"This excellent and suitably broad summary work should serve as a valuable introduction to the western war for a wide reading audience. With The Civil War in the West, it's safe to say we have in our hands the subject's new standard single volume history." --Civil War Books and Authors blog
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The Library Journal, the largest and most respected trade publication for the library profession, has selected The Journal of the Civil War Era as one of the ten best new periodicals of 2011. The Journal of the Civil WarEra is published jointly by the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center in Penn State’s College of the Liberal Arts and The University of North Carolina Press.
William Blair, director of the Richards Civil War Era Center and Liberal Arts Research Professor of American History who serves as the founding editor, said the launch of the journal has exceeded expectations. It has attracted work from a wide range of scholars including emerging stars and senior people in the field. He added: “I am especially pleased that The Library Journal cited not only the meticulous research behind our articles but also that the work remains accessible to a general reader.”
While the editorial home for the journal is at the Richards Center on the Penn State campus, Blair indicated that the partnership with the University of North Carolina Press, a leader in academic publishing in the Civil War era, has contributed mightily to the success of the project. “The press brings an impressive degree of professionalism to all aspects of the publication as well as a known reputation for quality with academics in the field.”
In addition, the Journal of the Civil War Era has been adopted by the Society of Civil War Historians, providing a substantial readership base that will provide authors with visibility.
The journal features a broad range of scholarship on the Civil War era including slavery and antislavery, labor and capitalism, popular culture and intellectual history, expansionism and empire, as well as Native American, African American, and women’s history. The editors highlight flourishing research on the many issues raised by the sectional crisis, war, Reconstruction, and memory of the conflict, while bringing fresh understanding to the struggles that defined the period, and by extension, the course of American history in the nineteenth century.
The journal is published quarterly. Articles have included: popular comedy in the Civil War era, the mental and physical health of Union soldiers during the Peninsular Campaign, the efforts of widows of Black Union soldiers to secure government pensions, and women’s roles in domestic supply lines during the war.
By early May 1862, Union general George B. McClellan finally had his heaviest siege guns aimed at the Confederate lines at Yorktown. For a month, his attempt to take Richmond, Va., the rebel capital, by way of the Virginia Peninsula had been stalled — both by his overestimation of Confederate troop strength and by the South’s extensive fortifications. At long last, however, McClellan seemed ready to blast away at the rebels.
At the same time, however, many runaway slaves along the peninsula were telling Union soldiers that Yorktown’s Southern defenders wouldn’t be there for the bombardment. This was no secret: The New York Times reported that two runaways claimed “the rebels [were] moving their stores, baggage and personal property back to Williamsburg.” On the left of the Union lines, a black scout assured Col. Regis de Trobriand that the Confederates were leaving. The colonel passed along the information, but although McClellan and his staff were receiving similar reports, they chose to ignore it.
But the reports were correct: despite the strength of his defenses on the Peninsula, Confederate commander Joe Johnston wanted to rely on Richmond’s stronger fortifications, stretch Union supply lines, and mire the Union Army in the Chickahominy swamps between the peninsula and the capital. On May 4, Federal reconnaissance probes and balloon observations confirmed the obvious: that the rebels had pulled out and were headed toward Richmond.
The withdrawal ruined McClellan’s plans and crushed Northern hopes for a decisive battle at Yorktown—just like in the American Revolution. Trobriand was furious that “we had been held motionless two days before abandoned positions.” If headquarters had heeded the news brought in by local blacks, the Army of the Potomac might have pounced on the retreating rebels. Union officers would not ignore black informants again.
One question I am frequently asked is: “Did a particular Civil War movie or TV show get the music right?” Surprisingly, my answer is usually, “yes.” I think, because Hollywood is typically more concerned with profit than product, most people assume historical shortcuts are the norm. I generally agree with this sentiment, but producers, directors, and screenwriters usually do a pretty good job of accurately incorporating Civil War music.
The film most frequently under scrutiny is Ken Burns’s PBS documentary, The Civil War. Eager to find flaws in such a highly regarded film, people tend to appear a little voracious when they ask me about it. Unfortunately, I have to tell them Burns’s song selections and the way they are presented are, for the most part, in line with the historical evidence. He hits all the highlights: “Dixie,” “The Battle Cry of Freedom,” “Marching through Georgia,” “All Quiet along the Potomac, Tonight,” and even the popular minstrel tune “Kingdom Coming.”
The attention he gives to “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” is somewhat problematic because I would argue the song was not nearly as popular as its progenitor, “John Brown’s Body,” but I am admittedly in the minority on this matter. The tidbit I can impart is that the documentary’s ubiquitous theme, “Ashokan Farewell,” is not a Civil War tune. It was written by Jay Unger, who plays fiddle on the soundtrack, and Burns liked it so much that he made it the film’s central piece. This, however, is not a criticism. Burns has never denied the piece’s twentieth-century origin.
Gettysburg and Glory also hold up well. Neither of them incorporate large amounts of period music (other than bugle calls and drum rolls) but, when they do use historical music, they mostly do it well. Both of the Confederacy’s major anthems are clearly audible in Gettysburg. “Dixie” is included as part of the soundtrack and “The Bonnie Blue Flag” is played by a Confederate band as Robert E. Lee makes his way to the eponymous battlefield. Both are good choices, as both were extremely popular among the soldiers and both would have been played on the march and in battle.
More critical to the narrative is “Kathleen Mavourneen.” In an episode taken directly from the film’s source material, Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels, Confederate General Lewis Armistead reflects on the shared humanity of Northerners and Southerners after hearing the song. He recalls how he sang it with his good friend, Union General Winfield Scott Hancock, before the two separated to fight for different sides. The piece is a good choice not only for its plaintive melody but because it was well-known before and during the war—thus making it plausible that Armistead could sing it before Fort Sumter but still hear it in camp two years later.
Setting familiar events in an international context, The Revolution of 1861: The American Civil War in the Age of Nationalist Conflict, by Andre M. Fleche, enlarges our understanding of nationalism in the nineteenth century, with startling implications for our understanding of the Civil War. In the following guest post, Fleche explains the importance of this international perspective on the most American of wars.
The Civil War has long been treated as America’s unique odyssey, or, as one famous historian described it, as a conflict as “American as apple pie.” In popular culture, the war has often been depicted as a war between brothers in an American family quarrel. For example, Ken Burns’s popular film series on the war especially encouraged viewers to see the war as a uniquely American conflict, which shaped a unique American identity. While these interpretations of the war powerfully appeal to the national psyche, they do not capture the complexity of the Civil War. In our increasingly globalized world, it is clear that this view must change. In the age of the internet, Facebook, and Twitter, when news travels across the globe in an instant, we twenty-first-century people should be well-positioned to appreciate the ways in which the flow of people, ideas, and information can make national borders less relevant.
During the nineteenth century, though news traveled more slowly, Americans were just as connected to the world around them. Ships from Europe brought news from abroad regularly, and small town papers copied items from port cities and published editorials on world events. These updates fascinated Americans and took them away from the local world of their homes and farms.
The American predilection to consider foreign peoples, ideas, and events proved important during the Civil War for several reasons. First, thousands of foreign-born men fought for the Union and for the Confederacy. During the 1850s, immigrants made up a larger proportion of the nation’s population than at any other time in American history. They came with ideals and commitments. Thousands fled Ireland to escape poverty and British oppression and thousands more left Germany to seek freedoms of speech, press, and person. A significant number of them had participated in the European revolutions of 1848, which had sought to establish representative governments in Ireland, France, Germany, Hungary, Austria, and Italy.
When the Civil War began, they fought in the name of the same principles in America. For too long, popular interpretations of the Civil War have portrayed foreign-born soldiers as hirelings and mercenaries, similar to the hated “Hessians” who had fought for the British during the American Revolution. It is high time to acknowledge that they had as many ideological reasons for fighting as their native-born counterparts. keep reading →
In the Peninsula Campaign of spring 1862, Union general George B. McClellan failed in his plan to capture the Confederate capital and bring a quick end to the conflict. But the campaign saw something new in the war–the participation of African Americans in ways that were critical to the Union offensive. Ultimately, that participation influenced Lincoln’s decision to issue the Emancipation Proclamation at the end of that year. Glenn David Brasher’s unique narrative history delves into African American involvement in this pivotal military event, demonstrating that blacks contributed essential manpower and provided intelligence that shaped the campaign’s military tactics and strategy and that their activities helped to convince many Northerners that emancipation was a military necessity.
Brasher introduced one influential figure in intelligence-gathering for the Union, William Ringgold, in a recent article for the New York Times’ Disunion series. Read his post, “The Steward-Turned-Spy,” at the Times’ website.
On a dank and frigid night in January 1862, William Davis, a slave from Hampton, Virginia, nervously awaited introduction on a stage at New York City’s Cooper Institute. The opening speaker, the Reverend L. C. Lockwood, an abolitionist, had asked for forty-seven-year-old African American to come north on a speaking tour to solicit donations for the contrabands. That night at the Cooper Institute, Lockwood gave a brief description of the slaves at Fort Monroe, and then he struggled to find a proper phrase to describe Davis’s status. Because the slave had not worked on the Confederate works before coming into Union lines, he did not meet the criteria of the Confiscation Act and was technically not free. Lockwood settled for calling him “one of Uncle Sam’s slaves.” The minister jokingly assured the audience that William Davis had no connection to to Confederate president Jefferson Davis, “except the relation of antagonist.” With that, the Peninsula slave stood up before the podium and told his story.[1]keep reading →
The Library Journal, the largest and most respected trade publication for the library profession, has selected The Journal of the Civil War Era as one of the ten best new periodicals of 2011. The Journal of the Civil War Era is published jointly by the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center in Penn State’s College of the Liberal Arts and The University of North Carolina Press.
