now as they turn on their cameras and unmute. and the way i wanted to start this off is actually to have each of our panelists introduce themselves to you, rather than have me read along introduction for each person. and i want to have them talk about how they became interested in the american civil war, where they teach, what sort of classes they teach and how they think about teaching a lincoln and the civil war. we have jack davies coming in here and will have jackal first and then will have kerry go second and then tamika and then craig and then i will bring up the rear. so let's see, jack, if you can unmute yourself and turn on your camera. go right ahead. >> i was born in independence, missouri which is pretty much on the fringes of the civilization, prior to the civil war and of course it's the center of what was a very different sort of war. as a result of which, my grandparents, it was still a fairly lively topic of my conversation. my grandmother's grandfather -- and my grandfathers grandfather had been a confederate soldier in virginia, who died in the war. so they were kind of still at it a little bit but that's all marriages. from that to some sort of self definitions that they were throwing out, who are the people out in that region at the time we referred to has jayhawkers and red legs, border trash, that sort of thing. so gary gallagher -- i am border trash and i am proud of it. around the age of 12, my grandfather had a copy of a book, this is a hollow ground. i don't know why, i happen to read it. i think i got fascinated by the maps first. and that kind of sucked me in. and of course, this is just about the time that the civil war sentinels taking place, by which time i was living in california, which is kind of a long way from anywhere related to the civil war. i got interested in genealogy, i didn't wait until i was 80, i started it as i was a teenager. i found out to the had a number ancestors involved in the war. it gave me an interest in finding out what the experiences were and that they had gone through in their lives. and then they serve a eureka moment for me. we always knew that there was an ancestral piece of equipment from a yankee grandfather who was my great great grandfather who was a cattle heard there. but i had never seen it. and one day in california, opening a box that i had never been through, i came across this. this is the great great grandfather's cavalryman's pistol pouch, his pencil from marking his belongings and a photograph of him. you can tell from the photo, but he was a corporal. people in my family are always destined for high office. and somehow, that piece of physical make trickery culture really grabbed me. and the interest really kind of began to explode from that. i never waited in the academic world, in lists at least until -- lockers primarily and publishing, for about 21 years. the magazine called civil times. which gave me a wonderful opportunity to study for everybody, not just one professor. until i got to know the wily, but robertson, mary elizabeth massie, jean oak franklin, and i just spent time with all these wonderful people, all through my publishing days. and also, i enjoyed the popular historians, who were not academics. alex haley, tucker. which i think helped get me some insight into what the popular mind and the popular imagination was interested in and wanted to see and understand. so i had an extraordinary sort of path to reach the civil war and one problem, may even be unique, i don't know. but at every point, it really helped to get me a deep sense of fascination of the people of those times, the crises they went through and the means by which they try to continue. >> great, thank you. carey, how about you? >> hi, thanks don for inviting me to be part of this wonderful panel with so many people that i am fond of. so, like jack, in some ways, i think it was where i was from. i grew up in the shadow valley, and surrounded by civil war battlefields, civil war fights, less than two miles from my home where my parents still live. there was a bridge that jackson had burned, so i was everywhere in the valley and my grandfather, he was a world war ii veteran, a marine in the fourth division, took me to battlefields, took me to gettysburg and he was a curry -- gracious reader of anything civil war. my parents likewise took us to harpers ferry and other historic sides, like williamsburg, that's what we did as a family. so i always had his interest in history. certainly never thought i would end up teaching history. i was going to law school, that was my path until my fourth year, i took a pass failed class by this guy named ed air and everything changed at that moment when i realized that i could do this and not just be a lawyer. so that was my path to the civil war. >> that's great. and you teach at the university of virginia. the director at the civil war history museum. and you did your undergrad and graduate work at uva. i return >> a return to uva, spent 12 years at purdue, then i'm back uva and teaching courses on both the civil war and civil war memory among many other courses. >> great, thanks. to me commonly. >> john, thank you so much for having me. i am very excited to be a part of this panel. so, my interest in the history of the civil war also started with family tradition. my family is has fought in every war since the civil war and i just comes from a military family. my father was it in the military and was in charge of the african american cultural club when we lived in england and so we read a lot of history books, and a lot of biographies and so that's how i became very interested in history. so when i went to uva and i always warned my students when they are applying to graduate schools and if they are applying to uv in particular, you think you're going to study one thing and i came there with the intention of stunning 20th century hunched three and of course, now i'm a 19th century specialist and i think that, you know, when you go to a place like uva and you get this study like with people like gary gallagher in carolyn cheney, you can't help but be sort of pulled into this world. that's where all the cool kids are. and so, i ended up having a lot of questions and kind of our general american survey about where were black women during the war. i assume that many of them were not necessarily soldiers but how are they responding to the developments of war? and it's the through that sort of line of questioning that i became very deeply interested and very experiences as refugees and freed women during the war. >> great. and you are at oberlin college now. >> i am, yes. >> and you made a very important point, to make a, about the civil wars where the cool kids are because that's a great leeway to craig simons, who has moved more world war ii but we're gonna bring you back to the civil war today. can you tell us a little bit more craig about what you've taught over the years? >> that's my i was -- but tamika, you and i had a reverse circumstance as john mentioned, i have been in the civil war for 40 years and i kind of beat me up a little bit and i'm doing a lot of world war ii stuff now. but i have been interested in history since i can remember having a conscious thought. and to a certain extent i, think my focus on the civil war in particular like jack, it's all bruce captain's fault. and here's a guy who could take everybody to just bring it alive. i try to do that as much as i can with my students and also in my riding whenever i can. so i began thinking and reading as much as i could about the civil war but grew up in california, about as far away from a civil war battlefield as you can get, if you're not in hawaii. but also to tie in with what caroline had to say a few minutes ago that when i finally got east and we had our own son, that's how we spent our vacations, going to civil war by katie battlefields. far from convincing him that he should be a civil war historian. i think he decided he could get as far away as he wanted from that. he does teach in california but he teaches literature, so he's not into that at all. but i think bruce is probably the short two word answer to what first promoted my answer into the civil war. and i ended up teaching it for 30 years of the united states naval academy which i will argue is the best job in america. >> that's great. i was thinking about this last night, the first civil war book i ever read was jack davies is -- and what i read that when i was in middle school. and i had him sign it for me a few years ago. when i started college at ten state, it was gary gallagher's last year there and he was teaching a number level courses that i wasn't able to take but i would go into his office and try to talk to him about the civil war. and i remember, as i began to make the transition from being a business major to waste three major, i want to take gary's office and i told him i wanted to be coming history professor. and he said, let me give you some advice. get a real job and do history on the weekends. i don't know if he gave that advice to anyone else. it was very good advice, but i'm very glad i didn't take it. i teach american studies at christopher newport university, and so i don't actually teach the civil work last year, but i do teach a lot of lincoln speeches in the different classes that i teach. so, craig i want to start with you and i -- you've had a long career teaching in the annapolis and now in rhode island, can you talk a little bit about the changes you've seen over the course of your career in terms of anything that jumps out at you. your students recourse content? >> that's an interesting question. first of all, i do teach at a rather unique institution, keep in mind that the u.s. naval academy is not virginia, high state or princeton or perdue. my students all wear uniforms. everybody comes through every class, nobody is late. when i walk in the room, they come to attention. so that probably doesn't happen a lot in some of your classrooms. and they're almost universally really bright. that doesn't change. they were bright when i began teaching there in 1976, they were bright when i left there 30 years ago. to do other things. one of the things i did note though is increasingly, i think they are burnt -- without a great depth of factual knowledge. and i suspect, without any specific proof of it, that some of it comes from the fact that most of them took advanced placement, high level courses in which he resume, i don't need to teach you things, you could always look up things. let's think deep thoughts and consider them, which is a great thing to do. but often leaves vast look who none of emptiness, particular of sequence, of chronology and particularly of geography. i remember being shocked fairly early on when i was teaching at the naval academy, handing out a blank map of the united states and asking them to find places -- some of them confront the state of south carolina. which began to giving me a geography quizzes in our history class, to which one of my colleagues responded, geographies about maps. histories about chaps. but i kept doing it anyway because i help them picture things. in fact, when i got into this section of the course where i did military maneuvers, i put a map up on a white board by projection, and then used colored markers to follow the movements around and they seemed to find that quite enlightening. so that's one way, and here is one other way i think things change over the 30 years that i thought there. thinking about what i would say today in our conversation, i went down to my basement and pulled out some cold great books and shocked myself to discover that the late 1970s, my course average, this is for an upper level course, an elective course that history majors took. my average grade was 2.3. 25 years later, it was 3.5. now, i don't think they caught much that much smarter. maybe i got that much easier. i just think that's the way our whole curriculum has moved in the time between the mid seventies from the end of the 20th century. so there are a couple of ways that it has changed. >> that's interesting. grade inflation, a perennial topic of discussion and department meetings. carrie and tamika, i want to ask you both. what has been your experience in recent years in terms of your approach to teaching the civil war. has it changed in the last couple of years? or has it changed this semester in the wake of the tumultuous summer of 2020 with the broom of george floyd and protests in the streets? >> i'll start. so, two things. one is in my civil war memory class, because we look at the way in which the war has been remembered, interpreted, celebrated, we couldn't keep adding verbs there. from the war forward in the past, i've been teaching this course now for 15 years and i used to concentrate primarily on the 19th century, looking at the veterans and other aspects. literature, you were talking about -- i always teach the important tint and the mortar,. but overtime, i have increasingly added more about the 20th century. this, year i brought it all the way up to 2020. so our last class focused on what happened this past summer and what is continuing to happen. so that's one way in which that course has changed. but i will say, i was still at purdue when charlottesville happened. or august 11th and 12th, 2017. and i was really narrative to go into my classroom that fall and teach about the civil war. in hindsight, i'm not sure why i was, but i was. and i re-wrote that opening lecture to make it more about why studying the civil war matters more today than it ever has. and i've continued to modify that opening lecture as i teach. i've also done more. i've added more debates, my students really seem to like debates, we added a debate on who freed the slaves. and they get assigned, they don't get the pick. they have to argue he was either african americans, union soldiers, lincoln or congress. and then we talk about why that's the case. and they ask for more debates. they want to debate on reconstruction. so the next time i teach the course, will talk about that. they also want more on impeachment now. thinking about their contemporary times and trying to understand the past. so that's a modification on the next time i teach the course. >> that's great. tamika? >> so i tend to start the civil war class, and i do teach civil war and reconstruction and i also teach an advanced seminar on the civil war era, which is more of a historic goal graphical -- but for my lecture course, i do begin with an article from james mick fearsome on how to think about civil war history and sort of a general public audience and the importance of thinking about it in terms of public history. but then i also have -- why so few blacks study the civil war? and i think that's just a really wonderful way to get a conversation started about people's proximity to this knowledge, right? i grew up loving history but i wasn't a civil war buff, right? as where in my class, i might have someone who's like a serious civil war buff and then i might have some people who love history and i may have some people who may just have no idea as to what this war was about. and so i think these articles are very great in capturing kind of the stakes on how exchanging -- i teach at oberlin and so, many of us on the call know that oberlin has a reputation, right? one that got it started in the 19th century has been very radical and progressive and i think that the students are drawn to oberlin because of that tradition and so, they are very interested in learning about various experiences, particularly the social experience, social history of the civil war and so, i think that's kind of what i bring to how i designed the course is thinking about that bottom of history. and what i like about that bottom history is that, and accounts for the lives of african americans, have people from the west, of soldiers, of women, of immigrants in ways that, really wet their appetites and sort of what their interests are in. so i think oberlin brings a unique context in itself and teaching at oberlin and how we teach anything at oberlin, and it is very interesting. but, i'm always very encouraged by the fact that so many of these students are still interested in the civil war and so, these classes, the enrollments are always high and i don't think it has anything to do with me, but i think it has something to do with his generation being very invested in its topic and just understanding the nuts and bolts of that history. and yeah, it's a fun course to teach. now, have to make adjustments for this audience because most of my students are either from the west coast or from the east coast. many of them are not from the midwest. many of them are not from the south. i even asked them to raise their hands to tell me wet if -- they've even been to the south. and i'm always just shocked at how few hands are raised. i'm, like you haven't been to the south? and so i think, just having those cultural concepts and social distinctions to come of treason and our conversations have been very useful and however approached the course. >> yeah, that's very interesting and i imagine that's true for most of you, that you have a lot of students from throughout the nation. most of my students and -- craig go ahead >> i'm just going to follow up on that because one of the things i often did when i begin a class was asked my students who are now national audience, so it brings students remarry because it's a naval academy. how many of you are from states that were part of the confederacy? many hands go straight up. thank you. how many of you are from states that were part of the union but in the north at the time of the civil war? and i get this. >> that's funny. jack, so you spent a lot of your career in publishing, but you spent ten years teaching at virginia tech. can you tell us a little bit about your experience at tech and then, you know, we just talked a little bit about the massive social changes we've seen in, social movements, we've seen in the last few months. what sort of changes have you seen over the course of your career in terms of public thinking about race or the civil war and how have you seen that affect the field of civil war studies? >> first, your question about teaching at tech. i actually spent 13 years there, but i was brought in primarily to teach research and writing seminars for graduate students. and so, i didn't actually teach the survey or the basics, which i tech was two semesters. i think it may have been the only school in the whole country. it's gone back to one semester now. now i taught that once. so i don't really have a basis for much comparison and the teaching. i can't say that the students that i had in the one year i thought that course had a very -- background. a lot of them are simply taking it because their parents or grandparents had gone to tech and had say taken the civil war corps, whether it's being taught by -- sometimes that have 300 students. and the grandfather warned that her mom said when you're there, you have to take a civil war class. then, a lot of them were disappointed because they found out that course was teaching by me. because it can be a very entertaining subject. they came with very little background. and not that many history majors. tech has a corps of cadets, rotc. over 1000. and there be a fair number of members of the core cadets taking the classes, because they might have an interest in military history. but i don't really have a basis beyond that to judge how prepared they were when i last talked, compared to 20 years before. or compared to how prepared they were today when they take that class. much of this has to do with the nature of virginia tech itself. it's not primarily a liberal arts college. all those years of publishing, as well as being a writer myself and civil writing books and seeing with the general reading population was interested in, i have seen a lot of changes. mostly, i think for the better. when i go back to -- when you're in middle school, i wrote a novel. in 1974, civil war was almost poison. it was very difficult to find a trade fellowship who would take on a civil war book. it had concluded -- civil war and academia, but in publishing was kind of a casualty of the vietnam era. public taste turned against anything against military. it was really only people like bruce, he was in his last years, who could get a civil war book published. that of course has changed, dramatically. i don't know, i couldn't guess it quite right on the come out now but it's pretty phenomenal, still. to the whole mom and pop publishing company specializing nothing but publishing civil war history. some of them very good. the reprint in this tree, to sort of took off in the mid 1970s. amid print 1970s classics, and had been done by the indiana press in the fifties and sixties, with some limited success. and that was about it. something changed in the public appetite in the seventies, late seventies that started to see this material coming out again in a phenomenal pace. and equality, and the nature of what was being published changed a lot as well. and to calm in term apply to a lot of civil war books in the 19 sixties and seventies was pop warner. they were mostly just in the official records and a few often very suspicious, long after the fact with not much real background. and essentially written to entertain. and they did. but that has changed. the audience for civil war books has gotten a lot more sophisticated throughout the years and i don't know which came first. with the stories we're producing better material, and the people wrote it -- or if the readers expected it first. but there were some's very significant changes, 30 years ago, 40 years ago. it will fall battles. but, there may be hit something new this day. the approach to the committee change dramatically. at some point may be in the eighties, they started being less and less, just generals. and more and more political and social characters. we were very frequently have a civil war book and which lacks minorities or aren't even mentioned. and that's a whole sort of sub draw of the publication that has become a field in an itself. and i've really seen happening that's not happening everywhere yet, like it will in its full realization is this revolution and digital, which will be made available online. the creation of -- tech in turn a document into a digitized virtual document. these are revolutionary things. i would've tortured myself and looking at genealogy bank top home, the american societies -- tens of millions of patients in newspapers, just to look through and look at a book at 34 years ago and see everything i missed. because it wasn't practical bent to spend years on a newspaper, now you can do years worth of research on the press in a matter of a few weeks. it's not being fully realized as more and more becomes digitized i think it will. though i think it always carries with it the danger of people being sucked into the idea of one stop shopping. >> right. >> as -- used to say getting their fingers dirty with the scholarship. getting their fingers dirty. a important component, and the most fun part as well. >> i agree. >> i want to piggyback off of something you said a few moments ago, i will put the stick carry. so when you think about all of the new scholarship that is out there, you add it one of the major series in the field. there is some much work being done on so many different aspects of the war. what are some of the major themes or ideas or fact that he tried to get your students understand once they have finished a semester with you? >> i will go back to where craig began with, this i will reiterate that i to do sugar 50 courses because i learned early on in teaching the civil war that you cannot teach something a simple as the and a kind of plan if people don't know where the mississippi river is. so that is a basic fact. geography. knowing what state succeeded and what didn't. i know that is not what you are asking, john but i think that is something that can extend far beyond the civil war. in terms of what the leave with, i want them to be asking questions. bigger questions about why we ended up in a war in the first place. why was democracy fragile enough that and election, a democratic election could bring us to the most horrific war in history. why did people make the decisions that they made. one of the things that i stressed time and time again regardless of what's history glass i am teaching is that we don't have to condone peoples behavior in the past. we don't even have to condemn their behavior, but we have to understand why they made the decisions and act as they did. and an example that i use, that maybe is not the best parallel, i say we do not have to agree with what the taliban is doing in order to try to understand why it is doing what it is doing. we need to treat historical characters the same way, think beyond the fact that they are characters. they are real live people with a lot of flaws, and could seem to be hypocrites. lincoln is a great example of this. so many students become frustrated when they realize what the emancipation proclamation didn't did not do. number one they feel that they were misled by previous teachers, we have to talk about the complexities of it but understanding that lincoln was a person who changed overtime. whose position and values changed with the context, and with his own lived experience. so those are some of the big, broad types of things that i try to get at in my class. >> i think you are right in talking about how we humanize these historical figures. i think a lot of times when students are doing a reading it is just boring words on a page and it is hard for them to think about living, breathing human beings wrote these words. people who experienced life in ways that are not dissimilar from the way that we do. in my cost is they do a lot of lincoln readings. in my first class i go in and the early class on the early life of abraham lincoln. i start with him being born in the law cabin and i bring them up to where he is meeting mary todd. i talk to them about his love, life his failures, his wandering around new zealand and illinois and try to get them to see him as a human being. at the very end of the lecture i look, out and i do this without introducing myself at all. i look out and i say that i know most of you are probably really confused as to why you just heard a lecture on the early life of abraham lincoln on the first if class. expect me to go over the syllabus and tell them what they are going to do the semester. i say for next class you are going to be dispute that abraham lincoln delivered in 1938. i say i have brought you up to that point in his life now, i want you to think about him as a real person. a young man in his late twenties and not as the giant statue in the lincoln memorial. my hope is that by humanizing lincoln in that way it can really draw the students in and get them to see history in a different way. >> yes. something as basic that i think we as practicing historians take for granted is getting students to be in that moment, whether it is 1838 or 1861. i am pretending that you don't know what comes next. to understand what we can call contingency or something else, but understanding that things don't have to unfold as the unfolded. what happened at seven days has profound implications for the proclamation, if he had been maybe more successful than maybe things would have turned out differently. instead of saying everything as a study march, i found that is sometimes difficult for students to turn off, to stop in that moment and pretend that they don't know what comes next in order to assess why figures made the decisions that they did. >> that's a good point. i'm going to ask a question and i will give it to each of. us i guess will go in the order that i see on the screen. i will go to craig, first than tamika, than jack and carry. i am looking at all of your wonderful background and all of the books that we have in our offices or living rooms where we are sitting. we all need to take the snapshot that there is that my rate my screen or reach my room on how good your books look in the background. when we talk about teaching, what are the readings you most a choice assigning, the authors or articles you find most resonate with students. craig i will start with you. and if you could talk about why you think they work well. >> sure. happy to do. it it's interesting. going back to a bill said, he said he does not like to mix fact and fiction because he is scared he will draw something out of fiction and that will become the reality. catherine clinton says that she does. i am kind of on catherine's team here. among the books that my kids like the most that the re-read after the left academy, re-read again, yes i'm old enough to have many former students. retired i assigned the killer angels just about every year that i taught at the civil war. after that we would have a discussion about, it but then we would get into one of those big blue navy academy buses and we would walk that, field the southerners would go across the field. the northerners would stand at the stonewall and shoot their. around we would stand right where chamberlain stood and said my god you could feel a hair stand up. it's a piece of functional -- fiction but it suck them up. they want to know everything that really happened with those real life people that caroline was talking about. that focused them a lot. another book that i found very useful, teaching reconstruction is very, hard particularly on -- we can construct that think and tear it apart. i will use debates like caroline does. then we do seven weeks on the war where we are charging across the field and axes and owes on the board, all of the stuff which to them is red meat. it is kind of like do we have to do this? so getting them into reconstruction was always heard. i found one of the things that always worked was -- autobiographical novel, a bagger that goes to the war with all of the best intentions tries to create a new life down. there he had been a. veteran he was there during the. war the climate was. nice what a fool he was to think that there was a week to make that -- captures them in a way that i think even wonderful books about reconstruction, no i know that's not necessarily a oxymoron but even very good books on reconstruction cannot get them into it in the same way that his book did. of course i use more conventional books as well. -- that'll fire freedom, the text pucks version of that would be the spine of the course. but i find that giving, them michael shore, albert, i never gave them, -- it's too. long i would spend a day with them, reading experts, explaining how it had a impact. so those three in a way, you get the three pieces of the civil war reconstruction era, in fictionalized form that i think makes those characters live. >> that's great. so there was a one person -- i think he went, there i could be wrong about that. i will use that as a segue over to tamika. >> for me the books that i like our martha's morning lincoln i think is very fascinating, and just thinking about the broader public sentiment and what people really thought about lincoln and i think that students are quite surprised by the ways that americans in the 19th century thought of him and i think because my students, they have the radical cards, so they understand the nuances of emancipation and what it did it and did not do, so kind of leave it at that. no, let's talk about the american people and where they are with us. i think that when we begin to do that. excuse me. no whatever ever calls me on a saturday. don't know where that came from. i want to combine that with kate mazer's reprint of johnny washington's account of people in d.c.. black people in d.c. and what they thought about link in. i think that they are surprised by how nuanced the reading is of lincoln during that time. of late, i have really enjoyed her, work readings of emancipation has been empowering work, for my civil war seminar i like to assign -- fiery trial because i think it is a really great distillation of how to think about lincoln's approach to slavery. and i find that it is certainly tailored to students interest in lincoln's presidency. particularly around emancipation. so my big takeaway for them is to sort of just approach it to resist the impulse to oversimplify people like lincoln and also jeff davis and the different people who figure prominently in the war. so these readings help me do that work in a way that has been really great. >> i am curious how your students respond. they knew. lincoln about a copy in 1942 for 200 dollars before i knew that she was going to release it with oxford a couple of years ago, so i could have gotten it a lot cheaper. it is a wonderful. book but it is not a traditional history. and a lot of ways it is a work of folklore so i am curious as to how years today react to the stories of abraham lincoln getting to know communities in the war. >> i think they were taken aback. i think that they were prepared to see lincoln as someone who yes, issued the emancipation proclamation but with someone who was racist in the product of his time. but i think when you put black perspectives of who lincoln was at that time, it becomes very different right when you are thinking about how black people are cultivating their own kind of oral traditions around house supreme ember lincoln, when you bring in those voices, that kind of tempers that instinct or impulse to dismiss lincoln as he just did this to win the war. whereas they see that african americans held him in high regard while they also critiqued some of his choices. but at the same time, what made the stories about their own proximity to lincoln and whether or not they saw him on his walks throughout the district and so forth. so it's about oral traditions and history meeting that happens. that can create some tension, but i think that collectively these works do really important work in giving us a fuller picture. >> that reminds. me there's a really wonderful article by jon barr and david that looks at the sleeve narratives from the wpa and how they talked about lincoln, and how many former slaves talked about oh i met lincoln at such and such time. many thought that he actually traveled through the south and disguised. i assigned that article once in class and people were fascinated by the memory from the 1930s of lincoln as a emancipator or limited figure in the way that they remembered him. sorry go ahead. >> i was going to say i think it is part of a broader tradition as well. i always tell people that when i was growing up, it wouldn't be uncommon to see grand grandma's house with the picture of lincoln and a picture of jfk and martin luther king up there as well. and great grandma doesn't know lincoln, she's not relate to lincoln. but lincoln is going to be up in the house, right? so i think that this tradition, certainly persists throughout the 20th century as well. >> yeah, that's right. jack, let me go to you. why did you enjoy signing ad virginia tech? >> a variety of things. my interest was more focused in the mid or the memory and the perceptions they were likely to have today in the civil war area as opposed to what it actually was like. i found that it was theater idea of civil was almost entirely influenced by film. so i did show gone with the wind. it took up an entire week's worth of class periods, it was very easy work for me. and about after that, to kind of deconstructed to show them how the incrustation of myths. especially through the lost cause mid era. had produced not just gone with the wind but what is still a powerful and still influential misconception today. i think they got it. they sort of enjoyed seeing this juxtaposition of the picture of -- versus what the actual south was like, top to bottom. both during the war and afterward. i didn't get into reconstruction, it reminds me of a conversation i had years ago with, i forgot his name, he was a screenwriter and did a mini series called moon in the gray, back in the eighties. and he would say, he really had wanted to do a follow-up series on reconstruction. but he couldn't because there were no heroes. from my dramatist point of view. of course, there are heroes but they're all flawed. trying to get the students to think critically. i also assigned them when i regard as perhaps the worst book written about the civil war. charles sissi adams in the course of human events. it's about 200 pages of complete nonsense presented by a fellow who says he was the world's greatest authority on taxation, but he was enumerate. he would add 100 percent of them was 87% plus 14%. he just didn't get it. it was very much a lost cause, a lot of libertarianism thrown in and complete nonsense about savory in particular. 62% of southern homes had slaves, according to him. and then gave them a chance to read that and then some assignments. it's simple things that -- or where the imagery was pushing was clearly influenced by mid and memory that still hung on. there was a little to how much i could assign the because it was an open division course. i don't know how much they got out of it but, what i found fascinating was seven be five years later, the first time the camera looks down the stairs and you see -- looking up at his butler. and everybody in the class one oh! >> monetary, how about you, what do you enjoy signing? >> i'll talk about both of my classes. in my civil war and missile and memory corps, i start with robert lawrence is legacy of the civil war, britain during the centennial, which gives them some framework to talk about the treasury of virtue and i started a signing this in indiana when i realized that so many of my students used the first person to talk about we did this, we did that. meaning the union and really wrapping themselves and warns treasury of virtue. so that's how i lead off my semester and it works incredibly well. some other trusted books that i come back to time and time again, killer angels, which i teach as part of the 19 seventies and thinking about how it is a reflection in some ways on vietnam. and we also talk about the killer angels effect. so showing them what it now looks like on the far left flank of the union army that there is now a paved path up to chamberlain's monument, as opposed to if we look at the far-right flank. i also have long used, at least portions of confederates in the attic, i thought this last monday and students, you, know they are born long after that book was researched and written but they found so much in it. and it was a really striking this time around how many of them noted that things that were going on in 1995 96, especially with confederate flags and white supremacy, how much of it they felt seemed so contemporary to them. so that's from the memory class. for my civil war class, i almost always begin with chortles to use, apostle's of disunion and having the students read the secession speeches -- the commissioner speeches from the deep south to virginia and north carolina and the other upper south, slave states. it's a way of reminding them what's secession was all about and that it was about slavery, fears of -- all of those other issues that we can pack into that. so that's a trusted stand by. my students have really liked katie shy of least nature civil war, and thinking about medicine and soldiers and a different way. and especially because so many of them are from virginia, they have a sense of place and thinking about the peninsula and understanding of the way in which the environment and soldiers interacted with one another. and the book that's worked the best for me on reconstruction is -- the co-backs massacre. and really drilling down into 1873 massacre, and thinking about the ways in which violence and politics were so intimately connected and went hand in hand in the reconstruction south. that is a difficult look for students to read on a kind of visceral level, but i find that it gets the complexities of reconstruction through that book. >> so that actually is a great lead into a question we got from a viewer. and that is how do you teach the? and this is open to everyone on the panel. how do you teach the horror of the war? how do you teach the horror of slavery? how do you bring these hard issues into your classes? >> go ahead carey, since you are not muted. >> i will talk. so, a lot of firsthand accounts, whether it's with slavery or the battlefield itself. pausing and making students take stock that when we talk about numbers, if we're talking about the number of enslaved people who fled to a refugee camp of just -- our use of a lot of images to. making them stop and think about these people as individual people. one of the things i've started doing in recent years is using some of the color eyes photographs and i find that students can relate to those. there is the one, is a cumberland landing of the african? and when you see the color as diversion and use realize how young they are or how old they are and it's almost all women. and the different colored dresses and head scarves and there is a dog in a picture and i'm honing in on that, i think again, it's about the humanity. i also use a lot of accounts of soldiers talking about the battlefield. and i often stop and remind my students that even though -- they certainly were heroes and their can be korean war, but this was the loss of lives and it's not just the pictures of the dead bodies that you see at antietam. it's the ripple effect out that effects entire communities in the entire nation and it's a lot of preaching on my part to me. honest, that making them stop and really thinking about what we are talking about. and there's moments of silence i think can be especially powerful to bring them around and ground them in the seriousness of what we are discussing. >> to meek and then craig. >> absolutely. i think that when we talk about soldiers, we talk about the military, there's a way in which we can talk about it and extra terms, especially for this generation who, you know, doesn't know anything about, you know, having to go to war right, are being forced into war. and, you, know my family, like i, said are my family surrounded by soldiers. both of my siblings were told jurors and my brother fought in iraq. and i think that when you begin to humanize sort of these big numbers and these figures and they start to read the letters from soldiers or they start to listen to an account from a wpa a narrative, there is going to be some struggle with thinking about the provenance and the wpa. but still, what stories they are able to tell our very compelling to students and i'd like to actually assigned some of these sources and writing assignments so, that not only are they introduced to them in class, but they can actually sit with them as they are proponent wearing their own thoughts and doing their own thinking about the war. and so, i tend to give them an option of selecting one of three primary sources and sometimes they are very difficult to grapple with. but i think that putting that in the context of his in the cinnamon means that we don't have to figure this all out right now. we can react and respond to what we're reading and then let's begin to develop some thinking about what it is that we are reading. and so i find that using those primary sources, just as caroline has, has been very compelling to students. sometimes, it is -- it appears more poignant to them reading those firsthand accounts than it does for me to sit there on my pulpit, right? preaching to and telling them what happened at that time. >> carrie pointed out the importance of numbers and the impact it had. i think numbers have in some ways more impact on this generation today than in the past, why? i don't know. but, i found a way to kind of stunned them was tell them how many deaths that were and then bring that forward six generations. reveal to them that they should you're talking about hundreds of millions of americans who aren't born and are alive in this generation because of those who died in the civil war. >> yeah, that's a very powerful way to put it. and to think about just the numbers of people who died is unfathomable to us today, i think. what that generation was able to go through. >> can i just jump in and say one thing that seems to work well is if we are talking about 11,000 casualties to point out the basketball arena. we're talking about 60,000 men that are in an army, that's the football stadium. and so, making those sorts of -- so they can picture what these numbers mean. i think gives them some tangible way of thinking about them. >> yeah, that's a wonderful point. craig, let me go to you on the question of -- >> yeah, well a couple of things again about the uniqueness of the institution where i thought for 30 years. that's two things in particular. one is that there is one enormous dormitory where they all live. and in bancroft hall, and that is where they get their sort of leadership training, as opposed to education. so it's a drummed into them daily. they are responsible for the lives of the people they lead. and a lot of people don't know this. there is no united states marine corps academy, the marines go to the naval academy. so some 20 to 25% of our graduates each year at the naval academy go into the marine corps and they particularly are interested in the civil war. so my classes would have perhaps half of the students would be those who intend to go into the marine corps. so they are thinking about leadership and their responsibility for the men and women that they will lead in terms of -- so i really don't have to underscore that a whole lot. i think the numbers, that caroline points out in the track, emphasizes are meaningful to them because of that background. so that's one thing. i think selling the human cost of the civil war to that particular group of students is less of a lift, perhaps at the naval academy than it might be elsewhere. but i want to follow up to on something that caroline said about running a class. and that is silences, pauses. i had to train myself to shut up so often because my instinct is to keep talking to them and i'd ask an open-ended question and nobody would speak for three seconds. so i tell them what i thought the answer was. no, don't do that. you ask the question and you wait them out. and you can do the same thing in terms of what was the impact of this subsequent generations, as jack points out, what's the impact on the people who are waiting at home and wait for them to catch up with you. i think that's an important thing for all of us to do because i'll speak only for myself, i'm vain enough to think that my opinion is so valuable, i shouldn't be speaking at all the time. and that's not necessarily true. for i certainly think it is a view craig. the lincoln forum has a wonderful program for scholarships for high school teachers, where teachers can apply and in a normal year when we go to gettysburg we recognize them for their excellence and teaching and they get to enjoy the multiple days of the symposium. we weren't able to do so this year but we have a number of teachers who are watching and one of our teachers scholars is ruth. she has written in with a couple of questions. the one is she asked we have a lot of engaged students in the college classroom. is there any advice you can gift high school teachers who, their students are not choosing to be in the class like a lot of students are. can you give advice on how high school teachers can really reach out to high school students and get them interested in lincoln or interested in the civil war so that they do want to keep learning more and be engaged in it. >> and since unlike craig's classroom we cannot have moments of silence here on television i will go to to meet this first. >> it's probably because i'm closer in age to a highschooler. you know i think that this is why i like the social history approach and i do military history as well. from a civil war course. some of the newer scholarship that's done, this has become a emerging sub field of civil war history has invited opportunities for students to see themselves right in some of the stories. not exactly what is in the war but different regions, different ethnicities, thinking about gender. these issues figure prominently in a lot of the scholarship that's been done in the social history in the war and i find that's often a great entry point. i like to be regionally specific as well. if there are ways in which you can connect them to sort of your current locale, and that places connections with the civil war, i think there are some really great opportunities that students are going to be like a passed by that bench, cemetery, that spot many times, and i didn't realize that was the context in which had been either created or commemorated. i think that approach has been a really nice way has been a nice way to bring people in and i think our contemporary debates around monuments, in similar ways that carrie has addressed in her class. what is going on in -- with all of the monuments? what is the debate and one of the parameters around the debate? i think a lot of people are interested in understanding what is at stake. what is the history and provenance of those monuments. and their own relationship to it. >>, jack to want to speak to that? and then i will go to carry? >> one thing for sure. one thing i think can be helpful as that year after year after year, at least in publishing, the most popular single genre is the biography. people are interested in people. i have never thought teenagers, never thought a high school. if you can find some individuals who provide some leverage into the greater story, the students interested in them that could open the door to start to grapple with or find interesting the context of the world in which those people are living, and from their spread out more and more. in some ways that's how i learned about it. >> when you wrote your first book in middle school. >> carrie. >> i will echo tamika in echoing about place. if you have the ability, and of the circumstances make it difficult but the ability to take students to it doesn't have to be a battlefield but that's incredibly powerful, to take students to places so they can see a landscape. or if you are in kansas to go to the creek and there's not a lot there but man is it powerful to stand there, and think about what's happened. so space is one. thing i will come back to fiction. there is a fine line of not teaching the fiction as though it was the actual lived experience, but it does provide a entry point for students. i will say to the high school teachers out there, i taught -- i have for the last couple of years in my memory class, none of my students have read it in high school. i was sort of surprised about that. number one a book about the, more button in the 1890s, not by a veteran by someone who was realistic enough that people believed it had been by a veteran so i think there are so many entry points that fiction allows. >> i like thinking about fiction the way you, are if you are close enough to battlefield, he invited me to go along on his gettysburg trip and it was just a incredible experience to be able to go along and learn from him in the location where the battle had taken place. carey, i want to ask, you can you talk a little bit about how you use the uva cemeteries in classrooms? >> again, this year makes it difficult but in my memory, course the beginning of the semester they had to go out to the, cemetery the ev a cemetery which i happened to walk there this morning with none other than gary gallagher. but it is a place that allows you to think about both the wartime because you can look at the cemetery and look at the grieves and see the way in which they were laid out. all the soldiers, about 1000 soldiers were buried there during the war because of the fact that the university was a vast hospital complex. you can see the dates. you can see buried from 62 to 65. then the monument that was put up in the 19 nineties. it is a place that i sent my students, they have to reflect on it, they have to write on what they see with the landscape tells them. why it is there, and they also have to talk about whether or not they ever noticed it was, their most of them noticed it was right next to the cemetery. most of them walked past and never thought twice. so often point to get those things that right in their midst. but i will go back and say that purdue certainly was not close to a civil war battlefield but there were memorials to various civil war soldiers in places around campus that students were not aware of. they walked past all the time. so making them slow down and pass the landscape around them i think can be incredibly empowering. >> i think that is a wonderful point. we are almost out of time. we have six minutes left. this could be the last question that we have. one of the questions that came in through the queue and a function was what do you wish that your students knew before they got here class? again i think this is something that is geared towards has school teachers who are thinking about what they should be covering when did he tesco students. are there things that you wish that they knew. or are there things that you are often finding you have to help them and learn as a result of what they learned earlier? craig why don't you go first. >> i mentioned geography before. i think that's important. i think particularly for bright students, college bound students and high school they are not required to memorize state capitals and many of that stuff that -- jack and i were required to do when we were youngsters. no longer perhaps. so they don't have that. it is a burden on a high school teacher to say here is what you should do ruth. you should teach them all the nuts and bolts so we don't have to would be talk about broader issues. but on the other hand, the maps are, away if you can't go see a statue or a cemetery or eat battlefield, maps give you an opportunity to give you a visual representation of how things happened. i think that would be useful. but i also think for how school teachers and particular jack put his finger on it, lincoln is a interesting individual, john you do this in your class, if you get get them hooked on something. we try to get them on a hook so they will turn the page. you can do the same thing in the classroom. get them interested in the person. how did that -- you expand that outlook onward until you explain with the compton constitution was all about rather than start with memorize the compton constitution was passed on such and such day. so i think that might be one way of getting at it. it is difficult now not only as a high school teacher who doesn't have access to battlefields or statutes or cemeteries but also at a time when people are mostly teaching remotely to do any of that, but you can as jack suggests come up with an individual, a personality, and then build around that or competing personalities as bill did. >> think. you anyone else want to speak with that? of what's stints wish coming into the classes or what you have to help them and learn? >> i want to say that i think studying the south is still very important. and i find it very striking how many of my students know about the south and its history. and i think that it would be really helpful in adding some nuance and complexity to our understandings of the confederacy and understanding peoples reasons for fighting. that it wasn't just people being told what to do and they are doing it. it is that people had conviction. and to understand those convictions in that 19th century context i think is really important. >> tamika, how dear students responded to that near classes? when you try to get them to understand the confederate as they saw themselves and with the we're up to? >> i find it's a really great learning moment. the idea is to really grasp something very quickly and package it up so you can pass the exam or do well on paper. to really to construct something without a posture of dismissal but to take seriously what americans thought at the time i think is really just wonderful way to understand your own self in this current moment. and thinking about peoples differences politically or culturally or whatever that might be. and so i always try to frame it as this is a skill that is not just for you to pass the class. this actually just a scale about civics and thinking about the differences that people have and how politics were, and how culture and society is shaped by these dynamics. i think that when they start to understand that and go a little bit in-depth in studying that they feel very enlightened and empowered in ways that goes beyond filling out your bubble in the mid term exam or saying all the right jargon-y things or catchphrases for your essays. it really begins to be something that they are now fully empowered to look at. and think independently about what they are looking at rather than teaching to the test. i teach to cultivate their own independent thinking. that could be different from mine. it's fine. to just sit well with that in the classroom space realizing that people are going to come and arrive at different conclusions. >> yes that is one of the things that i love about using primary sources. which we have all kind of talked about is getting students to read the words of the historical actors. and getting them to try to understand the people as they understood themselves. so i always love using the sessions reaches and the senate of the southern senators of january of 1861, i'm sure a lot of us use alexander stevenson's cornerstone address and using things like that in connection with lincoln. and letting them see the way that their ideas are intentioned with one another and helping them analyze i think is really important. >> i father there was something of a gee whiz moment in taking the second confederate permanent constitution and pointing out where there are examples of it of these guys not be reactionary sleeve owners but actually in a odd way idealists. how to reform the system. no political parties. making the constitution more organic and easier to amend than the u.s. constitution. those are not things that people expect. >> we are at the end of our time. i want to think all of our panelists for participating in this wonderful discussion. thank you all so much for doing this. i want to remind all of our attendees at home that you can order the books written by our panelists through the gettysburg heritage center and you can find them at gettysburg museum store .com. they will come with a signed book plate for this very special 25th an ever surrey of the lincoln forum. thank you all so much for this discussion. >> there is a morning a look at the reliability of the u.s. electric grid. watch live coverage of the senate energy and natural resources committee beginning at ten eastern on c-span 3. online at c-span.org. or listen live on the free c-span radio app. as a preview of what's available this weekend on c-span 3. march is women's history month and on thursday night, we'll show you programs from our history bookshelf series. to begin, sheila tate, press secretary for her first lady nancy reagan from 1981 to 1985 recalls the personal and public life for mrs. reagan as described in her book, lady in red. an intimate portrait of nancy reagan. watch thursday beginning at 8 pm eastern and enjoy american history tv and every weekend. on c-span 3. an october of 1859, just 18 months before the first shots of the civil war, millet terry -- we wanted to present one of our guests today in the more traditional lecture format. and those who have heard our next guest. either we want to present one of our guests today