>> good morning, everyone. take your seats. all right. if we could get seated, please. let me reintroduce myself to the c-span audiences. i am peter carmichael, the director of the civil war institute. i am a member of the history department here. welcome myeasure to good friend, stephen berry. stephen berry is the gregory professor of civil war history at the university of georgia. i have a feway rules i live by in our field and this is one of them. anything that stephen berry writes i have to read. brings berry always incredible, beautiful writing with rich insights. it is what i think many of us like so much. that is a good thing because his tok is so good that you want come to jealousy but you cannot because stephen is such a wonderful guy. he is a fantastic teacher. i have sent many students to work with him over the years. at the university of georgia he has -- he is not only a prolific scholar -- he has written or edited six books. my favorite was his dissertation, done sometime ago at the university of north carolina. his advisor is still teaching at carolina. another book i would highly recommend that he edited is a ingtastic book called "weird the war: stories from the civil war's ragged edge." he is engaged in a lot of digital projects and has many of his graduate students working on these projects. my favorite of these is titled voices: the corpus of civil war letters." many come from soldiers who were semi-literate or illiterate. what is best but the project is the letters are transcribed. you do not have to fuss with the handwriting so much. private voices is a fantastic digital project. today, steve berry will speak to us on the language of the common soldier. let me welcome steve berry. [applause] >> i am delighted to be here. thank you for that generous introduction. i am stephenoned, berry from the university of georgia, where i specialize in civil war studies. lately i am much more involved in the running of our center for virtual history, which specializes in digital objects. one of our first projects was this one, invasion of america. it animates every native american land session -- cession . all of those are made under great duress. the united states seized 1.5 billion acres. depending on estimates, that is an eighth of the arable world. you have to imagine it playing out. between 1776 and 1887. siteight guess that this is plugged into contemporary debates about who is an immigrant anyway, who is an american anyway. the site went viral, crashed our servers, and garnered views in every country where google does analytics, including easter island. this is another of our early projects, the u.s. news map. this allows you to search 11 million newspaper pages between 1789 and 1922 and return results you can see on a map and through time. you can essentially watch things go viral across the united states map in 1922. ans project was awarded award from the neh. and from the library of congress. my partner in crime got to meet one of our senators. , csiis my baby lately dixie, which aggregates corner inquests. slate called it a beautifully conceived and profoundly mournful new digital history site. you all do not know me, but beautifully conceived and profoundly mournful is something i would like to see on my tombstone. [laughter] today is one of our other projects, one i think it's way more ambitious and has gotten way little attention. i know private voices sounds like a poor insight -- porn site . the website is devoted to the language of the civil war's common soldier. it is private in the sense that most of the men we are looking at are privates. all of the civil war letters on this site have been painstakingly selected from archives across the country by my partners in crime. i have to give them a shout out, michael ellis at missouri state and michael montgomery, distinguished professor at university of south carolina. i say all of these 10,000 letters were selected. what i mean is a letter can only be included on our site if it was written by someone who was what linguists call transitional illiterate. these are men and some women who learned their letter sounds but do not know proper spelling, syntax, punctuation, et cetera. the majority of the men on our famly"pell family " because that is the way it sounds. it makes sense. why not spell it that way? if you do not have your nose in a book, and most of these men did not, if you spend most of your life jawing with your famly.", " best respects to all inquiring friends and tell them all to write to me. i understand that abigail was in a family way and i will be glad to come home but i cannot come home. but i cannot. please tell mother she must not trouble herself because i was just a boy for a good soldier. please take care of my dog joseph and do not let my gun rust. best respects to the family and all inquiring friends. , 174th.lmer you know that it was drafted. our people hates the idea of a silent e. they are not married to their "wife," they are married to , which is good enough for them. i drop you a few lines and answered your letter that you sent. we will talk about letters in a minute. dear wife, you never said in your letter how much money you had received from me. i would like to know how much you had received. let me know in your next letter. dear wife, i have more money to send if i could get a chance to send it to you. wife, i was sorrow to hear that mother has been sick but i am in hope that god will restore her to perfect health again. i can say to you that i do want to see you and the dear little children the worst i ever did in my life. may god bless you and them with the best of health until i come home again. it is my prayer. , "son"t is father's day is stupid. "sun" makes more sense. for those of us who have sons, when they are gone it is a little darker. that is a little shout out to my young men. son, i take my pen in hand to write you a few lines that will inform you that i am well. hoping those lines may reach and find you enjoying the same good blessings. i want you to send something good to eat if you can get the chance for our rations is scanty. that sounds like something will would write down in a text wobbling video games to me. his spelling is a little better -- while playing video games to me. his spelling is a little better. i must get my supper. i want to see you very bad sometime or another. i could say more but it is so cold. remain your affection eight son -- affection ate son. one last to complete our family -- daughter. a silent "gh" is stupid. we do not think about this because we are used to english but it is not logical. "dauter" makes more sense. i have nothing that pleases me to look at. if i was with you and my little babe, it would be some enjoyment to me. as it is, i can only study the love of a daughter in the absence of a loving and kind wife. i hope god will spare us and let us live together on earth and live in the way that we should live. in all of these cases, what you see is men who are using what they know of individual letter sounds to approximate the way things should be spelled if english made any actual sense. ok. this is back to the michaels. i hope i do not have to expend what a herculean effort it was to assemble and transcribe 10,000 letters written by soldiers who cannot spell. obviously, you cannot use a spellchecker. you cannot use autocorrect. you have to get every letter right and none of them makes sense. there are erroneous stray punctuation marks that are not improper uses -- usage and you have to get those right. they do not have the greatest handwriting. this is a great example. this is a classic of the genre. men who are transitional illiterate are not always -- do not always have the greatest penmanship. here is the larger point -- for some of the men in this collection, these are the only letters they ever wrote. many had never been out of their home counties, never had the need to write. these things are scarce. i like to put it this way. in a tiny fraction of archives, there are a tiny fraction of letters like this one. this letter is like a needle in a haystack and the michaels spent a decade and a half assembling a haystack of needles. to what end? what can we do with a haystack of needles? that is what i came here to talk about. first, you can actually hear what a civil war soldier sounded like. essentially, these men are phonetic writers. , he is revealing that he does not say "ought to," he says "orter." we saw the same thing in a prior slide. "e spells letter "litter because that is how he says it. it is a litter. wordthing with the -- they spell it "cheer." take this example of isaac coleman. thisape this -- they keep heavy guard around. i do not know when we will draw but i hope it will be soon i hain't got much tobacco maybe this is not truly useful, but i find it interesting. we can imagine reenactors or actors using our site to improve the pronunciation of the characters, how they might actually have talked. .ther linguistic value theas not the only man in confederate army who said "orter" when he meant "ought to. " these are not idiosyncratic pronunciations. they are regional reagents and we know that because there are tons of other "orters" in our archive. these points do not move around the way we do. it is not a national job market for them and they do not take a job in san francisco. it is true that movement west life,seminal aspect of but these are families that mostly stayed put. that means it is not just they come from their home counties. their language comes from their home counties. that means we can map it. looking at is what prefixing. each. represents nota -- each dot represents a letter but a letter writer. these are the county's origins of individual authors -- county of origins of individual authors who used a prefixing. that is the way they talk. it is not distinctly regional to the north or south. some things are. howdy sounds like something that would be more often said in the south. they did not say it like howdy, partner. yeis a contraction of how do . i hope we will meet again so i give howdy to all those black-and-white. sort of surprised me. i did not realize pronouncing a creek as a "crick" was a northern phenomenon. it might have changed through time, but that is what our data revealed. one many of you may be familiar with. dixie was not originally what dixie called itself. dixie was what the north called it. all of our letterwriters that use the word dixie are from the north. do you use this? i have never heard it in my life. it means late, late morning. it is a northern phenomenon, a pennsylvania phenomenon. this is a northern one too. gain. for us, if we are gaining weight this is a bad thing. that was not true for civil war soldiers. the average weight was 143 pounds. i left 143 a while ago. the average weight of the american male is now 200. i know we are taller, but still. they are pretty lean. when somebody is gaining weight, that is a good thing as far as they are concerned. these are ones we cannot figure out. maybe you can help me. , it using the word fairly tends to be -- northerners use middling. i will someday give you a true detail of the killed and wounded because i believe i know middling well and i will inform you. that is what they used the north especially here in pennsylvania. southo not use it in the care they have a comparable term, which is tolerable, meaning rather or fairly. the south uses the word connection for kinship networks and the north does not use it at all. northern families are huge but do not use the word connection. respects to all of the connections or write to me were all of our connections are. southernersing that tended to use only. since it is father's day, i thought i could finish with a section on regionalism's by looking at what people called their fathers back in the day. wasuld have thought there no more southern version of language then daddy. than more southern -- daddy. it is more southern but does not hold a candle to the use of the word "pap." this is confirmed by google. line, look at the blue " is running stronger through 1900. daddy" comes on "a as a term care that is the word father at the top, a very formal word -- term. father athe word the top, a very formal word. what you're seeing here is that was running stronger until relatively recently. is making quick gains in the last few years. there is a shout out to mine. other linguistic value is ohm'sg at neil loggia's -- neologisms. everything we talked about so far you might say it is interesting but who cares. i like the idea that i might -- that we might get to hear from them, but some of you might say you do not think the battle of gettysburg turned on what these boys call their daddies. i would agree. neologisms.t an interesting way at measuring the impact of a war is the impact they leave on language. wars typically do this. it demands and elasticity of expression and english is one of -- most elastic languishes languages in the world. if you want to know what difference a war makes, ask what impact it had on language. one of the classic examples is the word skedaddle, which basically did not exist anywhere on earth in 1860. by 1862, it was in every american's mouth. i have never seen a curve that steep if you look on the lower left. it is overnight everybody is talking about skedaddling. let's ask why. like 1861 was the first time an american army got routed. george washington ran away a lot. one of his soldiers describes the battle of long island as i cannot describe the horror and confusion. our men running in every direction and everywhere we turn we meet the british or hessians, men screaming for help, everyone else running to save their own skins. a skedaddle. every civil war historian here knows that is what a skedaddle looks like. he did not know the word then when he recorded it and no one invented anything like it until 1861. run --peculate wife will why bull run. i think also it is the scale of civil war armies. they are massive by comparison to anything that had been on the continent, which makes her teat -- retreat seem like pendant ammonium -- pandemonium. my larger point is what the soldiers did with this neil loggia's him -- neologism. rebelsst two examples, have possession of this town because we have skedaddled essentially. the second example -- we have been skedaddle and dashed foraddl -- skedaddling days. the common soldiers take this word. new recruits come two days after we come. if they would stay, we would have a full battery, but after they get their bounty most of them will skedaddle as many have done. what you're seeing them do is appropriating a military term to create a synonym for desertion. they do this a lot. had awar soldiers fiendish love for taking military terms and making them ridiculous. the synonyms for desertion, and there are many, half of them are repurposed military terms. all of these mean desertion -- i will flank out, run the blockade, take a north carolina discharge, chris a furlough, break the guard. these men are transitional he literate. literate.ionally that does not mean they are not creative in the way they use language. they are facing a dire reality and need something to match. that is what you see them doing and we need to appreciate what a herculean labor it is for common people to move our mother tongue. it is a lot of work. they are making a demand on us in some ways in the way that they write. they did this with other military terms. the idea of being a high private -- there is no high private. for a man who wants to claim he has dignity left, by god, he is a high private and he is proud of it. he does not want to be promoted from that. that is as good as it gets. quickstep, aky synonym for the trot. or a bodyguard, another name for a louse. they are taking military terms and applying them to an experience that is about desertion and pain and indignity and trying to make some kind of meaning, trying to reclaim some kind of dignity from that. they did this not just with military terms. anything they wanted to take the air out of and they wanted to take the air out of anything. we are all familiar with seeing the elephant. we do not examine it. the dominant metaphor for getting a taste of battle, but doesn't it mary the weird idea that the whole world is an obscene circus? less well-known are terms like i seen the monkey show or i seen the monkey dance. john ingram writes home i guess you have heard before this time that i have seen the monkey dance. six of apriloy the as well as i have enjoyed some sundays. he is talking about shiloh, the great bloodbath. i did not enjoy it as much as i enjoyed some sundays. i saw the monkey dance. i have seen this before, this ironic minimal lysing and misdirection. i call it surrender rising to the fatal -- surrendering to the fatal absurd. i am dead anyway, so bring it. in this circumstance, there did not seem anything else to do. that is from world war i. as far -- as soon as he got past the point where he said i am dead anyway, the rest is gravy and went easier. you see that in the civil war. i had been living in hopes that the people of nc would do something for peace. i cannot see they have done anything so we give up to the idea that we have to fight until we are killed. daniel abernathy. same idea, same conclusion. ofi had not been a student the civil war, i would have been a student of world war i. there is an old argument about world war i that i except -- the inexplicable destination of 8 million people has a cultural effect. is that world war i was the midwife to the modern. it destroyed the victorian and gave birth to irony and a new that was more wistful, less trusting, more sad. if you go back to the greeks, all of literature is about characters that have more power than most men usually have, whether hercules or achilles, even into the medieval age. you are writing about heroes, men who have more power than is realistic. get at to dickens and you little orphan who wants one more bowl of gruel during he has a very realistic amount of power for his situation -- gruel. he has a very realistic amount of power for his situation. menr world war i, we get who wake up as cockroaches. you see it everywhere across european high culture after world war i. in art, there is cubism before world war i. andecomes salvador dali these nightmare dreamscapes of surrealism. you see it even in science. even science will bend to culture. killed,lion people are it will. before you have in tony and -- newtonian physics. histein had done most of work before world war i but becomes popularized in the notion that things are relative eyes -- relative. or sigmund freud. all of that is an attempt to explain what they just did to themselves. it marks their culture. 8 million deaths make a difference. the question has always been did something like this happen after the civil war? most historians have said no outside of a few outsiders, men who were directly damaged like mark twain. the dominant culture managed to absorb 700,000 dead and to see causesacrifice as a lost and the one cause and later emancipation as an almost white victory in the inevitable march of american freedom. reading private voices, i am less sure. the more i read of their letters, the more i realize common men managed to weird the english language to make it answer for the way they felt. the way they felt was cynical and a little pissed. maybe if we want to assess the war's effect we should not look too high culture. we should look to the low. we should look to a haystack of needles. so let's do it. what do i think are the most important lessons i have learned so far from working with private voices? let's start with this question of literacy. literacy rates for civil war soldiers were estimated at 80% for confederates, 90% for union soldiers. i am not disputing that. what i am disputing is this idea that literacy is one thing, some kind of uniform condition that we all either are or are not. it is not that. it is a continuum. take this letter as an example. of february 1864. the father was dead. i am sorry to hear that news. i want you to write to me as quick as this letter comes to hand for i do not get any letters from you by the male. .- mail the soldier who wrote this letter is thornton sexton, serving as a private in the 37th. he is perfectly illiterate. what he did is he got one of his buddies who was a little more literate to write this letter for him because he is desperate. whoever wrote the letter does not know how to spell news or right or quick. but sexton was his buddy and they were desperate. i think we have to treat sexton's condition seriously. can you imagine how helpless it would feel? he does not know if his dad is dead. he does not know how to get a letter to them. that is a different kind of helplessness then i think we commonly recognize because we can get any answer to anything. i could call my son right now. he will not answer, but i could. we can google anything. we have information and people at our fingertips. we close distances like magic but they are far away, very remote, and often under duress. fatherurns out, sexton's and sister were fine. sexton never learned that before he was killed. at the far end of our literacy spectrum are the enslaved. this is john hamilton, 62nd pennsylvania. we are used to black people. there is a black boy here. we pull a good deal of fun out of him and a good deal of information. he cannot read but he is trying to learn. i think he is as smart a boy as i ever seen it not to be educated. that hamiltonea is a pennsylvania soldier saying this guy cannot spell and this guy is uneducated. he clearly does not see that he is in a transitional literacy estate. that -- literacy state. that is my point. we need to realize the soldiers are operating on a spectrum of literacy that needs to be taken seriously. so what would it matter? if they are not habitual writers, they are not habitual readers, or they would have figured out proper spelling. then you have to imagine their information network is spoken, not written. what would that mean? your world is a little smaller. you are dependent upon the people you actually talk to and the people you trust. that also means none of your information is being vetted and verified by outside sources coming to you as a written text. that means rumor and accurate intelligence are at war on a in anplaying field endless feedback loop. civil war soldiers were much more in the dark, much more information blind and , then weon starved have hitherto allowed. the other great thing about the haystack of needles is i can deploy it against once i -- against what i call the civil war -- the urge to transform the civil war into an american iliad. i love can burns's -- ken burns 's series. more people watched it than the population of the union and confederacy combined. one of those people was me. i was a freshman home from college. in my clueless way, i had gone to college to answer one simple question -- how can i be a good man in a bad world? 'n the soft glow of my parents television, i found an answer at the end of that first night with the narrator read a letter by a young major to his wife. sarah, my love for you is deathless. nothing but omnipotence could break it. yet, my love of country comes over me like a strong wind and dares me on with all these chains to the battlefield. i do notreturn -- if return, never forget how much i love you. when my last breath escapes me, it will whisper your name. i remember this moment distinctly because it was the moment i became a civil war historian. to my young brain, everything that was honorable in this world , everything i wanted to be, was love of country and love of family, this swelling strings served back to me as truth. it was not well into graduate ,chool that i learned the truth that his corpse was decapitated and cooked and turned into bone jewelry. that is not my point. larger pointy relates back to history and language. wroter wrote this letter it in what i call the civil , selected tongue through the cadences of shakespeare and the king james bible. because educated men wrote so much because they belonged to families of means, families with trunks and attics and property that they transfer down the line, because they built our archives and our universities, because we love the high tongue, it is irresistible, all our history has been written in it -- what i think that means it's all of our civil war history has been effectively overwritten. this ist time i read to thought i had never read anything so beautiful about what it means to watch a nation that you love suicide itself. it is perfect. it is gorgeous. it is in the high tongue. i learned to appreciate the second example even more. ruinedars our country is and distracted forever. i fear we will never be a happy people again so i think we would all better try and prepare for death. it is the same sentiment. it is not as beautiful, but here's the thing -- mcguire's version depends on her understanding of a literary -- of literary sources. in this case, she is channeling the bible. the day jesus stood up and cried out if anyone deserves let him come to me and drink. out of his heart will flow rivers of living water. she marinades in this kind of high language, in the king james version of the bible and shakespeare. she can spend that out to express her feelings. -- the thing with abernathy -- he does not have access to those to express his feelings. they come so much harder to him. he did not write this one either. he is perfectly illiterate. he had to grab a body to say you know how i feel? i feel like this. i need you to write this down and i need you to send it home so they know what i feel. it is harder won. it takes a greater active empathy to fill in the emotional space that make that moment for him -- act of empathy to fill in that emotional space that make that moment for him. that does not mean it is any less true. what would happen if we went for it and rewrote the war in the low tongue? what would the world look like? i think it would have a toughness, a rawness, a spare ss. the sources at private voices put me in mind of a world -- words they would never know, insouciant, which means a cultivated coolness, a sense of having no more f to give. please let me know in your next whether he caner talk or not and whether it still sucks titty yet. what a romantic. about our children. there is an honesty to it. there is a rawness. that is what he wants to ask. or this letter which ms. ba ggerly receives. we have a heap of men here that have the clap and pox and all complaints. they get drunk and run after mean white women but i can tell you i take no part with them. i would be a little dubious. it is raw. their life is lived close to the bone. it is honest. rhonda bateman writing her brothers -- i have a sore throat. i lost my baby. she lived nine days. hoping this will find you both well. we have nothing new to write about. that is a tough cookie. you want to know why the war lasted as long as it did, how men could stand 80% casualties in a cornfield and fight the next day? do you want to know who we used to be? look no further than women who nine days a baby in and rightly had nothing new to write about. these men are -- these people are tougher than we are. as hard as they got, there was one thing they were soft about, even softer. this is what i like about our website. one day i was hanging around the office and i was like i wonder what civil war soldiers thought heaven would be like. i searched every variation of thinkrd "heaven" i could of. none of the boys talk about st. peter, the pearly gates. all describe it simply as the place where families meet to part no more. for many poor white families, the civil war marked the first and only time they were not together. absence as much as violence defined what the war meant. i never knew what it was before to be from home, but i know something about it now. i still hope that the time is coming that we will meet again and if we do not meet in this world i hope we will meet in heaven, where we will part no more. i read this again and again. part no more. all i want is to go home. what i yearn for most, what sounds like heaven to them, is family. that is another difference. he said his country came over him like a strong wind and dragged him to the battlefield. that is beautiful. some of the boys and private voices were literally dragged to the battlefield and fought because they were forced to. what would it be like if that documentary had ended with this letter? would i be a civil war scholar? children, i see myself this morning with a troubled heart and stressed mind to write a few lines to let you know that i heard my sentence read yesterday and it was bad. -- sorry to let you know there are some words missing here -- for i know you have a great deal of trouble already. thise to be shot at nine month. i have but seven days to live but i hope and trust in god that when they have slain my body that god will take my soul to rest where i will meet my little babe that is gone before. maybe that is unfair to expect that you would end the first night of the civil war with that letter, but what about this one? my dear children, you all express you want to see me so bad, but i know you do not want to see me any worse than i do you. i think through the mercies of god i shall be able to see you again in a short time because this will come to a close. it looks like we came -- can't stand it much longer. he was killed shortly after. andy dear, you are my only dearest friend in this world. if ever i live to get through with this war, i will always take your advice hereafter in anything you say. it appears i will never get to see you anymore in this world. could i just see you one hour, it would do me more good than the best things that ever could be. i never have craved anything much in my life but that it be the good lord's will to spill -- spare our lives. i hope we will meet in that happy world where we world -- where we will never part again. he was killed shortly after. i said to the outset that our ash.ite has made no sl i have to admit that slate kind of got it. the magazine admitted we had discovered the first ever known use of the phrase kick ass. to be honest, they treated our discovery as a linguistic oddity. appeared onginally a blog about swearing. if we are going to talk about swearing, we have to start with peter carr michael. -- carmichael. we have to start with this essay wewrote for my collection are doing the war and now his book -- weirding the war and now his book. a soldier approaches the narrator, who is immersed in thought, writing in his journal about the death of trench warfare. he asked the writer if it will be verbatim. will the characters in print speak like soldiers really do or will you tidy it up and make it proper? i am talking about swearwords. the writer agrees he has no intention of hiding the rough language, even if readers might condemn him as foulmouthed. he tells the author he does not doubt his desire to be daring but at the last moment he will find it hard and refuse. if you do not put it in, your picture will not be very accurate, like you wanted to paint them but did not put in one of the most glaring callers wherever it appears. i will put the swearwords income of the writer says, because it the writerh in, says, because it is the truth. and pete areack right. civil war historians have by and large tidied up the war and made it proper. the key to reversing this is to do what pete called for a decade ago and barack called for a century ago. we need to pay careful attention to language. let's do that by ending on this kick ass letter. the writer is john b. gregory, a residing onvirginia a farm with his wife martha and therefore young children. in february 1862 he wrote his wife i am glad to see tom oakes come. he is going to touch my box where we paid for a pint of whiskey this morning. we do not by much but we are obliged to buy some. somebody has drunk -- is drunk nearly every day and they do not them unless they fight and then they will put them in the guardhouse until they get sober. the captain is doing everything he can to get us to volunteer. he thinks everyone ought to stay. ,ou have to know your timing your civil war chronology. february 1862 means many of the terms of men's enlistment are coming around. that is probably why the army as being permissive about how drunk everyone seems to be. we know lots of these men would say i do not to do that and the confederacy would have to institute a draft and forcibly to longer tours and then the duration of the war. here's the thing about gregory's letter. amid these complaints, he writes kickassd i want to between his own lines. he was in it to win it. he was in it for the duration. gregory, the man who wrote this letter, was killed right here on this ground at gettysburg on july 3, 1863 in an assault on cemetery ridge, where more than half of his regiment were killed, wounded, or captured. he left four children and a wife at home who never knew where he was buried, barely knew he was dying for. i do not know if gregory kicked ass. kicked.e got his ass slate noted that the gregory letter is just one example of many that should turn up in the private voices archive as the site grows. launched with 4000 letters from four states, 6000 more have been transcribed and are expected in the coming year, along with a dynamic mapping features so users can explore regional variations in word usage and speech patterns. as the article concludes, that to me.pretty kickass indeed it does. thank you very much. [applause] >> i was wondering what you think of having a civil war book written in the same context that barrett kuhn was written. it was first written in the people rejected it because it was written in the vernacular. what is your thoughts -- what are your thoughts? i think that is a fantastic idea. it is a story of a slave, reportedly the last slave, written in the vernacular of the slave telling the story as opposed to being written in polite english. >> that is a great idea. i appreciate it. about therious website and the way it is put together. do you have them identified by what regiment they were in her anything like that so if you wanted to search a specific regiment --? >> you can search by regiment, state, last name. doing keyword searching on a site where everybody spells whatever way they want to is a little more interesting. we have not solved the question of how to really do fuzzy searching. but this is very fuzzy indeed. you have to be careful when you do your searches to make sure you are getting everything you want, but there are lots of ways to get inside all of the text. >> sounds like something i "orter" do. >> i have a question in regards to where you think this is going from here. i see a lot of students write very phonetically. they are told to sounded out. do you think -- sound it out. do you think we are going full circle or is there another reason that is coming back? >> i think that is an interesting point and one i made with this joke about my son. they speak in text. do they actually know how to spell? i am not sure. they are spelling phonetically, shortly. everything is an acronym. everything has three letters. it is a different kind of language. likei first read it, i was , "oh" because i'm a writer and a reader and i love books. i am watching a generation -- i know a student has been born who will go through the university of georgia without having read a book cover to cover it. at first i am cranky about that because i write books. realized that they are awash in a different kind of information and they are communicating in a different way. i do not think they read less than we do. i think they read differently than we do. am a this is because i historian and i do not like to predict the future, but i am not sure what it is going to do to our language. i do worry that as much as i appreciate the low tongue and am trying to my mate for insights fort the -- mime it insights about the common soldier, losing the high ton gue? that is my favorite thinker that is our soul. i would worry -- thing. that is my soul. i would worry deeply if that happened. thank you all so much. i really appreciate it. [applause] >> thank you so much, steve. we are setting out for our book signing in the back corner of the ballroom. there at 12:00. >> you're watching american history tv on c-span3. this conference from gettysburg college is now in a lunch break until 1:15 p.m. eastern. we will be back then with more live coverage, starting with -- edwardedward ayres book the thin light of freedom. our lecturer in history series looks at early english missions in colonial america. welcome back. i think we are going to get started today. we are shifting the direction of our course today. we are moving away from , in particular the jesuits. we spent a lot of time talking about the jesuits. we will move toward the protestants. we will look at their missionary efforts, the work they did. today we are looking at their work in early new england. one thing i want you to think about for seminar is this critical question. you have basically done a whole crash course

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