he is the great professor of civil war history at the university of georgia. let me say i have a few rules i live by in our field, this is one of them. anything that stephen berry writes i've got to read. he always brings to his research incredible, beautiful writing with rich insights. we like him so much. his work is so good. you want to be jealous but you can't, steve is a wonderful guy. a fantastic teacher as well. i have sent many students to work with steve over the years. and at university of georgia, he is not only a prolific scholar, he has written or edited six books. my favorite is all that makes a man, love ambition in the civil war south. that was his dissertation. done some time ago at the university of north carolina. william barney was his adviser who is still there, teaching at carolina. another book that i would highly recommend he edited, fantastic book called weirding the war, stories from the civil war's ragged edge. and other things that he has engaged in, a lot of digital projects and has many of his students, graduate students working on projects as well. my favorite of all digital projects titled private voices, the corpus of american civil war letters. many of the letters and private voices come from soldiers who were either semi literate or illiterate, and what's best of all about the project is that all of the letters are transcribed. private voices. fantastic digital project. today steve berry speaks to us on the language of the common soldier. let me welcome steve berry. [ applause ] >> thank you so much. i am delighted to be here. thanks, pete, for that generous introduction. as pete mentioned, stephen berry from university of georgia. i specialize in civil war studies. lately more involved in the running of the center for virtual history which specializes in digital projects. one of the first projects was this one, invasion of america. it animates every native american land session. you might guess all those sessions were made under great duress over the course of a century, ugs seized 1.5 billion acres. you have to imagine it playing out as native americans make land sessions from coast to coast between 1776 and 1887 my guess maybe that this site plugged into contemporary debates about who is an immigrant anyway, who is an american anyway, the site went viral, crashed servers, garnered views where google does analytics, including easter island. this is another of our early projects. u.s. news map. this one allows you to search 11 million newspaper pages between 1789 and 1922, 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. this project was awarded an award from neh and from library of congress. my partner in crime got to meet one of our senators. this is my baby lately. csi dixie which ago debates coroner inquests from 19th century south. they called it beautifully conceived, profoundly mournful digital history site. you all don't know me, beautifully conceived, profoundly mournful is something i would like to see on my tombstone. my focus is on one of our other projects, one that's way more ambitious and has gotten way little attention, not as much as it deserves. this sounds like a porn site. we thought that would lift up the traffic. anyway, the website is devoted to language of the civil war's common soldier, so it is private in the sense that most men we're looking at are privates. all of the civil war letters on the site, closing in on 10,000, have been pain stakingly selected from archives across the country by my partners in crime. michael ellis at missouri state, and michael montgomery, distinguished professor emeritus at university of south carolina. all of the 10,000 letters were painstakingly selected. what i mean is a letter can only be included on our site if written by someone who is what ling wiss call transitionally literate. they learned letter sounds but don't know proper spelling, syntax, punctuation. the majority of men spell family f-a-m-l-y. that's the way it sounds. makes sense, why not spell it that way. if you don't have your nose in a book, if you spend most of your life jawing with friends and most did, family is good enough. we have best respects to inquiring friends, found them to right, i understood abigail was in a family way, i would be glad to come home but i can't come home, but i can't. please tell mother she must not trouble herself about me for i was just the boy for a good soldier. please take good care of my dog joes i have and don't let my begun rust. best respects to the family and all requiring friends. you know that kid was drafted. or people hate the idea of the silent e. they're stupid. they're silent. why bother with them. they're not married to their wife, they're married to a wif. my dear and loving wife, it is with the greatest of love and pleasure i seek myself to drop you a few lines in answer to your letter you sent. we'll talk about litterist in a minute. dear wife, you never said how much money you received from me. i would like to know how much you received from me. let me know in your next letter. dear wife i have more money to send to you if i could get a chance to send it to you, i could send it. or my dear wife, i was sorrow to hear that mother has been sick, i am in hopes god will restore her to perfect health again. i can say to you i 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 'til i come home again. it is my prayer. or since it is father's day, can't help my son. s-o-n is stupid. it sounds like sun. it makes more sense as s-u-n. dear son. i take my pen in hand to write you a few lines which will inform you that i am well, hoping the few lines may reach and find you in joy and same good blessings. i want you to send me something good to eat if you can for the rags are scanty. i must come to a close for it night, my hand is so numb, i can't write any more. i must get my supper. i want to see you very bad. some time or another i will. close. one last one to complete the family. daughter. silent g-h? it is stupid. we don't think of these things, we're used to english, but it is not as if it is logical. dauter makes sense. write son, let me know whether you got them books. i sent to you my little daughter nora, i have nothing that pleases me here 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 about the loss of daughter and absence of loving and kind wife. i hope god will spare us, let us live together on earth and live in the way we should live. so in all these cases what you see is men using things and spelling the way it should be spelled if english made any sense. i don't need to point out what a herculian effort it was to translate these letters from soldiers that can't spell. you can't use a spell checker. you can't use auto correct. you have to get every letter right. there's erroneous stray punctuation marks that aren't in proper usage, you have to get those right too. and you can imagine they don't have the greatest handwriting. this is a great example. this is a classic of the genre. but men that are transitionally illiterate don't have the greatest hand or penmanship. for some of the men, these are the only letters they ever wrote. many never out of home counties, never so far from home, never had the need to write. these things are scarce. 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. michael spent a decade and a half assembling a haystack of needles. to what end. what is the actual point? what can we do with a haystack of needles. that's 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. in this case, brotherton reveals he doesn't say ought to. he says orter. that's the way he hears it, he knows what letters sounds make, that's what he writes. same thing mentioned in jordan counsel's letter in a prior slide, spells letter litter. same with the word cheer for chair. or take this example of isaac, they keep a heavy guard around us day or night, nobody goes out or comes in, don't know when we will draw, i hope it will be soon for i hant got little tobacco and no money. it is maybe haint. a combination he is going for. maybe this isn't youthful but i find it interesting. you can imagine hollywood script writers or actors using the site to improve pronunciation of characters, how they may have talked. other ling kwis particular values. william brotherwright wasn't the only one that said that. they aren't idiosyncratic pronunciations, they're regional variations. we know that, there were tons of orders and letters in archive. these points don't move the way we do. it is not a national job market for them, don't take a job in san francisco and put up stakes. moving west was a seminal aspect of life in that period, but these are boys whose families mostly stayed put. that means it is not just that they come from their home counties, their language comes from their home counties. that means we can map it. so in this case what we are looking at is what's called a-prefixing. on this map, each dot represents not a letter but letter writer. these are counties of origins of individual authors that tended to use a-prefixing. you can tell from this, everybody does it. at least the transitionally literate man, they're all a-coming, that's the way they talked. it is not distinctly regional to the north or south. some things are. this one. howdy. that sounds like something more often said in the south. didn't say it like howdy partner. it is a contraction of how do ye. i hope we will meet again, give howdy to both black and white. this one surprised me. i didn't realize pronouncing creek as crick was a northern phenomenon. it might have changed through time. certainly that's what our data reveals. this one many of you may be familiar with. dixie was not originally what dixie called itself. dixie was what the north called it. all our letter writers that used the word dixie are from the north. do you guys use this? is this a word here? i never heard of this in my life. means late morning essentially. truly a northern phenomenon, even a pennsylvania phenomenon. forenoon. and gain. if we are gaining weight, it is bad, moving the wrong direction. wasn't true for civil war soldiers, average weight of a soldier was 143 pounds. i don't know about you boys, i left 143 back awhile ago. the average weight of the american male is 200. we're a bit taller, still, they're pretty lean. when somebody is gaining weight, that's a good thing as far as they're concerned. again, it was a northernism. these are ones we can't figure out. maybe in q and a you can help me. using the word fairly. it tends to be northerners use middling. our grub is middling. i will give you detail of the killed and wounded, i know middling well. i will inform you that aaron is right hardy and midlin fat. they don't use that in the south. they have a comparable term which is tolerable, meaning rather, somewhat, fairly. the south uses the word connection for kinship, the north doesn't use it at all. northern families are huge, have giant networks, but don't use the word connection. give me respects to all of the connection. write to me where all our connection is. right how all the connection is. since it is father's day, thought i could finish with a section on regionalisms by looking at what people called their fathers back in the day. i would have thought there was no more southern word in the language than daddy, and it is more southern as we see from this, but it doesn't hold a candle to the use of pap. paps ruled the age in 19th century, far more than daddy. this is confirmed by google. if you look at the blue line, it is pap. it is running stronger through the 19th century to 1900. and it is only relatively late that daddy comes on as a term. again, because it is father's day, i'll give you one more. that's the word father at the top. that's a formal word. ngrams is a formal body of literature. i would discount that almost all together. you see that poppa was stronger until recently. dads are making quick gains in that lower line only in the last few years are we starting to call fathers dad. so there's a shoutout to mine. other linguistic values, looking at theologians. everything you talked about, you say it is interesting, but who cares. i spent time thinking about civil war soldiers, like the idea we may get to hear from them. i like thinking about how they talked. but somebody mielt say you know, i don't think battle of gettysburg turned on what any of these boys called their daddies. fair enough. i would agree. let's look at this. this is an interesting way of measuring the impact of war, impact they leave on the language. and wars typically do this. the desperation, novel circumstances all demand elasticity of expression. english is one of the most elastic languages in the world. you want to know what difference a war makes, ask what impact on the language. one of the classic examples is the word skedaddle which didn't exist in 1860. by 1862, it was in every american's mouth. for all years i played with google ngrams, never saw a curve that steep. it is overnight everybody is talking about skedaddle. let's ask why. not like 1861 was the first time an american army was routed. george washington ran away a lot. one soldier described battle of long island, i can't describe the confusion and horror of the scene, artillery flying, men running every direction, everywhere we turn meet the british or haitians, men screaming in mud, everyone running to save their skins. he didn't know the word when he recorded that, no one invented anything like it until 1861. i can speculate bull run, that's one heck of a skedaddle. i think it is the scale of civil war armies, massive by comparison to anything on the continent, makes retreat seem like a pandemonium, an entire city evacuating at once. but my larger point is what soldiers did with this. first two examples, rebels have possession of this town because we skedaddled. the second example, we have been skedaddling eight days. that comes in 1861. this is what the common soldiers take the word and do with it. dan moorehead skedaddled. we had 35 new recruits come 2 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 a good many has done. it is a synonym for desertion. they do this a lot. civil war soldiers had a feindish love for taking military terms and making them ridiculous. the synonyms for desertion, there are many, half of repurposed military terms. i am going to flank out, run the blockade, take a north carolina discharge, going to press a furlough. i'm going to break the guard. remember, these men are transitionally literate, many can't write well. that doesn't mean they aren't created kr creative in language. they are facing a reality. they need an argo to match. we need to appreciate what a labor it is for common people to move our mother tongue. it is a lot of work. and they're making a demand on us in some ways in the way 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 comically claim he has dignity left, by god, he is a high private. and he is proud of it. doesn't want to be promoted from that. for him, that's as good as it gets. highest thing in the army. or kentucky quick step. a synonym for the trucks. or bodyguard. another name for lous. they take these and apply to an experience that's about desertion, pain, indignity, trying to reclaim some 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 everything, they would do it. we're familiar with seeing the elephant. we talk about that term. we don't examine it much. it is a dominant met for for a taste of battle. the idea that the war is an obscene circus. i seen the monkey show or monkey dance. i guess you have heard before this time that i have see the monkey dance, i did not enjoy the 6 of april as well as i have enjoyed some sundays. he is talking about shiel oh, great bloodbath. i didn't enjoy it as much as i enjoyed some sundays. i saw the monkey dance. i have seen this before, this ironic minimalizing, misdirection. i call it surrendering to the fatal absurd, attitude that amounts to i'm dead anyway, so bring it. as for me, i more or less made up my mind to die the idea i made things easier and the circumstance they didn't see anything else to do. that's from world war i. as soon as he got past that point he said i'm dead anyway, the rest is gravy, his time went a lot easier. but you see that in the civil war, too. i had been living in hopes the people of mc would do something for peace, they have been talking about it so long and i can't see that they have done anything, so we have give up to the idea that we have to fight until we are all killed. same idea, same notion. same conclusion. if i hadn't been a student of the civil war, i would have been a student of world war i. there's an argument about world war i that i accept. inexplicable did he say medication of 8 million people have a cultural effect. the argument in great war and modern memory is that world war i was the midwife to the modern. it destroyed the victorian and gave birth to irony. new age that was more wisful, less trusting, more sad. he pointed it out. you go back to greeks, all of literature is about characters that have more power than most men usually have, even into the medieval age. you're writing about heroes, men with more power than realistic. you get to dickens, you get an orphan that wants one more bowl of gruel. after world war i, we tell stories of men that wake up as cockroaches and worry budget getti -- about going to work. that absurdism has been borne. you see it in european high culture after world war i. in art, cubism comes in before world war i. and these nightmare dreamscapes. you see it in science. it will bend to culture. yes. 8 million people are killed, it will. before you have newtonian physics, it becomes popularized. the notion that things are relative. sigmund freud, the notion that we're driven by irrational urges to go back to childhood. all of that an attempt to explain what they did to themselves. it marks their culture. 8 million deaths make a difference. outside of a few outsiders, men who are actually and directly damaged by the war like mark twain, they absorb 700,000 dead and see the sacrifice as pure good. lost cause and one cause. later emancipation as an almost white victory in the inevitable march of american freedom. reading private voices, i'm less sure. the more i read of their letters, 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 a war's effect, should look -- not look to high culture, look to the low, look to the haystack of needles. so let's do it. what do i think are the most important lessons i learned so far from working with private voices? start with this question of literacy. literacy rates for soldiers are estimated at 80%, for confederates, 90% for union soldiers. i am not disputing that. i am disputing the idea that literacy is one thing, some uniform condition that we are or are not literate. it is not that. it is a continuum. take this letter as an example. another letter come here this evening dated 13 february, 1864. the father was dead. sister was also dead. i am sorry to hear that news. write to me as quick as this letter comes to hand for i don't get any letters by you from the mail. the soldier who wrote this letter is thornton sexton, from ash county, north carolina, serving as private in the 37th. i say he quote wrote it, he is perfectly i will literate. he got a buddy who was more literate to write this for him because he is desperate. whoever wrote the letter doesn't know how to spell here or dead or news or quite or mail. sexton was his buddy and they were desperate. we have to treat sexton's condition seriously. can you imagine how helpless it would feel. doesn't know if his dad is dead, if his sister is dead, doesn't know how to get a letter to them. that's a different helplessness than we commonly recognize. we can get any answer to anything. i can call my son now, he wouldn't answer, but i could. we could google in a nanosecond. we have information and people at our fingertips. we close distance like magic. but they're far away, very remote, and often under duress. as it turns out, sexton's father and sister were fine. sexton never learned that before he was killed. of course, at the far epidemic -- end of the spectrum, we are pretty well used to black people. there is a black boy that visits us sometimes, we pull a good deal of fun out of him and good deal of information too. he can't read or spell but trying to learn. i think he is as smart a boy as i have seen not to be educated. i love this idea that hamilton is a pennsylvania soldier saying this guy can't spell, and this guy is uneducated, and he clearly doesn't see that he is in a transitional literacy state, too. that's my point. we need to realize that all of these civil war soldiers are operating on a spectrum of literacy that needs to be taken seriously. so why, what would it matter. if they're not habitual writers, they're not habitual readers or they would figure out proper spelling. then you have to imagine that their information network is effectively spoken, not written. what would that mean for you? first your world is a little smaller. you're dependent on people you talk to and people that you trust. that also means that 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 left to war on a level playing field within a very tight circle of men, and sort of information bubble, endless feedback loop. civil war soldiers are much more in the dark, much more information blind and information starved than we hiter to allow. the other great thing about the haystack, i can apply it against the civil war church. i love ken burn series. this made history, breaking all viewing records for a pbs program. 40 million watched it when it aired in september. more than the populations of the union and confederacy combined. one of the 40 million was me. i was a freshman, home from college. my clueless freshman way. had gone to college to answer one simple question. how can i be a good man in a bad broken world. in the soft glow of my parents' television i found an answer. at the end of the first night when the narrator read the swelling sound, a letter by a young major to his wife. my love for you is deafless. my love of country comes over me like a strong wind, bears me irresistibly on with all of these chains to the battlefield. if i do not return, never forget how much i love you. when my last breath escapes me, it will whisper your name. i remember this moment. it is the moment i became a civil war historian. to my young brain, it was everything that was honorable in this world, everything i wanted to be, entangled love of country, family, swelling strings serve back to me his truth. it wasn't until graduate school i learned jewelry. that isn't my point. my point is people are generally awful. i'm adult now. the larger point relates back to history and language much whoever wrote this letter, not sure he wrote it. probably didn't. whoever wrote it wrote it in what i call the civil war's high tongue. infle inflected through shakespeare and king james bible. they belong to families of means, families with trunks and attics and transfer down the line. they built our archives and our universities. because we love the high tongue. it's irresistible. all our history has been written in it. what i think that means is that all of our civil war history has been effectively overwritten. i remember the first time i read this, my heart was a fountain of waters and i may weep it away for this my ruined country. i thought i never read something so beautiful about what it means to watch a nation you love suicide itself. it's perfect. it's gorgeous. and it's in the high tongue. i learned to appreciate the second example even more now. and it appears our country is ruined 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. that's the exact same sentiment. it isn't as beautiful, but here's the thing. mcguire's version is -- depends upon her understanding of other literary sources. so in this case, she is channeling the bible. john 7:37 on the last day of the feast the great day jesus stood up and cried out if, anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink. whoever believes in me out of his heart will flow rivers of living water. so she's sort of marinades in this kind of a high language, back to the king james version of the bible and shakespeare. so she can spin that out to express her feelings. and the thing that i think about with abernathy, he doesn't have access to those, to express his feelings. they come so much harder to him to find this language. and the thing about this letter, he didn't write this one either. he's perfectly illiterate. he had to grab a buddy to say you know how i feel? i feel like this and i need to write this down. i need you to write this down. i need you to send it home so they know what i feel. it's harder one, it takes a greater act of empathy on my part to fill in the emotional parts that make that moment for him. i agree it's harder. i agree it's not as beautiful. but that doesn't mean that it's any less true. so what would happen if we rewrote the war? what would the war look like? i think it would have a directness. a toughness, rawness, spareness. these sources at private voices always put me in mind of a word they would never know, that means a cultivated coolness. a sense of having no more fs to give. so please let me know in the next letter whether it can talk or not and whether it still sucks titty yet. right? can you imagine? i can't imagine a wife getting this letter on valentine's day and be hike what a romantic about our children. but will is a spareness. honesty to it, right? there is a rawness. that's what he wants to ask. or this letter which she received on christmas 1862. i can tell you we have a heap of men here that have the clap and pox and complaints. they get drunk and run after negroes and mean white women. i can tell with you a clear conscience i take no part with them. if i was the wife getting this letter, i wouldn't be sure. i would be a little dubious. but it's just raw. they're life is lived close to the bone and naked or honest. this is roda bateman, i have a sore throat. i lost my baby. she lived nine days. the rest of the family is well. hoping this finds you both well. we have nothing new to write about. that is a tough cookie. right? do you want to know why the war lasted as long as it did? how men could stand 80% casualties and get up and find the next day? do you want to know who we used to be? they could lose a baby in nine days and say they had nothing new to write about. they're just plain tougher than we are and tougher than about a lou. as tough as they were, as hard as they got, there was exactly one thing that they were soft about. even softer than sullivan. this is what i like about our website. one day was hanging around the office and i was like i wonder what civil war soldiers thought heaven was going to be like? i searched every variation of the word heaven that i could think of. and what you find is that none of the boys talk about st. peter or pearly gates, none describe the here after as a place where sins are forgiven and enlightenment bestowed and believers sit at the right hand of god. all describe it as a mace where families meet to part no more. for many poorer white families, the civil war marked the first and only time they weren't together. absence as much as violence defined what the war meant. and i never knew what it was before to be from home when soldier wrote his family. but i know something about it now. so i still hope that the time has come that we will meet again and if we don't meet in this world, i hope we will meet in heaven where we'll part no more. i read this again and again. part no more. part no more. all i want is to go home. what they yearn for most was heaven to them is family perm nance. that's another difference between them and about a hue. he said his love of country came over him like a strong wind and dragged him with all his genes back to the battlefield. that is beautiful. and some of the boys were hit rally dragged to the battlefield. they fought because they were forced to. what would it have been like if that first night of burn's documentary ended with this letter. would i even be a civil war scholar? my dear wife and children, i see myself this morning with a troubled heart and a xi stressed mind to try to write a few lines to let you know that i heard my sentence read yesterday and it was very bad. and i'm very sorry to let you know for and there is a word missing here, but what he says is for i know that you have a great deal of trouble already. i have to be shot the ninth of this month. i'm sorry to inform you i have but seven days to live. i hope and trust in god when they have slain my body that god will take my soul to rest where i will meet my little babe that has gone before. what about this one? my dear children, you all express your want to see me so bad. i know you don't want to see me any worse than i do you. i think through the mercies of god i was unable to he soo you all again in a short time, for i think this thing will surely come to a close for it looks like we can't stand it much longer. he was killed shortly after. the best thing that cover be. i never craved anything as much in my life but if it not be the good lord's will to spare our lives, i hope we may meet each other in that happy world where we will never part again. isaac was killed in virginia shortly after. you'll remember i said at the outset that our website made no splash. got to give credit where credit is due and admit that he kind of got it. in october 2017, the magazine admitted that we had discovered the first ever known use of the phrase kick ass. now to be honest, they treated our discovery as kind of linguistic oddity. the post appeared on a strong language blog, a sweary blog about swearing. now if we're going to talk about swearing, we actually have to start with peter car michael. that sort of came out wrong. what i mean is we have to start with this essay that he wrote for my collection and now his book. it begins, in the world war i classic "under fire," a soldier approaches the narrator who is immersed in thought writing in the journal about the muck and death of trench warfare. he asks the writer if the comrades will be quoted verbatim? will the characters in print speak like the soldiers really do? they have no intention of hiding the rough language even if the redders condemn him as a foul mouth pig. he is not convinced telling the author he doesn't doubt the desire to be daring but at the last moment you'll find it hard and refuse to be honest. so if you don't put it in, he concludes, your picture won't be accurate. it's like you want to paint them but didn't put in the most glaring colors wherever it appears. i'll put the swear wrdz in the writer said because it's the truth. i believe that barak tidied up the war and made it cleaner. it's what pete called for a decade ago and barack asked for, we have to pay close attention to language. let's end on this kick ass letter. the writer is from 1860. he was a farmer from pennsylvania county, virginia residing on the farm with martha and four young children ages 1 through 5. february 1862, he wrote his wife, i will be glad to see tom oaks come if he's going to fetch my box where we paid $1.50 for pint of whiskey this morning. we don't buy much. but we're blight to buy some. ain't near so tight as they were some time ago. somebody is drunk nearly every day and they don't do nothing with them without they fight them and then they put them in the guard house until they get sober. the captain is down here doing all he can to get us to volunteer again. he thinks everyone ought to stay. okay. you have to know your timing, civil war chronology. so it is february 1862. many of the one year men in terms of enlistment are coming up. that's what's going on. that's why old captain gilbert is running around. that's why the army is talking about how drunk everybody seems to be. we know ultimately that these men would say i don't want to do that and ultimately the confederacy would have to institute a draft and start to forcibly conscript people to much longer tours and then to the duration of the war. but here's the thing about gregory's letter. amid this sort of cavalcade of complaints about the goings on in camp, he writes the word i want to kick ass. that's what he wants to do. he writes in between his own lines with all his griping, gregory was in it to win it. he was in it for the duration. gregory, this man the man who wrote this letter, was killed right here on this ground at gettysburg on july 3, 1863 and an assault on cemetery ridge where half the regiment was killed, wounded or captured. he left four children and a wife at home who never knew where he was buried and barely knew he was dying for. i don't know if gregory kicked ass, i know he got his ass kicked. the gregory letter is just one tan tantalizing example manufacture that should turn up as the site grows. launched with 4,000 letters from four southern states, 6,000 more have been transcribed and as the slate article concludes, that sounds pretty kick ass to me. indeed, it does. thank you very much. >> hello, yes. are you aware of the book baracume? >> yes. >> what do you think having a civil war book written in the same context that it was written? because, you know, it was first written in the early 1900s. people jektrejected it because was written in the vernacular. what are your thoughts? >> i think that will be a fantastic idea. i hope someone takes that on. i might take that on. >> i don't know if everybody is aware of what it is. but it's a story of a slave the last reported last slave but it's written in the vernacular of the slave telling the story as opposed to being written in the plight english. >> thank you. that's a great idea. i appreciate that. >> yeah? >> i'm lee elder. i'm curious about the website and the way it's all put together. do you have them identified by what rejment they were in or anything like that? >> yes. >> so if you wanted to search a specific regiment, you could look? >> you could search by regiment or state or last name or a global text search for individual words. obviously, doing key word searching, a site where everybody spells whatever they want is a little more interesting. so we haven't solved the question of how to really do fuzzy searching, i mean we can't do it. you have to be careful when you do your searches to make sure you're doing everything you want. there are lots of ways to get inside this text. >> sounds like something overdue, thank you. >> yes, thank you. >> yeah? >> i have a question in regards to where you think this is going from here and modern age. i see a lot of students write very phonetically. they're told sound it out. do you think we're going full circle here or is why is that come back to the fold? >> i think that's a really interesting point. and one that i made with this joke about my son. but, you know, they speak in text, right? the quickest way home. do they actually know how to spell? i'm not sure. but spare spelling phonetically and shortly to get everything as -- everything is an acronym, everything has three letters. and so it's just an entirely different kind of a language that does -- when i first read it, i was like oh! i'm a writer. and a reader. of i love books. and i'm watching a generation i know for a fact that there is, you know, the student has been born, the student has been born who will go through the university of georgia with a d average and never read a book in their whole life, not cover to cover. at first i'm hike wellike, well cranky about that. because i write books. but then i realize that there is a different kind of information and they're communicating in a slightly different way. i don't think they read less than we do. i think they read differently than we do. and so as -- maybe this is because i'm a historian i don't like to predict the future, but i'm not sure yet what it's going to do to our language. i do worry that -- as much as i appreciate the low tongue and i'm trying to mind it for insights about the common soldier which we've been after forever, losing the high tongue, i -- that's my favorite thing in the world. that's my soul. i would worry about that deeply if that happened. i'm not sure that is happening. that's a great question. thank you all so much. i really appreciate it. >> this is a special edition of american history tv, the sample of the compelling history programs that air every weekend on american history tv like lectures in history, american a artifacts, real america, the civil war, oral histories, the presidency and special event coverage about our nation's history. enjoy american history tv now and every weekend on espn3. c-span3. >> the house will be in order. >> for 40 years, c-span has been providing america unfiltered coverage of congress, the white house, the supreme court, and public policy vents from washington, d.c. and around the country. so you can make up your own mind, created by cable in 1979. c-span is brought to you by your local cable or satellite provider. c-span, your unfiltered view of government. gary gallagher is the co-he hadder to of "civil war places," seeing the conflict through the eyes of the leading historians. it asks scholars to discuss places they deem significant to the civil war. starting now, historians that contributed to the book discuss their selections. this was part of the gettysburg college civil war institute's annual summer conference. this is an hour and 15 minutes.

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