Program Notes: I had been posting this feature towards the end of the month, now I will be posting it at the start of the month instead. Also, each month I will end with a “Meme of the Month.” Please share these if you see fit.
Blogs
An article that has attracted a lot of comment appears on the Blog of the Civil War Monitor. The post by Ohio State history professor Mark Grimsley reflects on the impact of the stirring events of 2020 on his scholarship. Professor Grimsley has long written a column for Civil War Monitor called American Illiad. With this post, he announced that he is stepping away from that. According to Grimsley he undertook writing the series “five years ago, animated by the conviction that certain stories and characters in the Civil War were fixed in the American imagination by their mythic resonance. I made it my task to tease out what that resonance might mean.” Grimsley writes:
At the outset I recognized that “foundational to the American Iliad is the conviction that the conflict was not a struggle between darkness and light, freedom and tyranny, but rather between two sides, equally gallant, committed to different but morally equivalent visions of the American republic, and therefore caught up in a tragedy larger than themselves, ‘a war of brothers.’”[1] I never believed in that moral equivalence, though for a long time it didn’t bother me; it was the founding myth on which the American Iliad was based. But over the years I have found the insistence on that equivalence harder to ignore, particularly in light of the recent protests that have thrown into bold relief the pain it causes so many of my countrymen—countrymen who happen to be black. Put simply, my continued involvement with the column requires me to ignore something I can no longer ignore.
Professor Hilary Green has compiled a list with links of articles by scholars of the Civil War on the recent attack on the capitol on January 6, 2021. She is the new editor of the Muster blog.
Professor Melissa Stuckey has a piece on the blog Muster on how the public was engaged on Black Civil War participation in the Great Dismal Swamp region during the September 26 We Want More History Day of Action.
It was a particularly good month for the bloggers at Muster! Stephen West has a challenging post on whether the rebellion of 1861-1865 should have been swept aside in the interests of reconciliation and unity. No less an authority than Frederick Douglass weighs in.
The Civil War Picket has an article on a new museum exhibit on immigrants in the Civil War. Phil Gast kindly included a quote from your’s truly on this subject dear to my heart. The Picket also has an article on the preservation of a battle site near Mobile, Alabama where Black soldiers helped win one of the last Union victories of the war. Nine USCT units fought at Fort Blakeley.
Chris Mackowski at Emerging Civil War has an interesting summary of Civil War references in Joe Biden’s inauguration address.
Emerging Civil War has a group effort by its historians who recommend books to read during these unusual times.
For the uninitiated, Civil War Books and Authors is a venerable fifteen year old blog with book news and reviews run by Andrew J. Wagenhoffer. This month’s review is of The Impulse of Victory: Ulysses S. Grant at Chattanooga by David A. Powell. Powell is one of the country’s leading authorities on the Civil War fighting at Chattanooga and Chickamauga and Wagoner says that in addition to insights into Grant’s command of his armies, “David Powell’s The Impulse of Victory also offers readers of all backgrounds arguably the finest summary history of the Chattanooga Campaign yet written.”
Professor Hilary Green of the University of Alabama had an interesting series of Tweets recently on the ridiculous 1776 Commission report on the teaching of American history. The report basically said teachers should leave out the bad parts! You can follow Professor Green at @HilaryGreen77
Podcasts
The podcast Dig is produced by four professors from colleges in the Buffalo, Niagara Falls, and Erie, Pa. area. Confession, I went to University of Buffalo before any of these historians were born. Right after the calamitous events of January 6 at the Capitol, Dig released a podcast on the Election of 1876, which was disputed until nearly the very end and held the prospect of igniting a new civil conflict.
Meme of the Month
