anything that stephen berry writes, i've got to read. stephen berry always brings to his research incredible, beautiful writing, with rich insights and what i think, many of us, we like him so much and that's a good thing. his work is so good that you want us to come to the jealousy but you can't, stephen is such a wonderful guy. he is a fantastic teacher as well. many of my students have gone to work with him over the years. at the university of georgia he has not only -- he is not only a prolific scholar, but he has written or edited six books. my favorite is "all that makes a man," love and ambition in the civil war south." that was his him -- his dissertation done sometime ago at the university of north carolina. william barney is his advisor who is still there. another book i would highly recommend, which he edited, a fantastic book called we're doing the war. war, storieshe from the civil war possible ragged edge. the other thing, he's engaged in a lot of digital projects and has many of his students, his graduate students working on these projects as well. my favorite of all the digital projects is entitled private voices, american civil war letters. many of the letters come from soldiers who were either semi literate or ill literate. best of all about the project, all the letters, they are transcribed. you have to fuss with the hand writing so much. again, private voices, a fantastic digital project. today steve barry is going to speak to us on the language of the common soldier. let me welcome steve barry. [applause] >> well, thank you all so much. i'm delighted to be here. thank you to -- think you for that very generous and direction. mentioned, i'm stephen berry from the university of georgia, where i specialize in civil war studies, but lately i'm much more involved in our running for the center virtual history that center -- specializes in digital projects. one of our first projects was this one, invasion of america. every native american land session. all of those concessions were made under great arrests and under the course of it century the united states sees 1.5 billion acres. depending on estimates that's a 1/8 of the terrible world. you have to imagine this is playing out in pieces and parts as native americans make their land concessions from coast-to-coast. you might guess, maybe, that this site is plugged into contemporary debates about who is an immigrant, anyway, and who is an american, anyway. the site quickly went viral, crashed our servers, garnered views in every country where google does analytics, including easter island. this is another of our early objects. the u.s. news map allows you to search 11 million newspaper pages between 1789 and 1922. the return results that you can see on a map and through time, you can essentially watch things go viral across the united states in 1922. this project was awarded an award from the neh. and from the library of congress. my partner in crime got to meet one of our senators. this is my baby, lately. csi dixie aggregates corner inquests. slate called the project a beautifully conceived and profoundly mournful new digital history site. you all don't know me, but beautifully conceived and profoundly mournful is like that something i would like to see in my tombstone. [laughter] today is on one of our other projects. one that i think is way more ambitious and has gotten way less attention. not as much as it deserves. i know it sounds a bit like a pornography site. honestly we thought that would lift up the traffic. the website is devoted to the language of the civil war's common soldier. private in a sense that most of the men we are looking at our privates. all of the civil war letters on the site -- and we are closing in on tens of thousands, have been painstakingly selected from archives across the country by my partners in crime and i have to give them a shot at -- out of. michael l at -- michael ellis and michael montgomery, distinguished professors at the university of south carolina. these 10,000 letters were painstakingly celeste -- selected. what i mean by that is the a letter can only be included on the site it was written by someone who what linguists call transitional he literate. men and women who learned their letter sounds but don't know proper cell -- proper spelling spelling, orper syntax. the majority of the men on our site spell family f m a l y, without a why, that's the way it sounds, right? it makes sense. why not spell it that way? if you don't have your nose in a book, most of these men didn't, if you spend most of your life join with your friends, most of these men did, that's good enough. in this case we have best respects to all inquiry friends, tell them all to write to me as soon as you can. i understood that abigail was in a family way and i would be glad to go home but i can't come home. but i can't. please tell mother that she must not trouble herself about me. i was just a boy for a good soldier. please take care of my dog, joseph, don't let my gun rust. best respect to the family and all requiring friends. 174th. you know that kid was drafted. hate theple absolutely idea of a silent e. they are stupid. they are silent, why bother with them question mark they are not married to their wife, wife, ,hey are married to their wif, more than good enough for them to get "it is with the greatest love and pleasure that i seek to drop a few lines in answer to the letter that you sent. we will talk about those in a minute. to"dear wife, i would like know how much money you received from you. let me know in your next letter. i have more money to send if i could get a chance to send it, i could send it. didy do wife, i was sorrow to hear that mother has been sick, but i am in hopes 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. god bless you and them with the best of health until i come home again, that's my prayer. or since it is father's day -- i son iselp myself -- stupid. sounds like soan. sun makes sense. when they are gone, it's darker. it makes a lot of sense. that's a little shout out to my little man at home. hand to write in a few lines, hoping that they may reach him find you enjoying the same good blessings. or "i want you to send something good to eat if you can get to eat -- get the chance, our rations are scanty. that sounds like something will would write in a text playing video games to me. tonight,ome to a close my hand is numb and cannot write anymore. sometime or another, i could say much more, but i remain your affectionate son. one last one to complete our family. daughter. is full stupid, right? i love the english language, but it is not as if it is logical. daughter? utr makes a lot more sense. pepper the place with simon -- silent e's. "i have nothing that pleases me here to look at. if i was with you and my little babe it would be of enjoyment to you but as it is i can only study about the loss of a daughter in the absence of a loving and kind wife. i hope that 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 are men using what they know of individual letter sounds to approximate the way things should be sent -- spelled if english made any actual sense. ok, this is back to the michael's. i hope i don't need to point out what a herculean effort it was to assemble and transcribe 10,000 letters written by soldiers who cannot spell. obviously you cannot use a spell check. you cannot use auto correct. you have to get every letter write and none of them make sense. there is erroneous, stray punctuation marks everywhere. you have to get those exactly right, too. and as you can imagine, they don't have a greatest handwriting. this is a great example, a men whoof the genre, are transitional he literate don't always have the greatest penmanship.anship 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 the home counties, been so far from home or had the need to write very the point is that 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 michael's spent a decade and a half with an assemblage of needles. what's the 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 the civil war soldier sounded like. essentially these men are phonetic writers. in this case, the brother reveals that he doesn't say ought to. pieces order. we ordered go. so that's where he -- that's what he writes. we saw the same thing -- i mentioned jordan counsel in a private -- prior slide. this is how he says it. it's a litter. same thing with the word chair. it's their kitchen table, it's not a chair, it's a sheer so far as they know. or take this example of isaac goldman -- they keep heavy guard around us day and night, no one goes out or comes in. don't know when we will draw, but i hope it will be soon because i don't got that little tobacco and no money. maybe it's a haven't and kind of combination he's going for their. this is an truly useful, but i find it interesting and we can imagine reenactors, hollywood script writers, using our site to try to improve the pronunciation of the characters. how they might actually have talked. other linguistic values. we a brotherton wasn't the only man in the confederate army who said order when he meant ought to. jordan counsel wasn't the only soldier who said litter when he meant letter. these are not idiosyncratic pronunciations, they are regional variations. we know that because there are tons of other orders and letters research. the important thing is that they don't move around the way we do. it's not a national job market for them. they don't take a job in san francisco and pull up stakes. it doesn't happen for them. it is absolutely true that movement west was a seminal aspect of life in that time, but these boys families mostly stayed put. as such is that they come from their home counties, their language comes from their home counties. meaning we can map it. in this case what we are looking called a prefix.led a so, i'm going, coming, dying. each dot represents not letter, but a letter writer. these are the counties of origin of individual authors who tended to use a prefix. what you can tell from this is that everybody does it. at least of the transitional he literate men are all going and coming. that's the way that they talked. it's not distinctly regional either to the north or the south . some things are. this one was surprising to me. howdy. something something that would be more often set in the south. they didn't say it like partner, like at the front like hello. it's a contraction of how do you and it is something that you are told or gave. i give howdy to all, both black and white. this one actually sort of surprised me. i didn't realize that pronouncing creek as a creek was was arn -- was -- as crik northern phenomenon. but that is what our data reveals. this one, many of you may be familiar with this, dixie was not originally what xe called itself. dixie was what the north called it. so, all of our letter writers that use the word dixie are from the north. do you guys use this? is this a word appear? it means like late morning. it's a truly northern phenomenon , even a pennsylvania phenomenon. this is a northern 1, 2. gain. for us if we are gaining weight, this is a bad thing. we are going in the wrong direction. that wasn't true for civil war .oldiers the average weight of a soldier was 143 pounds. i don't know about you boys, i left a hundred and 43 a while ago. the average weight of the american male is now 200. i know we are a bit taller, but still. when someone is gaining weight, it's a good thing as far as they are concerned. but again, it was a northern is him. these ones i can't figure out, maybe you can help me in the q&a . the using the word fairly, northerners tend to only use the word middling. in this example the grub is middling. i will someday give you something of a true detail other killed and wounded because i believe i know middling well. or i believe that karen is middling fat. that is what they used him in the north. they don't use it in the south. they have a comparable term, or fairly.mparable the south uses the word for -- the word connection for kinship networks. of course northern families are huge with giant kinship networks, but they don't use that word. give my respects to all of the connection. write about how all of the connection is. it's something that southerners only tended to use. since it is father's day i thought i could finish with this section about regionalism with how people address their fathers in the day. i would have thought that there is no more southern word in the language than daddy, i hear it a lot in georgia. and it is more southern, as we see, but it doesn't hold a candle to the use of the word path. the 19th the age in century. far more than daddy. bys is actually confirmed google engrams. yhe blueline is essentially pap and it's only relatively dy comes on as a term that's the word -- term. that's the word father at the top. a very formal word in a very formal body of literature. i would discount that a most altogether. from here you can see the pop off was running much, much stronger until relatively recently. theis making quick gains in lower line. only in the last few years do we start to call our fathers dad. there's a shadow to mine. values, looking at nilo just sums. everything that we have talked about so far, you might say -- ?k, it's interesting, but tears i have spent a lot of time thinking about civil war soldiers and i like the idea that we could hear from them, i like thinking about how they talk. that of people will say the battle of gettysburg didn't turn on when anybody called the daddy. fair enough, fair enough. nilo just him's, this is an interesting way of measuring the impact of a war, the impact they leave on a language. wars typically do this, right? andnovel circumstances experience all demands elasticity of expression. english is one of the most elastic languages in the world. so, if we want to know the difference of war makes, ask the impact it had on the language. one of the classic examples from the civil war is the word skedaddle, which basically didn't exist. was in every american's mouth. for all the years i have been playing with google engrams, i have never seen a curve that steve. everyone is talking about skedaddle. let's ask about why. why not before? it's not like it's just 1861 was the first time they got about it. seen with the air to plug -- everywhere we have looked we have seen the haitians, men up to their knees in mud, screening for health, everyone writing -- running to save their own skin that's their own skins. that's what a scab battle looks like. but no one -- he didn't know the word than when he recorded that and no one had invented anything until 1861. i could speculate why. bull run, probably. that is one heck of a skedaddle. it's also the scale of civil war armies, they are massive by comparison to anything on the continent, making rich treat seem less personal, more like a pandemonium, like an entire city evacuating at once. but my larger point is what the soldiers then did with this nilo just him. in the first two examples you can see that the rebels had possession of the town. because we have skedaddled, essentially. the second example is that we have been skedaddle in freight days. skedaddleing for eight days. this is what the common soldiers take in do with the word. dan morehead has skedaddled. 35 million new recruits come days later and if they stayed we would have a full battery but after they get their bounty, most of them will skedaddle, as a good many has done. so what you are seeing them doing is essentially appropriating a military term to create a synonym for desertion. they do this a lot. civil war soldiers had a 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 this -- flanking out, running the blockade, taking a north carolina discharge, pressing a furlough, breaking the guard, this is their argo. remember, these men are transitional he literate and many of them cannot write well. that doesn't mean that they aren't creative in the way they use language. they are facing a dire reality and they need the argo to match. that is what you start to see them appreciate what a herculean labor it is for common people to move our mother tongue. it's a lot of work. they're 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 comically 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. for him, that is as good as it gets. that's the highest thing in the army. or the kentucky quickstep, that's a synonym for the trots. or a bodyguard, that's another name for a louse. they are taking these military terms and they're applying them to an experience that's really about desertion and pain and indignity and trying to make some kind of meaning, trying to reclaim some kind of dignity from that. actually, 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 are all familiar with seeing the elephant. we all talk about that term. we don't really examine it that much. it's the dominant metaphor for getting a taste of battle, but doesn't it marry the sort of weird joie de guerre with the 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." on april 6, john ingram writes home, "i guess you have heard before this time that i have see the monkey dance. i did not enjoy the sixth of april as well as i have enjoyed some sundays." he is talking about shiloh, the great bloodbath of american innocence. i did not enjoy it as much as i enjoyed some sundays. i saw the monkey dance. i have seen this before, this kind of ironic minimalizing and misdirection. i call it surrendering to the fatal absurd, an attitude that amounts to "i am dead anyway, so bring it." "as for me, i had more or less made up my mind to die. the idea made things seem easier. in this circumstance, there did not seem anything else to do." that is siegfried sassoon from world war i. as soon as he got past that point where he said, "i am dead anyway, the rest is gravy," man, his time went a lot easier. you see that in the civil war, too. "i had been living in hopes that the people of nc would do something for peace, though they have been talking about it so long and i cannot see they have done anything. so we have give up to the idea that we have to fight until we are killed." daniel abernathy. same idea, same notion, same conclusion. if i had not been a student of the civil war, i would have been a student of world war i. there is an old argument about world war i which i accept -- the inexplicable destination of 8 million people actually has a cultural effect. the argument that paul fussell makes in "great war and modern memory" is that world war i was the midwife to the modern. it destroyed the victorian verities and gave birth to irony and a new age that was more wistful, less trusting, more sad. he pointed it out in literature, right? if you go back to the greeks, all of the literature is about characters that have more power -- mostly men -- than most men usually have, whether it's hercules or heracles or achilles, even into the medieval age. you are writing about heroes, men who have more power than is realistic, like "the song of roland." you get to dickens and you get a little orphan who wants one more bowl of gruel. he has a very realistic amount of power for his situation where the best thing that could happen is he gets another bowl of gruel. after world war i, we tell stories of men who wake up as cockroaches and worry most about getting to work. that kind of absurdism has been born. you see it everywhere across european high culture after world war i. in art, there is cubism coming in before world war i. it becomes salvador dali and these nightmare dreamscapes of surrealism. you see it even in science. even science will bend to culture. yes, if 8 million people are killed, it will. before you have newtonian physics. newtonian system is destroyed in part by world war i. einstein had done most of his work before world war i but becomes popularized in the notion that things are relative. or sigmund freud, the notion that we're actually driven by irrational urges that go back to childhood? 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 actually and directly damaged by the war like mark twain or ambrose bierce. the dominant culture managed to absorb 700,000 dead and to see their sacrifice as pure goods, the lost cause and the one cause and later emancipation as an almost white victory in the inevitable march of american freedom. reading "private voices," i am just 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 actually want to assess the war's effect we should not look to 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 are typically 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 literate. it is not that. it is a continuum. take this letter as an example. "another letter come here this evening dated the 13th of february, 1864. the father was dead and that sally, his sister, also 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 mail." ok. the soldier who "wrote" this letter is thornton sexton, born 1832, from ashe county, north carolina, serving as a private in the 37th north carolina. now, i say he "wrote" it because 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, right, does not know how to spell "here" or "dead" or "news" or "write" or "quick" or "any" or "mail." 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 doesn't know if his sister is dead. he does not know how to get a letter to them. that is a different kind of helplessness than i think we commonly recognize because we can get any answer to anything. i could call my son right now. he wouldn't answer, but i could. we can google anything in a nanosecond. we have information and people at our fingertips. we close distances like magic but they are 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 in spotsylvania. of course, at the far end of our literacy spectrum are the enslaved. this is john hamilton, 62nd pennsylvania. "we are pretty well used to black people. there is a black boy here that visits us sometimes that we pull a good deal of fun out of him and a good deal of information too. he cannot read or spiel but he is trying to learn. i think he is as smart a boy as i ever seen not to be educated." i just love this idea that hamilton 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 state too. that is 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 are not habitual writers, they are obviously not habitual readers either, or they would have figured 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 are dependent for your information 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 left to war on a level playing field within in a very tight circle of men in sort of information bubble and endless feedback loop. civil war soldiers i begin to think were much more in the dark, much more information blind and information starved, than we have hitherto allowed. the other great thing about the haystack of needles is i can deploy it against what i call the civil war's high church -- our urge to transform the civil war into an american iliad. i love ken burns's series. "the civil war" made television history as we know in 1990, breaking all viewing records for a pbs program. 40 million people watched it that first night when it aired in september. that's more than the populations of the union and confederacy combined. one of those 40 million was me. i was a freshman home from college. in my clueless freshman way, i 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, along with 40 million people, found an answer at the end of that first night when the narrator read, to the swelling sound of "ashokan farewell," a letter by a young major named sullivan ballou to his wife, sarah. "sarah, my love for you is deathless. it seems to bind me with mighty cables that nothing but omnipotence could break. yet, my love of country comes over me like a strong wind and bears me irresistibly on with all these chains to the battlefield. if i do not return, my dear sarah, never forget how much i love you. when my last breath escapes me, it will whisper your name." i remember this moment very distinctly because it was the moment i became a civil war historian. to my young brain, ballou was everything that was honorable in this world. he was everything i wanted to be, a tangled love of country and love of family, ascending with swelling strings and served back to me as truth. it was not well into graduate school that i learned the disturbing truth about ballou's death, that his corpse was decapitated and cooked and turned into trophies and bone jewelry. that is not my point. my point isn't that people are generally awful. i'm an adult now and i take that for a given. my larger point relates back to history and language. whoever wrote this letter -- we're not really sure ballou wrote it. he probably didn't. it was his friend. anyway, whoever wrote it wrote it in what i call the civil war's high tongue, inflected through the signature cadences of shakespeare and the king james bible. because educated men like ballou wrote so much, because they belonged to families of means, families with trunks and attics and property that they transferred 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 is that all of our civil war history has been effectively overwritten. an example will help. i remember the first time i read this. "oh, that my heart was a fountain that i might weep it away for this, my ruined country." i 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, and it is in the high tongue. i've learned to appreciate the second example even more. "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." it is the exact same sentiment. it is not as beautiful, but here's the thing -- mcguire's version depends on her understanding of other literary sources. 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, as the scripture has said, out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.'" she sort of marinates in this kind of high language, back to the king james version of the bible and shakespeare. she can spin that out to express her feelings. the thing that i think about with abernathy -- he does not 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 did not write this one either. he is perfectly illiterate. he had to grab a buddy 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 act of empathy on our part to fill in the emotional interstices that make that moment for him. i agree it's harder, and i agree it's not as beautiful, but that does not mean that it is any less true. what would happen if we went for it and rewrote the war in the low tongue? what would the war look like? i think it would have a directness, a toughness, a rawness, a spareness. the sources at "private voices" put me in mind of a word they would never know, insouciant, which basically means a cultivated coolness, a sense of having no more f's to give. "babe, please let me know in your next letter whether it can talk or not and whether it still sucks titty yet." right? i can't imagine a wife getting this letter on valentine's day. what a romantic. about our children. but there is a spareness, there is an honesty to it, right? there is a rawness. that is what he wants to ask. or this letter which ms. baggerly received on christmas 1862. "mag, i can tell you we have a heap of sort of men here that have the clap and pox and all complaints. that is that they get drunk and run after negroes and mean white women, but i can tell you with a clear conscience i take no part with them." you know, if i was the wife getting this letter, i wouldn't be sure. i would be a little dubious. it is raw. their life is lived close to the bone. it is naked, honest. this is rhonda bateman writing her brothers in november, 1864. "i have a sore throat. i have lost my baby. she lived nine days. the rest of the family is well. hoping this will find you both well. we have nothing new to write about." that is a tough cookie. do you want to know why the war lasted as long as it did, how men could stand 80% casualties in a cornfield and then get up and fight the next day? do you want to know who we used to be? look no further than women who could lose a baby in nine days and blithely write that they had nothing new to write about. these people are just plain tougher than we are and tougher than ballou. as tough as they were, as hard as they got, there was exactly one thing they were soft about, even softer than sullivan ballou. 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 the word "heaven" i could think of. none of the boys talk about st. peter or pearly gates. none describe it as a place where believers sit at the right hand of god. 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. part no more. all i want is to go home. what i yearn for most, what sounds like heaven to them, is family. permanence. that is another difference. ballou said his love of 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 first night of burns's documentary had ended with this letter? would i be a civil war scholar? my dear wife and 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. i'm sorry to let you know -- there are some words missing here -- for i know you have a great deal of trouble already. i have to be shot at nine this month. i am sorry to inform you that 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 particular 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 can't stand it much longer. he was killed shortly after. or my dear, you are my only and 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 as much in my life but that it be the good lord's will to spare our lives. i hope we will meet in that happy world where we will never part again. he was killed shortly after. i said to the outset that our website has made no splash. i have to admit that slate kind of got it. in the magazine admitted we had october 2017, discovered the first ever known use of the phrase kick ass. to be honest, they treated our discovery as a linguistic oddity. the post originally appeared on a blog about swearing. if we are going to talk about swearing, we have to start with peter carmichael. that sort of came out wrong. what i mean is we have to start with this essay he wrote for my collection "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 his comrades will be printed 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 colors wherever it appears. i will put the swearwords income , the writer says, because it is the truth in, the writer says, because it is the truth. i believe barack and pete are 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 farmer from virginia residing on a farm with his wife martha and four 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 is drunk nearly every day and they do not do nothing with 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. you have to know your timing, your civil war chronology. february 1862 means many of the one-year men's terms of enlistment are coming around. that is probably why the army is being permissive about how drunk everyone seems to be. we know ultimately that lots of these men would say i do not to do that and the confederacy would have to institute a draft and start to forcibly conscript people to longer tours and then the duration of the war. here's the thing about gregory's letter. amid these complaints, he writes the word i want to kickass 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. gregory left four children and a wife at home who never knew where he was buried, barely knew he was dying for. honestly, i do not know if gregory kicked ass. i know he got his ass kicked. 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 feature so users can explore regional variations in word usage and speech patterns. as the article concludes, that sounds pretty kickass to me. 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 barracoon was written. it was first written in the early 1900s and people rejected it because it was written in the vernacular. what are your thoughts? >> i think that is a fantastic idea. i hope someone will take that on. arracoon 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. >> i am curious about the website and the way it is put together. do you have them identified by what regiment they were in or anything like that so if you wanted to search a specific regiment --? >> you can search by regiment, state, last name. you can do a global text search for an individual word. 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. you can do it, 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 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. it is the quickest way. 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. when i first read it, i was like, "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. then i 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. maybe this is because i am a 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 mine it for insights about the common soldier, losing the high tongue? that is my favorite thing. that is my soul. i would worry deeply if that happened. i am not sure that is what is happening. great question. thank you all so much. i really appreciate it. [applause] >> this is american history tv on c-span3, where each weekend we feature 48 hours of programs exploring our nation's past. >> this weekend on reel america, we look back to world war ii, when allied forces landed on the mediterranean beaches of france. here's a preview. >> at the dark of the night melted into dawn, the faint outline of other ships could be detected. tense and alert, the men waited at their battle stations. guns of the fleet opened up and the invasion of southern france began. landing craft carrying men, tanks, and ammunition restore their objectives. -- raced toward their objectives. transports released their cargoes. some assault boats were lowered empty into the sea. others were fully loaded. as these landing craft heading for the shore, there could be no turning back. the roar of the fighting planes, the guns, and the rockets shooting overhead, created a never to be forgotten inferno. a group of landing craft escorted by destroyers moved toward another beach section. troops began to scramble up the beach. they were prepared for an enemy onslaught. but not a single german soldier appeared. not even a bomber sort overhead. -- soared overhead. >> you can watch the entire film sunday at 4:00 p.m. eastern on reel america on c-span3. ♪ >> the house will be in order. has been years, c-span providing america unfiltered coverage of congress, the white house, the supreme court, and public policy events from washington, d.c. under on the country so you can make up your own mind. created by cable, c-span is brought to you by your local cable or satellite provider. c-span -- your unfiltered view of government. >> next on american history tv, pulitzer prize winning historian wood deliversn a talk titled the revolutionary roots of the civil war. ' viewcusses the founders on slavery and argues that the civil war was inevitable. the james madison foundation hosted this event. >> we are privileged to have gordon s. wood with us for this 2019 james madison lecture. professor wood is, i think it is fair to say, the dean of early american historians. he is the alva o. way professor emeritus at brown university. born in concord, massachusetts, where the revolutionary war

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