that everything ive ever thought about the past is the gap between the old and new. And as aaron was saying that the image we have before was the south and it is an Agrarian Society trapped in the past and static. But the south was the fourth richest economy in the world by itself. And was one reason they thought they could go it at their own was the emergence of richmond. This is the water wheel at the iron works which began all the way back in the 1830s as an image of coming off a canal that was imagined by george washington. It suggests that virginia and the south were not born old. They were not born backward looking. John smith discovered this on his way to china two weeks after he arrived in the chesapeake bay, made it up as far as richmond and said, well, well come back in 100 years. We have plantations to establish down near the chesapeake. And it just sat this all that time. The waterfalls were an impediment. They could see that Falling Water would be an advantage for building mills. But it took a long time for them to make their way back up the james to the falls. Then they imported workers if wales. Its a welsh name. Because there were not enough indigenous workers that knew how to take the first coal in america. And iron that was also in richmond. They didnt know that they couldnt create an Industrial Center in virginia. However it turns out that can you actually employ or buy enslaved people to do this work . Would that be something that south will be able to adapt itself to . It turns out that, yes, you could. But not alongside the immigrants who instead wanted to train their sons in the skills of iron puddling and making. You had strikes. Things we dont think about in the old south or labor strikes and unions and against slavery. It becomes the capital because of this machinery. So virginia goes from being kind of highly reticent, finding itself the target of the entire war because of this wheel. There is the case where we think of something is being old, the way we often think of the confederacy and slave south, its an artifact of the past that finds itself trapped in the booming 19th century. I like the wheel because it disrupted that image. It makes it harder for us to imagine its all cotton fields in the south and smokestacks in the north. The other reason i do this is ive been trying to take this old thing and make night something new. When i first came to richmond, they asked me to join the boards of the american con fedry racon. It made sense to everybody that we would consolidate those incredible strengths and make a knew seem that would really do justice to having been the center of the war from start to finish. And the center of the largest slave state. But as you can imagine, it was hard for people to give up, museum and confederacy is 100 years old begun with the memories of the confederacy trying to keep alive this memory. The American Civil War center devoted to telling the story of the war from the union and africanameric africanamerican perspectives. This water wheel stopped turning. They had to find way to get water from the dry canal. It is disconnected from the machinery underneath. Could we have the water wheel of memory turn again . Could we have things that were long grown rusted and covered with vines and overgrown with all kinds of weeds and neglect, could we turn it into a museum that would tell the story of the defining vent of our nation in a new way . Its a little eye ronnic that were using the beautiful black and white or gray scale photographs. At the museum, we decided the past was in color. It was not all fiddle music and bhu and gr blue and gray but the people of the past were as alive as we were. We had to find ways to make that museum talk. And some ways color is a part of all of that. So when i was invited to participate in this, i had been thinking about it. I was chairing this board for the last six years. And i noticed in the essay now, we break ground in 2017. And now we opened in 2019. Many days that i wasnt sure that could happen. Many days it seemed it was too hard to raise all the tens of millions of dollars and take this Old Industrial site. Think about this. Lets take a 19th Industrial Site and build a new building. What could be next to the james river . A cannonball larger than any cannon can fire. We had tobly in all kinds of allies to examine it, xray it, make sure it wasnt going to explode on us. Also we were going to be able to build a glass box around these buildings without knocking them down. Will we be able to get out of the james river flood plain . Can we put the priceless collection of largest collection of civil war artifacts into this new place in a responsible way . So when i agreed to do this i didnt know that the answer to that was yes. But i did know that we had the water wheel turning again. I did know that you could come see the way that 19th Century America had driven its power. We could see things in new ways. Thats what it means for me. And the fact that now you can come see not only the wheel turn but the doors open feels good to be able to share that. We were exactly on the same page. Carol and i were on exactly the same page. For eds, will took a number of shots with his drone that showed some of the iconic buildings. That could be related to some of the photographs taken right after the fall of richmond at the end of the war, the famous pictures. I never would have taken that image and will explained to me why he was a photographer and i wasnt when he took it. He said he thought that ed might appreciate having a different option than just what i considered the best pictures for this. My original thought in this book was not to pick something obvious. As somebody who grew up in the shadow of the mountains in Southern California over the line from northern new mexico, i thought it would be nice to have an image of the real west. What i would call the real west in the book. It went up after the war and in various ways become controversial. That is my idea originally. And then i was decided to defer. There is one person who was going to take part in this and then couldnt. I couldnt believe that tony is dead at age 60. Tony was going to do something in the far west. He was going to do the Union Monument where the texasgerman unionists were very badly treated. The first main heavy artillery suffered the highest number of men killed in any battlefield in the war. Its a wonderful monument that lists the names and has very serious reconciliation themes on the back. Its a great interpretive site where you can talk about this junk tour and then on the back is reconciliation of the message bringing people together. But in the end, matt and i talked about whether i had to do something relating to charlottesville because charlottesville was so much in the news because of the violence in charlottesville relating to the lee statue and to a lesser degree to the jackson statue in charlottesville. And so i decided to do something on the confederate memorial landscape in charlottesville. I would have a time stamp on it. I wanted to do something in a little broader strokes. And so i selected one of the five principle Confederate Monuments in charlottesville which include this one which is in the university cemetery. The first one that went up and went up in 1893. They are con fed rats that died when uva was converted into a hospital early in the war by the confederacy. The people that ran the university invited the confederate government to leave in 1862 and they moved the hospitals elsewhere. The reason the cemetery is there is because it had been a hospital in 61 and 62 mainly casualties if first bull run and from jacksons valley campaign. This is the earliest of the five monuments. There were also a pair of tablets on the rotunda which is since been removed. It listed the 500 graduates of the men that died in confederate service. There is a generic confederate Soldiers Monument downtown. And then there are the two equestrian statues which were at the center of so much of the debate. One of Stonewall Jackson which is a very fine equestrian statute and one that was going to be executed by the same artist who did grant in front of the national capital. He died before it could be finished and another person finished it. I chose this one because it was the earliest of them. And i used my essay to talk about how i used the memorial in charlottesville over the years as a professor the auva to talk about history and memory and how important it is to be able to disentangle these two if you come to grips with the past and how the past infected later generations. Theyre a wonderful tool to do. That the fact that theyre a wonderful tool for me complicates the whole level of whether they should be that indown. Ill say right now my idea is this is a local issue. If a local community examines it carefully, thinks about it carefully and decides to take them down, then they should come down. But for me, as someone who thinks and writes and teaches about the civil war, the loss of these memorial landscapes is the loss of a tool that i had found very useful over the years. And thats how i used my essay to get at how you shouldnt flatten out the memorial landscape. Even the confederate landscape and friend they all came about for the same reason and are brought about by the same people when charlottesville is a perfect example of how that isnt true. Three of them i would call confederate memorials where former con fed rats and women who were alife durive during th memorial associations played key roles in putting them up. The two ee equestrian statues came from the brain of a very wealthy individual who funded lots of things in charlottesville including two other statues at almost at the same time as lee and jackson. One to lewis and clark and one to George Rogers clark that were part of the City Beautiful Movement towards the end of the second deck afd the 20th century. I talk about when the lee statue went up in charlottesville, it was almost exactly the same time that the United States congress made arlington the robert e. Lee national memorial. And the same time that United States government put lee and jackson on a 50 cent piece. A real 50 cent piece, not a collector 50 cent piece. But a 50 cent piece, the reverse of which paid tribute to confederate soldiers. The lee statue gave me a chance to talk about this much Broader Movement in the United States. He gave the speech to the lae statue in dallas that dallas took down a few months ago. These are valuable teaching tools. Theyre complicated in my view. And thats why i tried to get at with this essay is to try to think about the memorial landscapes in ways that make them complicated. Its the past always is, if there is one thing that you think you understand about the past, i promise you if you learn more about it, its more complicated than you think it was. But we love hughes of bhak and white now. There are a lot more shades of gray in many of the questions. It ended up in charlottesville. I thought i had to. Not because that was my first inclination or even my second one. And will and i we took great pictures of the first heavy artillery in petersburg. I hated to let those go. We didnt get to the plaza in a santa fe yet. Look at the little monument there that gets at both the civil war and nativeamerican issues. Im watching carols watch because i dont have a time piece up here. I left my cell phone over there. I dont want to get up and go get it. Id rather just sit here. There is a range of the images, the places that people chose range from the extremely familiar and famous on one end of the scaly put the Lincoln Memorial in washington, d. C. , which judy wrote about and wrote very beautifully about how she jogs in washington, she jogs there early in the morning. Its great early in the morning. Its great in the middle of the morning and great in the afternoon. Its great at night. Thats the thing about the Lincoln Memorial, its always great. They just wrote a book and the mcclean house was on her mind. I wont mention all 25 of the sites, i promise you. Those are more on the famous end of things. But there are other place thats almost no one has been to or would think about. Wilson green selected camp allegheny. That is in the wilds of barely western virginia now. We had a hard time finding the place and then having a harder time get ago way from it the day that we found it. Jim morton wrote about the soldiers home in milwaukee, a grand old building. That is one of wills favorite things to photograph. Brenda stephenson wrote about it in hampton which is this grand old oak tree there. My son loves oak trees. He lives in austin. And will decided that emancipation oak was even more impressive than the spectacular live oaks in austin. They wrote about the National Cemetery on santa monica boulevard in los angeles, california. Not the first place you think of. If you were going to think about civil war. But there are 12,000 Union Veterans buried in the National Cemetery on santa monica boulevard. Several years into doing this her brother became interested in genealogy and found out that their great, great, great grandfather is buried in the cemetery off wilsher boulevard in los angeles. Thats part of what they wrote about in her essay. So there are a lot of different sites here. Its a book that lends itself to you dont are to start at the very beginning. Though you should. Steves essay leads off. Im going itself. Start at steves essay and ill say parenthetically, it doesnt matter. You can open the book to almost any place and range backward and forward. Its much like leands of war wa. Its a book you can sample and go in any direction that you like. This is i ai reconstructed chapel. Correct. Do you remember the battlefield before it was there . Yes, i do remember. If it had just been a reconstruction, i dont think it would have been as interesting a story. Its how it got deconstructed that i find so interesting, that everybody who visited that battlefield wanted to take a piece of it home and it didnt exist on the landscape anymore. Then, yes, i want back after 2001, when it had been erected and i sat in the church and its a very different feeling. When you go out on battlefields, youre trying to figure out where things happened and thats great but there was this weird quiet, right, when youre sitting in an interior in the middle of the battlefield and know that the battle was raging all around you but youre in this moment of contemplation. Grand photography had that kind of stillness, too. It focuses you. You sort of drop into this contemplative place when you look at a still photograph. And this captured that mood perfectly. How it felt for me to sit there and contemplate the enormity of what went on outside but was made inside. Thats the key insight i had during that process. I cant resist asking, if i hadnt been brutally restrictive with you and allowed you free reign of what you wanted to do, which place at gettysburg would you have selected and why . I dont know. He knew i had to say that. When you first gave me the opportunity to participate and i started thinking about gettysburg locations, a lot of my interest at the time depended on what i was drilling down deep on. When we were working on the gettysburg field guide, we all think we know everything there is to know about gettysburg. All of you think you know everything there is to know about gettysburg, except we dont. One of the things we struggle with here at the park a lot these days is to try to find ways to tell the story, and im sure ed has found the same issue with the museum. How to tell the story to a broader audience so that everybody feels that the gettysburg story is part of theirs. It came down to two soldiers. They would have taken me over to coppsville. The one is a private with a name you probably would not expect to hear here at gettysburg, an ttoo lopez, missing in action, presumed killed after the end of the battle here. Youre talking about underrepresented here at gettysburg, trying to take the story to include hispanic is kind of important, an important direction to go. And you dont have to stretch or try too hard. All you have to do is do what we do best. I didnt quite finish up my story about the importance of research. All of us up here and a lot of you out there are here because we love the research process. The importance of finding the story. Taking the story, finding the evidence for the story and also realizing when that story stops because the evidence trail runs out. Sometimes we just havent gone down the paths far enough to find out what the end of the story is. Finding Antonio Lopez was kind of an interesting story. The other side of the story takes me to the union side down to the second massachusetts. The second massachusetts was the first regiment to put its monument out on the battlefield down to the spring and i was going through the roster for some reason. I cant even vaguely remotely remember now. I found the First Sergeant of company e, who was wounded in the fight. And what i noticed about him was his place of birth. Capetown, south africa. Now, who would have guessed, really . Once you start down that path and you find out the locals like to say the world comes to gettysburg. Were beginning to say the world has already been here. We just have to go back and find them again. The place thats been focusing a lot of my attention to find those stories was culps hill. Im not sure. But if i hadnt done culps hill at gettysburg and hadnt had that place back home, the comments about finding that weird or unusual place is something i thought about, too. The place i would have gone next was Natural Bridge, florida. Natural bridge battlefield in florida. How many have you ever been to Natural Bridge battlefield in florida . Thats one guy and thats a lot for an audience to go there. When they count up the number of people who visited, breaks 100 once in a while. Its a state park down in florida near tallahassee and it has one big gettysburg connection. The Union Commander was the core commander here at gettysburg we always forget about, john newton. I would have gone back to tell that story if i hadnt done any of these other ones. Poor john newton doesnt get much love. We all know that. That would have been theres an essay in the book that does deal with culps hill and another person thats in the building, we could have up here with us. Thats Peter Carmichael up against the wall. Peter wrote about a very Small Confederate burial site on culps hill. Did you used to get at themes that you addressed in your recent soldiers book . Ive heard you do it. I know they cant hear you if you talk. Im just saying that youre welcome to come up and talk. My point was that culps hill is represented by Peter Carmichael, a very modest site that almost no one would go see. If peter wasnt with you, you wouldnt know what youre looking at when youre there. Thats right. And the longtime park historian showed me that spot ten years ago. He said he believed its a confederate burial trench behind the Confederate Monument on culps hill. And in ten years, that slight depression that scott showed me is almost completely gone, erased by erosion. The thing it reminded me of is my antinia, theres a moment where theres a trace, a writing trace. Looking at that trace, this person saw that world, that path that was gone. When i look at that burial trench, i let my imagination go. Thats the thing i loved about this project. Not only was it personal but i felt somewhat liberated, unfettered, to think about that place and also to talk about how i use that place as a teaching tool with my students and to discuss North Carolina soldier who lost his brother, charlie fudge, mortally wounded, not far from where that was. Great opportunity for me to let my imagination go free and how that place is so important to my teaching here. Thanks, peter. A number of the essays deal with these sites as teaching opportunities. A number of us do that. And many of the others dont. Erin, aaron, i thought of something but didnt ask you about it. Did your going to lsu im serious determine for to you pick the mississippi . A little bit. Theres great photographs of baton rouge which ive come to know much better. Wartime photographer andrew lidle who spent the war there, doing photographs of the region, of soldiers and of people. This had to be something new. I came to this more from a it was less personal. Occurred to me when i was having lunch as a temp worker and next weekend mcpherson square, trying to figure out how all of these places i had to walk past George Mcclellan and thats not the way when you start to lead about things. Did that take a lot of counseling . I wound up going uphill. Youre always late. Trendge by him. And prefer to go backward rather than forward . Retreated work every day. Mcclellan is golden for people such as we. He is an inexhaustibly bountiful source for asides that everyone gets. I wonder why. What occurs to me here as were talking, steves word focus, the pictures are static. And so seeing in them what people are talking about requires a tool that i try to remind my students is an essential part of what historians do. Most people dont understand, which is imagination. I mean, its sort of a dirty word for people to think that the only thing we do is like an archaeologist, dust off facts and line them up on the table and thats the thing. To see one of the things that came up and nearly every comment, with which was transformation right to the church, and steve kirshmans language for me when he talks about the logged wood. The house of the lord become the house of chloroform and amputation. Thats what wars do, brutally transform our landscape. Without seeing the time lapse video of it, which is one way to do it. In a sense forcing us to imagine. Thats why i like doing history, that ability to understand that kind of transformation, working off these images. And it seems as though thats one of the things that came up, taking the old and making it new again, which is what we do as historians. Thats what i enjoyed about this. You didnt grow up reading things like that either. You, in fact, began life as a fine and very influential historian of the late 19th and early 20th century south. You are a southerner. Did you have civil war sites you were aware of before . I mean as you were a young person growing up in east tennessee and traveling around, were there sites you were aware of and could have discussed in this book . No. Basically, i was clueless. You know, where i grew up was in kingsport. I know theres another kingsporter here. Are you here . Yes . Bristol and johnson city and near abbington and all of that. The warriors path goes right through it. We were really daniel boone and David Crockett schools were within ten miles. But not andrew johnson. Thats where i went to elementary school. Nobody knew who he was. But there was a lincoln school, a Jackson School and johnson school. So, no. Really, it seemed that the civil war i cant think of the nearest Civil War Monument or memorial in the tricities. Maybe people know of one, but i didnt. Excuse me . Cumberland gap, which is pretty far way. And a place that people dont immediately associate with the civil war, they associate it with other things, cumberland gap. Its letting people get on to other western areas. This is my excuse for not being interested in the civil war earlier. I didnt really have any of these kind of prods about this. And i kind of had to create my own sort of matrix of connection. It came of trying to be a citizen. What we do to actually help virginia and richmond. We saw, who would ever have thought that charlottesville born the burden . How can we use these things that weve learned to actually help move the conversation forward . It came to me late in life. I think i kept it fresh. Just waiting. Yeah. Steves essay really made me think the process of coediting this book with matt gallman sent me back to a group of photographs that i took when i visited the sites here in the east for the first time in 1965 and 1967, when i was 14 and then when i was 16. I was struck by how these landscapes changed. These are not immutable landscapes. I found a picture i took of the Dunker Church in 1967 that had a red and white house trailer about 25 yards from the southern door to the Dunker Church and lawn furniture out and a car parked in front and a mailbox across the street. And i thought goodness, thats different. And i found pictures of shilohs steve, and there was an old church that i found there that was covered in brick. Thats probably gone. I thought that was the Shiloh Church as a 13yearold and thought boy it looks different than the descriptions ive seen of it. This looks very substantial and not just something that would be lost. Putting the book together made me think again. Not that i dont think about it often. All of us do. That there are these changing landscapes give us an endless opportunity to think about and talk about and share with and maybe even bore some people with how the civil war has figured in the history of this country ever since the end of it. Its this great lump in the snake, hard to get a sense of the snake without coming to terms with the kriccivil war. I see by carols watch its time to come up and ask questions. Peter runs a tight ship. Well be finished by 5 15, period. If anyone has anything you would like to offer, please step forward. I sense movement. This is slightly outside the frame of the book. Im sorry, then i cant have you ask that question. What dr. Ayres said youre not understanding the full civil war. One thing a few years ago when we had a reconstructionist team here, people talked about the lack of commemorative landscape, about reconstruction. Do any of you have a place that comes to mind for you that would tell the story of reconstruction for you . Yes. Colfax, louisiana. So colfax is a northern louisiana town, site of the worst massacre that happened on reconstruction, Easter Sunday in 1873, sort of a Pivotal Moment in the ability or recognition among the white south that they can mount violent resistance. White maurrauders killed people that day. If you teach the history of reconstruction, you teach colfax. The sign in colfax that the state has still refers to this as the site where 15 years of negro misrule ended. And to their credit, two of the graduate students in our program have been trying to suggest to the town, fathers and mothers, people on the City Police Board that governs signage that we can do better than that. And its the thing that people walk past and dont read and so its a mixed race group of people on this board, all of whom generally recognize this is not a good sign to have and doesnt do anything historically at all. But what we actually need in colfax is if not a state park but a National Park that talks about reconstruction and confronts what happened there. We have not made much headway. The police board almost decided for the parish, yes, we can do this, wrote new text and then some other project got in the way. But thats a site that should be memorialized and talked about and known. Thank you. Hi. So, i dont really have much of a question. Its more of a comment and a thank you, if anything, actually, to dr. Carmichael for giving us the opportunity to go on the tour with you at gettysburg and also the comment on you guys description of the imagination in history. I thought it was fantastic because he did a wonderful job of outlining the battlefield for us in a way that i thought was imaginative as well as creative as well, because we were able to visualize and kind of see in our minds what he was saying as he was narrating a story for us of the battle of gettysburg, which i thought was fantastic. And also what i found fascinating was his ability to translate what we saw on a map of gettysburg and also visualize that into what we saw before us. So it kind of added that texture to it that i thought was neat he was able to do for us. So, thank you. Really, thank you. Yes. The battle of vicksburg was a great, strategic victory. We only know this with hindsight that the army of the potomac was not destroyed here in pennsylvania. We have to put it in that perspective and consider them more or less coequals. I cant help but saying vicksburg was clearly more important than gettysburg was. Its perceived as a far greater disaster and far greater victory. It simply is more important. Even if the army was crushed at gettysburg . But it wasnt. We know that with hindsight. They knew it at the time that lee retreated, too. Vicksburg was clearly more important than gettysburg. Gettysburg is a fascinating example of how something percolates up and becomes the great dividing point for a variety of reasons that arent necessarily related to precisely what happened at the time. Thank you. Theres a monument that didnt exist, what would you want it to be and for who, for each historian . We thought about that a lot and we have 1,000 letters and emails, people suggesting things. As we were commemorating the end of the war. Interesting kind of perspective. People would love to see that military accomplishment about the civil war. People have argued thats a suitable accompaniment. Thats what i would say. Hamburg, South Carolina, prince rivers, color sergeant for the first usct in South Carolina. First day basically rode to freedom, became a soldier, fought valeiantally. The first South Carolina is actually the first africanamerican unit to really engage, take confederate prisoners and then occupy majority white town of jacksonville, florida. That convinces lincoln to draft the usct. As soon as he does it, he moves there, he could have become a legislator. But he knows already that you have to create a sanctuary city for whats coming. Sanctuary city in that day and age is a sanctuary county because you need to control the sheriff and local law. So he moves there and establishes a sanctuary. In hamburg, South Carolina. Its a majority black town but 20 whites and everybody is fine and reconstruction is working. And then its not. Hamburg, South Carolina, is like colfax, one of these places where the klan essentially tried to test the federal government and the federal government did nothing. But for me, the monument has to be to prince rivers. Prince rivers then returns to being a carriage driver again. So the arc of his remarkable life from carriage driver to soldier to state legislator to mayor to carriage driver again basically is the window of opportunity that opened and closed on an entire generation of africanamericans. Im not sure who or what the monument looks like, but since i live here, i work here and all that sort of thing, part of the gettysburg story that hasnt been told amazingly, yes, there are parts of the gettysburg story that dont get nearly enough attention. Its the aftermath of the battle. Its the story when there are still soldiers here. Some of them are wounded. Some of them are prisoners. Some are the provost marshalls, civilians, intermix tur, relationshtheres a bit of an occupation story here. Theres the return of the africanamerican population that left town that comes back to a very different world than the one that they left. Theres all kinds of stories that we are just beginning to look at. Unlike the other folks up here, i come at the gettysburg story from the perspective of the broader field of history. Ive never defined myself strictly as a civil war historian. We tend to use the phrase called the elements of national power. When we talk about a war, we talk about the military. We also talk about the political, social, culture and all of it is combined into military history and thats okay. We havent always approached the gettysburg story for most of these other stories using that broader brush approach. That approach applied to gettysburg and especially the aftermath. Is already beginning to tell us a whole lot of things. Theres a monument in there. I dont know what it is yet. We can try to fit in one more question, i think. From alexander, virginia, i want to take you to task, and tie something into eds talk. You brought up the charlottesville situation and what happened there. I sit on the virginia alcu board of directors and we are the ones who sued charlottesville to allow the neo nazis to march. The violence that happened, thats a different story. But i think it shows why the civil war, Confederate Monuments need to come down. You talk about you use them as a teaching tool and so forth. I get that. I understand that. The question, of course, ultimately is why cant that be done with the statues, monuments, museums, libraries or Something Like that where they belong . When ed is talking, richmond law, 1988, by the way. The last person to ask you a question asked you, how do we make i think the words he used, make civil war more relevant or interesting to africanamericans. This is certainly one way. All the reasons for keeping the monuments up to teach and learn history and all that kind of stuff are all legitimate but all those can be done with the monuments and museums and so forth. It seems to me that all those reasons are trumped by the hate and pain and sadness and all that comes with that, that they cause to people of color. And i know that very clearly because my wife is africanamerican. We talk about this quite often. How she can participate more in my hobby. She doesnt and we talk about that and thats one of the reasons that she doesnt. Why would we want to keep monuments up for learning purposes when there are other ways to do that and allow all the pain that comes with that for africanamericans, people of color, to look at these things every day and be reminded what they stood for and, of course, what people use them for today in many ways to perpetrate hate. How is that for a long question . A question, of course, i cant answer you in a minute but ill be happy to talk with you afterward. Very quickly, youre assuming a universal opinion on the part of people on both sides that including africanamericans. Africanamericans dont agree with exactly what to do with Confederate Monuments either. Theres a range of opinion within the Africanamerican Community with how best to do this. One thing that i would take issue with in what you just said is that theyre just the same in a museum as they were in the sites they were placed. I would disagree with that fundamentally. But we can continue this after this is over with. You can go a little bit more if you want. Im not going to go a little bit more with this because theres not enough time. Sure. But i would love to go much more afterward. Someone else was standing up just before this last question, who has since sat down. Peter says we can have one more question now. So well have another last questio question. I was going to ask almost the same thing but in a slightly different way and that is i was in santa fe in march and i think that theyve changed the language on the side of the monument by either blotting it out or doing something with it. Yes, they did. The xhecomment is about the monument in santa fe, talks about the civil war and sibleys movement up the rio grande but it had one part that talked about native americans, described as savages. Someone chiselled that off in the mid 1970s, off of the monument. It wasnt not some official action, but so when you go there now theres one thats been chiseled off on that monument in the plaza in santa fe. I thank all of you very much, both for taking part in the book and coming up here this afternoon. And thank all of you. [ applause ] before you all rush off to dinner, let me quickly say about this panel, this is the very reason why we do the civil rights institute. It pleases me that we can have these kinds of conversations that are so important to have as we do it in a very civil and educational way. Lets thank cspan, our great partner here at the civil war institute. Thank you so much. This is a special edition of American History tv. A sample of the compelling history programs that air every weekend on American History tv. Like lectures in history, american artifacts, real america, the civil war, oral histories, the presidency, and special event coverage about our nations history. Enjoy American History tv. Now and every weekend on cspan3. Sunday night on q a. We were taken out of the hall and confronted this mob of angry people. Middlebury College Alison stanger talks about being physically attacked in 2017 after an appearance by author Charles Murray on campus. At the end of your discussion with Charles Murray, you left that room and went where and what happened . The fact of the matter is that i dont really remember much of it. I couldnt even tell you what door we went out. But we were taken out of the hall and confronted this mob of angry people, some of who were in masks. They were shoveling and jostling. Their target was Charles Murray. Sunday night at 8 00 p. M. Eastern on cspans q a. American history tv continues now with professor earl hess on the tactics, terrain and trenches in the 1864 atlanta campaign. He is the author of kennesaw mountain, sherman, johnson and the atlanta campaign. This was part of the Gettysburg College civil war institutes annual summer conference. Its an hour. Its my pleasure this afternoon to introduce earl hess. Earl is the stewart w. Mccullen chair at Lincoln Memorial in tennessee. 20 books, a long