Our curated trip around the web is back for its March 2021 installment. Here are blog posts, social media accounts, podcasts, and Zooms that I think you will find interesting.
Blogs:
David Dixon has some soulful reflections on the removal of Nathan Bedford Forrest’s statue from its public space in his hometown of Rome, Georgia over at Emerging Civil War. Dixon writes:
As the first generation of Rome area blacks who had never known slavery came to maturity at the turn of the century, communities throughout the former Confederacy began leveraging Lost Cause mythology as a way to not only inculcate future generations with their preferred narrative of the past, but also to remind blacks of their place in the racial and civic hierarchy in the post-Reconstruction era. They did this, in part, by erecting statues of leading Confederates in prominent public spaces. The messaging was expressed both symbolically by the towering martial monuments themselves and overtly in dedications and newspaper reports: restore the natural and moral order of white supremacy, justify disfranchisement and segregation. Jim Crow shall rule the land.
A cousin of George Pickett has a blog post on how the Daughters of Confederate Veterans helped create the Myth of George Pickett. According to author Ann Banks, “The playbook for these activities originated with the honorary president of the United Daughters of the Confederacy – none other than General Pickett’s third wife, the indefatigable LaSalle “Sallie” Corbell Pickett. Like Pickett himself, Sallie was a child of Virginia aristocracy, and after his death, she devoted her lengthy widowhood to glorifying her late husband’s reputation, and to propagating the myth of the Lost Cause. She insisted on his heroism, patriotism and historical importance – once describing Pickett’s Charge as “one of those deeds of arms that are immortal with its imperishable glory, overshadowing all other events in martial history . . .””
Kevin Levin has a short post on his role in a recent Finding Your Roots episode with Henry Louis Gates. The episode discussed a slave who had been brought by his owner with him when he joined the Confederate Army.
Brook Thomas from UC Irvine says that U.S. Grant has a mixed legacy that does not come through in the recent biography from Ron Chernow over at the Muster Blog. The same blog has an article from Holly A. Pinheiro on teaching students about the United States Colored Troops using pension records.
Cecily Nelson Zander describes teaching her Civil War History course at Penn State during the Pandemic. Zoom has let her explore what her students knew about the Civil War before they took the course.
Al Mackey has a very long article on historians’ responses to the January 6 attack on the Capitol.
John Banks writes of the disinterment of the remains of Confederate General Pat Cleburne from a cemetery in Tennessee in 1870. He had been buried not far from where he had died during the Battle of Franklin. The idea was to return what was left of the general back to his “hometown” of Helena, Arkansas. Of course, Cleburne was born in Ireland and had no family in Arkansas, so the quite ordinary desire of a family to have a lost loved-one nearby was lacking. In fact, the rest of his family had settled in the North before the war.
Kevin Levin is a lightning rod attracting the sound and fury of those for who the Lost Cause is not a lost cause. A scholar of Civil War Memory Studies, Levin broke a lot of Neo-Confederate hearts with his book on the dangerous Myth of the Black Confederates. A Twitter innovator, he is one of the most active historians on social media. Find him at @KevinLevin
Zooms and Other Video
The Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College has a potentially daunting discussion of the historiography of slavery. Asheley Luskey and Peter Carmichael talk with Deidre Cooper Owens about how historians have looked at slavery over the last hundred and twenty years. I was most interested by the last segment when Dr. Cooper Owens talked about her own research into medical care for enslaved women. h/t to Kevin Levin for publicizing this video.
Podcasts
Civil War Talk Radio had an interesting discussion on social media and history. Soon after the Capitol assault, Gerry broke his rule against discussing modern politics to speak from the heart about the attack on democracy. He also discussed digital Civil War history with Stephen Berry.
The Washington Post had a President’s Day podcast on Andrew Johnson that you will like.
Meme of the Month
And Finally, the 1776 Report…
The 1776 Report was pushed out in the last two days of the defeated president’s term. It was a report issued by a presidential commission with almost no input from historians. By January 21, 2021 it was no longer available on the White House web site. The report itself may have been read by almost no one, but among those who did read it, mostly historians and high school educators, the reaction was near universal revulsion. I. Read. It.
Rebecca Onion at Slate had a direct take on the 1775 Report’s Orwellian distortion of history:
I read the whole Report, in all its two-spaces-after-a-period glory, and I need a shower—no, a car wash. As historian David Astin Walsh, who writes about the 20th century American right, noted on Twitter: “In tone the 1776 Report was identical to a John Birch Society pamphlet”—and boy, do I feel like I read one. The document is a screed forwarded by a Fox-poisoned aunt, one that might best be politely ignored. “I feel so uncomfortable even bringing attention to this mess,” historian David Blight, speaking for us all, wrote.
Over the last four years, Historian Twitter has become finely honed at responding to Trump’s madness, and it dutifully jumped into action. Torsten Kathke rounded up the bios of the various commission members and found only two people with American history–adjacent expertise; many are in the leadership of far-right institutions like Patrick Henry College and College of the Ozarks. (This observation created an evergreen little subdebate over whether the writers’ lack of expertise should matter.) Next, Courtney Thompson ran the text through the plagiarism identification software Turnitin and found some passages that looked suspect—then figured out that they were probably self-plagiarized. (This was confirmed by Politico’s Tina Nyugen on Tuesday afternoon.) Did we mention the thing has zero footnotes, in any style?
All of this collegial byplay was far more entertaining than reading this disgusting, confusing document, which is one long argument for white Americans’ permanent innocence. The basics: The ideas the country was founded on were Good; in fact, they were, and remain, Perfect, Eternal Truths. Therefore, nobody who really believed in those ideas could do anything wrong! (No racist bones here!) Therefore, the fact that some founders said privately that they believed slavery was evil, yet continued to hold people in bondage, was not evidence of their hypocrisy, but of their inherent righteousness. Therefore, “the foundation of our Republic” (yes, this document is sure to use the word Republic, itself a dog whistle) “planted the seeds of the death of slavery in America.” If it took a few more decades for this “plan” to end slavery gradually to come to fruition, so what? As for Native history, that’s a simple circle to square: It’s just not in here. Not a word.
The document makes a truly mind-blowing connection between the racist ideology of John C. Calhoun—yes, that one!—and … wait for it … everyone who has ever argued that certain groups in America have had it rougher than others, or that membership in those groups disadvantages Americans born today. “This is the most insidious paragraph of that 1776 tirade,” wrote Imani Perry, pointing to a passage that describes how the civil rights movement, a good idea at the start, “was almost immediately turned to programs that ran counter to the lofty ideals of the founders.”
The podcast Dig, hosted by four historians in the Buffalo, Niagara Falls, Erie Triangle, has an interesting, if quite long, episode on the report.
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