Youre welcome to our event series. Before i start, i want to mention real quick, if you have questions tonight, you ask us in the chat box or comments on the youtube page, and well get to as many as we can. If youre interested in purchasing the book, and i hope that you do, you can find it at most major retailers, but we like to point people toward bookshop. Org where you can find just about any book youre looking for and support independent booksellers across the country. Again, thats bookshop. Org. Please give them a look. I mentioned to someone the other day that i was reading the senates words in preparation for the event tonight, and they said, oh, thats the new faulkner biography. I said, well, you got the faulkner part right. The best way i can describe this book is equal parts. Literary history, social commentary and literary criticism. I think it will band to either of those subjects. What the book really did for me was force me to give serious thought on where faulkner stands
Peter i am going to go ahead and turn it over to john. I want to start with something i read in the introduction. Just absolutely fascinated by. And it is about your father. It is really a lovely story. Irwin silber. Book, published a songs of the civil war. He was not like a diehard civil war buff. He was not that kind nina he did like to sing the songs. Peter i have a question about your father. This is what you wrote. This book is not about my father civil war. It is partly about the people who created the civil war my father came to love as well as those who created the kind of civil war that he despised. So tell us, what did you mean by that . How can that help us sort of frame your book . Then we will turn it over to john. Nina so i think come in terms of the kind of the civil war that he came to love, i guess i would say that was the civil war i am going to say it was the civil war created by the popular front. By that, i mean this sort of loose coalition of civil rights organiz
The man who didnt get it, charles hughes, Supreme Court justice, all but won the election in 1915. In fact, when president Woodrow Wilson went to bed the night Election Night, he thought he was beaten. If he would have been elected how American History goes in several different directions, on suffrage for women, civil rights. What does he do on Foreign Policy . Germany baited us into war. Hes the one you could write novels about. Charles evans hughes who is on the Supreme Court and then left the Supreme Court when he ran for president and then went back on the Supreme Court. One of the finest minds on the court. Fellow justice called Charles Evans hughes, the greatest in our great line of chief justices. Why hughes . Robert jackson provided part of the answer when he was attorney general. Jackson said that hughes, quote, looks like god and talks like god, end quote. 1916 footage of charles hughes, that years president ial nominee campaigned soon after the Republican National convention
For a longer piece. It is an extraordinary watershed, historical moment. I think we are living through a third american reconstruction effort to reconstruct democracy so that it is multiracial, multicultural. Our first efforts were after the civil war. 1865 to 1877. We did achieve some racial progress. We had black elected officials. 1500 we had a freedmens bureau. We had the creation of black churches and Public Schools, but we also institutionalized racial segregation rather quickly by the 1880s and 1890s. And we did it through racial violence and public policy. Our second reconstruction is the Civil Rights Movement between 1954 and 1965. When we think about Public School desegregation and the Voting Rights act and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. There was again racial progress, but that was really quickly closed off when we think about 1968. The assassination of Martin Luther king jr. , the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, the assassination of malcolm x. Now, we have another effort. In
Longsuffering panelists for bearing with me as i arrived at a workable concept and title. I did have a very clear idea of what i wanted this symposium to be, a blend of wellknown speakers who would discuss what theyve learned about the study of the civil war over decadeslong careers, blended with excellent lesserknown speakers whom you should want well, know well and will want to know well and had them speak about their Exciting New Research and their contributions to civil war scholarship. And i finally stumbled upon a title and a gimmick, using the 2020, 2020 vision, 2020 hindsight, insight, cute idea, i guess. Providing both hindsight and insight into the study of the civil war. With that concept in mind, i want to introduce our new our first speaker, an obvious choice to lead off this conference. Jack davis has been one of the most prominent and accomplished civil war scholars for several generations really. He started as a boy. If i recall correctly, you can correct me if im wrong