Retirement would mean farewell. I am very pleased that, in his retirement, he remains a fixture in the commonwealth. As i think everybody knows, and appreciates, garys contributions to civil war studies are varied beyond his own scholarship which is writing and editing nearly 30 books and hundreds of articles and reviews. He has been a frequent contributor and columnist for popular civil war magazines, preservationists and battlefield guides. He is the Founding Editor of the most Popular Series of civil war the civil war america series. The students who are the prominent scholars in our field. In academia, there is a tradition that i dont know how popular these are but books that students write essays in honor of their mentors. Garys is going to have to be for volumes long to do it justice for all the students he has meant toward and the prominence and the work they are doing in the field today. It is a testament to garys work. All of these contributions have earned him the right to talk to us about what everyone should know about the civil war. [applause] gary thank you, john. Im always happy to hear from john. Once he figured out i am still in virginia and i welcomed his invitation to come and speak at this years conference but i have to admit, i think the conference got off to a rocky start. [laughter] jack davis committed several micro aggressions against me. Have fond memories of jack when he was writing his biography of Jefferson Davis. He related a story to me i had not heard before about Jefferson Davis when he was secretary of war and Winfield Scott when he was general in chief. The two men loathed one another. They loathed each other more than jack loads Robert Barnwell ret. [laughter] they had one exchange at one point and davis sent a nasty note to scott. Scott decided not to reply and he said he was not going to reply. I will put my glasses on so i can get this right. My silence into the provocation is because compassion is always [laughter] i dont know why jacks behavior this morning made me think about that, but it just came to mind while i was sitting outside and trying to gather myself before coming in here and speaking to all of you. John and i discussed several things that i could do today and we decided on what everyone should know about the civil war. It seemed like a good idea at the time. The more i thought about it, however, it struck me as problematical. Theres so much to know about the civil war and such a vast amount of both factual and interpretive material thats available to anybody who wants to dig into it. I wondered how i should pitch the talk. Should i pitch the talk toward an audience such as yourselves , who know a fair amount about the war already or should i speak in terms of what any citizen in the United States should know about the war . And i wondered how in 40 minutes i could do justice to advising anyone about what should be considered a sort of baseline grasp of a seismic event that has been examined so massively and has produced such a rapidly expanding literature. I dont know whether i solved the problem or not but we can chat about that later. Im going to begin by saying that i think the degree of popular ignorance about the civil war and about United States history more generally is quite astonishing and very upsetting to me. More than 30 years of teaching at universities, at penn state, university of texas and u. V. A. For 20 years revealed that far too many students, even very bright students, embark on their Postsecondary Education with really kind of a hopeless muddle about American History. Theyre especially bad on chronology and dont really appreciate the things actually happened in a sequence and often because one thing triggers the next one and then the next one. Theyre not just random things that fall into place and then you go along. There is a chronological reality in history. One affirmation of this sad fact of not really understanding chronology came when one of the students in my civil war class came up to me and suggested that i get on youtube and then he paused and said, i know you dont know what that is but heres what it is and ill help you get on. [laughter] gary this was a number of years ago. I do know what youtube is now but to be honest i didnt know what it was that morning and he told me to look at something called lunch scholars, so i watched a video on youtube and it was interviews with High School Students who were planning to go on to college and they had been asked a question and here was the question. In what war did the United States gain its independence . The most common answer to that among these students, the civil war. Korean war got one vote. More recently, and seriously, we are subjected to incessant babbling on the 24hour news channels, as well as in mainline print publications and on social media, about how the United States is more divided now than any other time in its history and our earlier speakers today have alluded to this. The pundits and reporters and others who make such observations often while others sitting around a table look at them and nod in agreement, these people betray a breathtaking ignorance of United States history. Ive decided to pull my punches , and particularly of the civil war. The ignorance is not a small problem. This is a real problem. I think if americans had a better understanding of our past, of the profound crises that we have encountered and overcome as republic, they could put our current controversies in better context and calm down just a little bit. There would be fewer shrill predictions of doom, less inclination for people to set their hair on fire or to go to def con one immediately in any discussion. I think just a few comparative examples will illustrate the striking difference between the divisions in the civil war era and the ones were coping with now. These are the things that americans should be aware of. Today we get to watch prominent actors use award ceremonies as a platform to express unhappiness about current political leaders. On april 14, 1865, the youngest member of the most celebrated actors in the United States expressed his unhappiness with Abraham Lincoln by shooting him in the back of the head. Today, in congressional hearings and other venues, politicians posture for the cameras and direct what they think of clever rhetorical barbs at their opponents. I just wish they could hear thadius stevens and their children compared to thadius stevens. Thats what we see now. On may 22, 1856, congressman Preston Brooks of South Carolina walked into the United StatesSenate Chamber and beat senator Charles Sumner of massachusetts into a bloody pulp on the floor of the senate because in his crime against kansas speech, sumner alluded to one of brook kinsman as someone who embraced, quote, the harlot slavery as his mistress. Recent elections have provoked posturing about how texas and california in the wake of victories by barack obama or donald trump respectively might break away from the union. As you heard someone allude to today, theres talks about parts of virginia going over to join west virginia. I find that vastly amusing, but we hear that kind of talk now. The crucial word in all of these instances is might. California might, texas might, parts of virginia might. November 1860, after Abraham Lincolns election, seven deep south states might not break away, they actually broke away and between april and june of the following year four more joined them and established another republic in north america. Americans at that time faced a reality, not the prospect, that the political system established by the founding generation had failed to manage internal fractures and had positioned the United States and the newly established confederacy to embark on open warfare and the scope and fury of the ensuing combat should underscore for all americans the utter inappropriateness of claims that were more divided now than ever before. Four years of war produced at least 620,000 and maybe 700,000 military dead. Thats between 6. 5 and 7. 3 million dead in the United States, 2020. The key of the slaughter lay in the institution of slavery with regard to whether it would be allowed to expand into federal territories in the antebellum period created a series of crises that eventually proved too much for the americans to deal with in any kind of peaceful way. They proved intractable. Americans should appreciate that no political issue in 2020 remotely approaches slavery in the mid 19th century in terms of potential divisiveness, which bodes well, i think, and the talking heads of the 24hour newscasts should know this, for the longterm stability of our republic. Theres nothing lurking in modern United States social and political circumstances that comes within, i dont even know what marker to use of what slavery did in the mid 19th century United States and that should make us feel good that we are not there and that were here. Before sharing my thoughts regarding basic things american should know about the civil war, it really is impossible. I could just sit here and list things you should know about the civil war until you literally drop and you should know all those things. I had to pick some and i know youll disagree with some of them, but here we go but before we go. But before i get there, i just want to talk for a few minutes about how difficult it is to try to get a handle on what we should know because of the sheer mass of material that awaits anyone who engages with the civil war. These are two societies that are overwhelmingly literate, engaged in really important events, which means people wrote about men. And you have millions of them and you have millions of soldiers away from home that had to write letters home and people at home wrote letters to them. They created a body of evidence unprecedented in United States history and a huge amount of it still remains. One collection has just come to the university of virginia, 40,000 soldier letters. One collection, 40,000 that no one has ever had access to. Its very hard to keep up with new work. It comes out at such an intimidating pace. Books appear at a rapid rate. Theres three major prizes just for books in Civil War History. The lincoln prize, which is supported by the Gilder Laraman institute. ,he Tom Watson Brown book award and the john now book prize, all big prizes that go to books in the field of civil war era history. And the prize for the center of Civil War Research from the university of mississippi goes annually to the best first book on the civil war. Book you have a good first coming out on the civil war, you wily think about the silver prize, so you have all these books but also tremendous information coming from other sources. There are two professional journals in our field. Civil war history and the journal of the civil war era. The civil war monitor occupies middle ground between hardcore academic journals. And the two more popular journals, civil war times, which jack davis edited back when his hair was brown. [laughter] and americas civil war which is the second and not as popular of the two. Jack published the first thing i ever put into print when he was editor of civil war times. When i was a little boy in colorado, i looked up to the older people like jack. [laughter] which made his behavior this morning all the more soul crushing, but im not going to focus on that. [laughter] gary jack. Trying to find the best of the enormous older literature and deciding what it tells us about central themes in Civil War History can pose even greater challenges than trying to get a handle on the newer work. And ill use as my example here a 1,022 page book titled, a title that will grab you catalog of the library of Lieutenant Colonel john Paige Nicholson relating to the war of he rebellion, 18611866, privately printed in 1914. It is 1,022 pages long and all it does is list the books in his collection. Thats a century ago. That massive tome includes thousands of items that nicholson collected in the half century following the end of the war. And he excluded he didnt include anything relating to lincoln. Theres no lincoln books in there. He didnt include anything relating to the navy, and he also avoided as he put it scurrilous books. I dont know how he determined that. But if he included those three categories maybe it would have been a 1500 page catalog that came out in 1914 and in the century since, nicholsons Library Catalog appeared, many, many thousands of additional books now crowd the shelves in the parts of libraries that deal with the civil war. And some topics, as you know, receive constant attention. There was a bibliography that came out in 2004, a long time ago now, that included 6,000 titles on gettysburg. 6,000. Thats the right response. I got a wow from about the middle of the room there. 6,000 titles. That was 2004. Weve had nine biographies of William Tecumseh sherman since the mid 1990s. 94 biographies. Mean, nine full biographies. I mean William Tecumseh sherman , is an interesting dude but nine . Thats a lot. And lincoln and grant have gotten an enormous amount of attention. Grant is enjoying a renaissance in terms of attention and soon there will be a musical within the next couple of years and thats going to really be fun. [laughter] gary maybe it will include a scene on when grant played desdemona when they mounted the play, when the United States army was preparing for the war with mexico. Walt whitman came to mind as i considered what i would say today. He famously predicted that the real war will never get into the books. You read that constantly. By that, whitman meant the real war of the common soldier. He was specifically talking about common soldiers, as he put it, the actual soldier of 62, 65, north and south. He said the seething hail and the black infernal background of countless minor scenes and interiors will never be written, perhaps must not and should not. Indeed, he said, the conflicts interior history will not only never be written, in practicality, minutia of deeds and passions, it will never be even suggested. Whitmans observations, i think, inspire writers who search for a novel way into a very crowded and popular field. How are you going to find something new to say . The best way would be to find something that we havent understood before, one of whitmans things that we dont really understand. Many authors strive to illuminate what they consider neglected or ignored elements of the real war. Im convinced that a great deal of the real war has gotten into the books. In fact, has been in the books for a long time. Gifted historians have produced a corpus of scholarship on the civil war era that together with the massive testimony bequeathed by participants from Abraham Lincoln to friedmans bureau workers to common soldiers to women diarists behind the lines, you can go on, they give us bountiful options of firsthand testimony. Its incredible what you can find and it keeps coming up, things that are new. From the late 19th century through the first 2 3 of the 20th century, historians dealt with three things. They dealt with causation jack talked a lot about that this morning. They talked about high politics and they talked about conventional military operations. And those are three topics that remain essential to any basic familiarity with the broader subject. But over the past half century the literature has become much richer and more expansive and youve had examples of that given to you by all the speakers today. We know far more than previously about whitmans common soldiers, about women in the United States in the confederacy, about African Americans in the process of emancipation, about white unionists and other dissenters in the confederacy, about guerrilla operations, about the conflict in a global context and increasingly about the american west, the real west, the west, the transhundredth meridian west. At it into the wars mosaic. Scholars have contributed to the dark side of the conflict, brutality, atrocities, cowardice, vicious activities and physical and psychological wounds that left some veterans profoundly damaged. As the field of civil war era history has become complex, there has been an understandable tendency, i think, to place new subjects as close as possible to the center of the story and to question many long accepted analytical frameworks. The traditional juxtapositions of north versus south, slave holders versus nonslaveholders, United States versus confederacy, have come into question, as has the fouryear time frame that typically delineates the subject in the minds of the popular readership for the civil war. Many scholars now insist that the war, if youre really going to look at it, has to include post appomattox events, including reconstruction, the west and native americans and the world all brought together, all brought together in a far more inclusive and geographically varied long civil war. Not one dominated by events that transpired east of the Mississippi River and especially east of the appalachians in the Eastern Theater between 1861 and 1865. All of of this is wonderful news for the field of Civil War History and it means that theres something