Civil Warriors

Over on Crossroads, Brooks used some recent commentary by Mark Neely as his point of departure for discussing the much-quoted and cited, but too-often poorly understood Prussian philosopher.

Why some consider Clausewitz difficult is a mystery to me, as I have always found him pretty easy. But that is perhaps grist for another post.

In any case, while Brooks is correct that the entirety of On War was not translated into English until after the Civil War, in fact excerpts (including its discussion of friction) did appear, translated, in a London publication in June 1834 and were republished in the United States in the March-September 1835 and September 1835-January 1836 issues of The Military and Naval Magazine of the United States.

Of course (ahem), had you read The Ongoing Civil War: New Versions of Old Stories, you would know this already. Still, the larger point that Clausewitz was largely unknown remains accurate. The excerpts that appeared in English in the 1830s are rather short and miss some of Clausewitz’s most important points. Moreover, wading through Military and Naval Magazine is not much fun today; I doubt many of its undoubtedly rather limited number of readers at the time found the effort worthwhile or got much out of it.

Here is something for those interested in what is going on here and here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FeS4tVFbNNk&feature=related

Of course, the fact that I am aware of what is going on is a pretty sad commentary on me.

A few days ago, Brooks Simpson posted a meditation on blogging on his new blog, Crossroads (very much worth following, by the way).  In it, he confessed that last year blogging “had lost some of its initial attraction.  Aside from reacting to certain events, I was not sure whether blogging had any other concrete purpose for me.”  With Crossroads he seems to have recovered it, but the question of “to blog or not to blog” has confronted many of us at one time or another.

Indeed, according to this New York Times article, a growing number have concluded not to blog.  Instead, there’s been a virtual stampede from blogs to other social media:

Blogs were once the outlet of choice for people who wanted to express themselves online. But with the rise of sites like Facebook and Twitter, they are losing their allure for many people — particularly the younger generation.

The Internet and American Life Project at the Pew Research Center found that from 2006 to 2009, blogging among children ages 12 to 17 fell by half; now 14 percent of children those ages who use the Internet have blogs. Among 18-to-33-year-olds, the project said in a report last year, blogging dropped two percentage points in 2010 from two years earlier.

Former bloggers said they were too busy to write lengthy posts and were uninspired by a lack of readers. Others said they had no interest in creating a blog because social networking did a good enough job keeping them in touch with friends and family.

I myself began maintaining a blog seven years ago.  The maiden effort — and still the one to which I devote the most time — has gone by various names but eventually became Blog Them Out of the Stone Age. For me it served two major purposes.

First, it became a way to explore my views about academic military history at a time when I had become frustrated with the field and was thinking of moving away from it altogether.  Several colleagues at Ohio State, having noticed this frustration, had encouraged me to re-cast myself as a nineteenth century Americanist.  For a while the idea was a tempting.  Blogging gave me a way to work through this issue.  It played a major role in convincing me that, intellectually, my core interest was military history, not Civil War history, although most of publications and reputation centered on the Civil War.

Second, and even more importantly, blogging became a way to push through a protracted and really quite frightening period during which my writing productivity plunged.  Like Joe Hooker, I just lost confidence in Mark Grimsley.  Consequently I found it deeply ironic when colleagues, sympathetically or scornfully, voiced the opinion that blogging was a distraction from my real work.  Because in fact it was the only thing that kept me writing at all.  What few publications I managed to produce often originated as blog posts.

Both purposes no longer exist.  I not only have long since recovered my commitment to military history, I have grown increasingly impressed by the rapid intellectual expansion of academic military history, which for a time seemed dominated by people who had circled the wagons around “the new military history” — which at age forty or thereabouts was no longer new at all.  And somewhere along the way — I think during my two years as an Army War College visiting professor — I recovered much of my confidence.  It’s a process that remains underway, but the trajectory is in the right direction.

Blogging, then, is no longer the lifeline it used to be.  And I too have found that another purpose blogging once served — a way to connect with others — is much more readily facilitated by Facebook.  (I’ve experimented with Twitter but so far haven’t found it a medium that appeals to me.)

You can certainly see this in my dearth of posts — quite noticeable on BTOOTSA but screamingly obvious on Civil Warriors and Facing the Demon (my blog about managing bipolar disorder, though with FD another reason predominates).

And yet I hate the idea of abandoning the blog.  Not just this one.  Any of them. I’ve always had a policy never to feel obligated to blog, and although the current hiatus has been longer than most, it still doesn’t feel qualitatively different from previous ones.  This post, and a resumption of regular posts on BTOOTSA, testify to that.  I still have a sense that the practice remains meaningful to me.  It’s just that the nature of that meaning has yet to fully reveal itself.

Much of the effort to draw analogies between contemporary politics and the politics of 150 years ago that produced and shaped the course of the Civil War has focused on the decidedly ironic connection between the political cultures of the Confederacy and the modern Republican Party. Yet, in a recent program at Middlebury College, journalist John Hockenberry offered another take on the subject, pointing out that a dedication to state rights, a strict constructionist approach to Constitutional interpretation, and resistence to Hamiltonian-Lincolnite-Rooseveltian efforts to expand the power of the national state and its role in American life was not confined to the South in the 1860s.

Midd Meets Hockenberry

Journalist John Hockenberry, this year’s inaugural speaker in the Institute for Working Journalism’s “Meet the Press” series, spoke about the Tea Party movement in America through a lens that most people in the audience had not considered.

But before he revealed what that lens would be, Hockenberry said on October 5 that journalists today need to do more than just report on current events. They need to study history, draw comparisons, and place events in a context “so they can be understood as an outgrowth of historical narratives and traditions and almost rituals in American democratic life.”

Then the four-time Emmy Award-winning commentator asked the audience, “Does anyone have some change in their pocket? A penny, perhaps?” . . . After a few audience members pulled out their one-cent pieces, Hockenberry remarked how ironic it was that Lincoln should end up on the copper penny. Why? Because the Copperhead movement was Lincoln’s nemesis for most of his presidency, he said. Also known as the Peace Democrats, the Copperheads opposed the Civil War and advocated restoration of the Union. They controlled the 1864 Democratic national convention and inserted a plank declaring the war a failure. Particularly strong in the Midwest where many families had Southern roots, the Copperheads controlled one chamber in the Illinois Legislature, blocked a bill in Indiana state government, and even saw their candidate, Horatio Seymour, elected governor of New York. (New York’s Seymour should not be confused with our Horatio Seymour, the Middlebury resident and United States senator who lived during the same time.)

“The discourse of the Copperhead movement was very much like the Tea Party movement of today,” Hockenberry said. He cited the typical anti-Lincoln rhetoric: “The war is destroying us”; “Government is growing too fast”; “Too many taxes”; and “Go back to the way it was.” For each slogan from the 1860s, Hockenberry drew an analogy to the Tea Party’s rhetoric about the war in Afghanistan, the TARP program, the size of the federal deficit, and the desire for freedom.

The full article can be found here.

(Hat tip to Facebook friend YankeeInTexas for bringing Mr. Hockenberry’s speech to my attention.)

After a long tenure as a member of the original team of bloggers that brought you Civil Warriors, I’ve decided that it’s time to take a break from blogging and step down from this blog.  I am currently engaged in finishing several manuscripts (as anyone can tell you, often the last steps in getting a manuscript off are the hardest, most tedious, and when it’s over, you welcome it with great relief).  I’m going over last minute revisions in my manuscript about the Civil War in the Eastern theater (a rather concise manuscript by my standards); revising America’s Civil War for an updated edition; working on the third volume of my contribution to the Library of America’s multivolume look at the war (the first volume, which Stephen W. Sears, Aaron Sheehan-Dean, and I coedited, will appear early next year); helping a senior colleague finish a manuscript on Union generalship; and finishing various assorted book chapters, editing assignments, and the like.  Then I have some other assignments awaiting completion: it will continue to be a very busy time for me.

The last decade for me has been a time where I’ve invested much energy in administrative matters at the university, college, and department level, as well in several professional organizations (such as the Abraham Lincoln Association); I’ve also concentrated on being a good father to three rather lively young ladies as well as being a good spouse to Cheryl, who brings real Confederate blood into the family.  The professional/career choices came at the expense of my publishing, as I simply did not want to maintain the pace of publication I had enjoyed in the 1990s.  I wanted to think more before I wrote more, and there is more to life than writing.  At the same time, I wanted to do things worth doing: in one case I got entangled in a project that became a big mistake because of the behavior of the publisher and the fact that I was misled as to what my task entailed (although the finished book proved a success, the back story remains interesting, in part because most of my ghostwriting and revision remained intact while I was not given appropriate credit).  That experience left a sour taste in my mouth and took time and energy away from my own work.  Other projects and opportunities proved more rewarding, such as my trip to Turkey in 2009 on behalf of the State Department, as well as an active presence with a newspaper sports blog back in New York.  I wanted to rethink what I was doing, and then of course sometimes life gets in the way.  For those of you waiting for volume two of the Grant biography, don’t worry, it’s coming, but I wanted to make it worth the wait.  I promise I will finish Grant in much less time than Edmund Morris took to write his Theodore Roosevelt trilogy, and I remain wedded to two volumes.  I’ve also embarked on several other projects, a few of long standing, but the fact is that while I’m maintaining my personal obligations (with one daughter in college, another soon to follow, and a third still mastering Halo) while concluding other obligations (mainly administrative ones at ASU) and moving back into writing once more.  Blogging for me is a way to comment on various issues as they come across my desk (or screen), and I want it to be part of what I do in the way I want it to fit what I do.

My decision to depart from Civil Warriors does not mean that I’m leaving the world of blogging: far from it.  Although I am still pondering an offer to become a blogger for a hockey site (where I would cover the Phoenix Coyotes), I will resume blogging next year, this time on my own, on a site tentatively called Crossroads.  There’s a great deal more to blogging that simply submitting blog texts, and I’ll have to learn what to do and how I want to do it.  I expect the learning curve to be an interesting one.

I want to take this chance to thank Mark Grimsley for inviting me to join him at Civil Warriors.  Mark’s been a professional collaborator for many years, and I expect that to continue (we still have to nail down revisions to our Gettysburg battlefield guide).  I also want to thank the other members of the team, especially Ethan Rafuse: he and I have exchanged manuscripts over the years, and, having just digested his comments on my work, I’m about to return the favor. I count both Mark and Ethan as good friends and confidants.  Civil Warriors has been a warm and inviting home over the years, and I wish it all the best as Mark and Ethan continue to carry it forward.  As for my fellow bloggers, a tip of the hat to Kevin Levin and Eric Wittenberg … and gentlemen, we will soon discuss other projects.

Take care.

One Progressive’s Nat’l Scheme To Burn Confederate Flags At Tea Party Rallies

A pseudonymous liberal blogger in Washington state hopes that progressives across the country will show up to tea party rallies on September 12 and — if it’s legal — light up a confederate flag so tea partiers can watch it burn.

“I think that it would start a great conversation about race and about how it’s being used for political gain right now,” the blogger, who preferred to be identified by his online handle, “General J.C. Christian,” told me Monday. “I can imagine people showing up at the tea parties, which I’ll do at my local one, and the tea party backers will start explaining why [the flag] is about state’s rights, not slavery, and all that and basically hang themselves.”

“I think that will be one of the messages that come out of the tea party events if my idea works out and people actually embrace it,” he added.

General JC Christian, who writes the satirical anti-conservative blog Jesus’ General, says he’s serious about Burn The Confederate lag Day, which he announced Sunday night on Facebook and the web. And while there’s no sign so far that Burn The Confederate Flag Day will spread across the nation, the idea seems sure to at least ruffle some tea party feathers.

Link to the full article from Talking Points Memo is here.

(Hat tip to Terry Beckenbaugh)

You hear it all the time … at least I do.  Critics of this historian or that historian claim that the historian in question is pushing a personal political agenda.  Their professional work reflects that personal political agenda: if anything, their scholarship is nothing more than their politics refracted through a flawed prism of the past.

Doubtless this is true in some cases.  One could point to Howard Zinn or Thomas DiLorenzo as prime examples.  Other people confront the accusation as well: Eric Foner finds himself attacked as a Marxist when people don’t like what he has to say.  People who read Foner’s work seriously often find that his Marxism influences and informs how he approaches historical problems, but I haven’t seen a successfully sustained argument that his accounts of the Republican party in the 1850s, Thomas Paine, or Reconstruction, to name but three areas on which he has written with such skill, are warped by Marxism.  You don’t have to be a Marxist to agree with his analysis, and when I’ve differed I haven’t resorted to the cheap trick of calling him a Marxist as if that in itself was sufficient.  When we disagree, we do so on the basis of the work before us, not on our assumptions about the politics that some people think must be behind that work.

It is interesting to me that some people who are unabashed in their political positions and who freely reveal how their politics influences their historical perspective offer mindless rants claiming that other people’s history is flawed because of their politics.  This is especially true when they assume a set of political beliefs are held by the historian they criticize.  I came under such an attack some time ago, and when I pressed the blogger to outline my political beliefs, he declined, although he continued to insist that my scholarship must be flawed because I was supposedly left-leaning, whatever that means (he then resented being identified as a coward, claiming that was a personal attack, when in truth it was simply an accurate description of his behavior).  He was joined in his attack by a fellow who seems a bit reluctant in his professional biography to identify himself as a leader in a state chapter (or “division”) of the Sons of Confederate Veterans.  You would think that if that fellow was really proud of that affiliation, he’d place it out front on his biographical sketches that accompany his publications.  Perhaps the best part of these recent rants was the claim that I was one of several historians who wanted to control the interpretation of history (again, somehow this claim was not accompanied by any evidence of this nefarious scheme: please forward it so I can use it on next year’s annual performance evaluation).  When this comes from a fellow whose group is famous for issuing “heritage violations” as if they were parking tickets, I have to laugh.  People who study this thing as a professional call this projection, I believe.

(Note: not all SCV members share the same beliefs or behave the same way.  So say my friends who are in the SCV.)

Now, personal perspectives and interests often influence what historians choose to explore.  I tend to be interested in the political struggles for emancipation and equal rights, for example, and how the political environment shapes that struggle.  Our SCV PhD, for example, prefers to regale listeners with stories about Nathan Bedford Forrest’s staff as well as “the deliberate Northern policy of targeting Southern civilians and Confederate prisoners of war for death.”  To each his own, I guess.  But I would find it bad historical practice to criticize the latter presentation simply by saying it was a simple reflection of his personal beliefs and perspective.  That’s poor historical criticism.  Nor would I make the wild-eyed assertion that the historian in question was attempting to control historical interpretation because I think that to make that claim about anyone is to make oneself look foolish.  But, again, to each his own.  If I disagree with an interpretation, then I’ll do it using evidence.  I’ve done this with the work of historians, regardless of their political beliefs, and in many cases I don’t know what political beliefs they possess.  To me it’s all about the work.

When I went to graduate school at the University of Wisconsin, I entered a rather politicized body of graduate students.  I once joked that there were no conservatives, liberals, or radicals at Madison: there were capitalists and Marxists, and I was clearly identified as being in the former camp (although when it came to a debate over financial aid, I found that the Marxist students were ironically the ones out for themselves at the expense of the community.  Don’t worry … they lost).  When I taught at Wofford College, Republican students asked me to serve as the adviser to the College Republicans, not because they believed I was a Republican (they confessed they didn’t quite know what I believed), but because I stood for the open discussion of ideas, and that was all they desired.  Since then, committed and principled conservatives have had no problem calling upon me: one placed me on the Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s civic literacy advisory board, and if you know anything about ISI, it’s not liberal.  In short, real conservatives respect me and my work, making it easy to dismiss the rants of certain uninformed partisans who hope that their intolerance and cant about political correctness and so on will be treated as something other than the whining it is.  Indeed, I think these folks are a standing embarrassment to serious conservatives: they are the Howard Zinns of the right, except that many of them lack his scholarly skills (I need not add that I don’t care much about Zinn’s scholarship, but then I also think Paul Johnson sometimes offers warped perspectives).

Serious conservatives and libertarians I take seriously.  Jeff Hummel sent me his manuscript on the Civil War era, and we once met for lunch: you can find my blurb inside his book.  I invited Barry Goldwater to speak to my military history class in the 1990s because I wanted him to have a chance to connect directly with my students.  Si Bunting and I have had many pleasant discussions, and when he came to speak in Phoenix last year, we had a terrific time … and we shared a stage with Jim McPherson last December at the New-York Historical Society.

And then there’s my teaching.  Two stories should suffice in that regard.  In the fall of 2000 I taught a course on the American presidency.  Many students recalled afterwards how in an October lecture I suggested that it would not be long until we would have to reacquaint ourselves with the workings of the electoral college, because someday it would play a critical role in an election outcome.  Others preferred to remember a different moment.  At semester’s end, two students approached me.  They identified themselves politically.  The Democratic student believed I was a Republican; the Republican student believed I was a Democrat.  They wanted to know which party I favored.  I asked why, and they responded that they didn’t know.  My reply was simple:  “And that’s how it should be.”  No one asks to which party do I belong: all students know that they will get a fair hearing in my classroom.  So it was with some satisfaction that a student e-mailed me yesterday to thank me for the letter of recommendation I had provided in support of his application for an internship.  He had just gotten the position … with the Heritage Foundation.  Apparently that organization trusted my assessment: it did not ask me to identify my political beliefs.

Now, does all this mean I’m a conservative?  No.  Indeed, it really doesn’t say anything about the political beliefs I hold, at least in terms of partisanship.  What it should suggest, however, to anyone with an open and discerning mind is that to the people who matter most … my students … there’s no political line preached in my classroom, and students from across the political spectrum have filled my classrooms and asked for my assistance, secure in the belief that what’s important to me is the work, the quality of argument, the use of evidence, and so on … not the politics of the student or the professor.  The same goes for my fellow professionals, whose beliefs are sorted across the political spectrum.

I understand it when people whose scholarship is fatally infected by their political beliefs assume that such much be the case with everyone they encounter … especially those with whom they disagree.  That’s why they call it projection.  Given them their fifteen minutes to issue their creeds: intelligent and discerning readers will know better.

The blogosphere’s an interesting place.  Really.  Anyone can gain a measure of legitimacy by setting up a blog or posting reviews on Amazon or making comments on websites.  In an age of ever-opening information and access, everyman can be his own historian, as Carl Becker once put it … and everywoman as well.

Indeed, blogs are one way to challenge the supposed boundaries between professional and amateur, scholar and buff.  People who would not have gotten a hearing twenty years ago are now players in an ever-broadening discussion about the history of the Civil War era.  I count many of these people among my friends, even if they rooted for the wrong team in this past fall classic.

But with access comes responsibility.  If one enters the conversation and wishes to be taken seriously, then one must not run away when one is taken seriously and has one’s arguments subjected to scrutiny.  Here’s one example.

I don’t care much for the phrase “politically correct.”  All too often it’s simply a signpost that the author has decided that whatever he/she finds disagreeable can be dismissed simply by calling it “politically correct.”  It’s a neat way of sidestepping the issue of whether something is historically accurate, and it carries with it the assumption (an all-too-revealing one) that one’s perspective on historical events is hostage to one’s political beliefs.  Oddly enough, that characterization is often quite true when it comes to describing the very people who resort to this cant of “political correctness” as a substitute for sustained historical analysis.

Can anyone identify a scholar who subscribes to the set of beliefs outlined in this blog entry?  Does such a person exist?  Or is this to be taken as being more along the lines of a screed protesting uncomfortable truths by distorting them?

So, tell me, dear readers … can you name a historian who embraces the notion that the North was 100% right or the South 100% wrong?  I can’t, especially as “the North” is a rather diverse place, as is “the South,” and there was no single “Northern position” or “Southern position” (for example, black slaves in the South were southerners, too, as all those fans of black Confederates like to tell us).   Does any historian say that slavery was the only difference between North and South (especially as some slave states did remain in the Union)?  And what is this rant about black Confederates?  I don’t know of any historian who rejects the notion that the Confederacy employed slave labor (thus Butler’s contraband policy), or that a handful of people of African American ancestry served in Confederate ranks.  The debate is over what this means, as well as a demand that those who argue that there were tens of thousands of African Americans who voluntarily served in Confederate ranks produce a shred of evidence to support their contention (this is one place where the cry of “politically correct” comes across loudest, from people who would rather not submit their assertions to any sort of scrutiny).

Much the same can be said for some of the claims the author of this column makes about Reconstruction (the author’s own blog reminds us that he is also a “top 500 Amazon .com reviewer”).  And, of course, there are also some bizarre assumptions implied in the post.  Is someone going to argue seriously that Gone With the Wind (both the movie and the novel, but especially the novel) was not influenced by racist assumptions?  Its history of Reconstruction shows its dependence on a combination of the Dunning school, Thomas Dixon, and Claude Bowers.  The author is so angry about John Brown that he comes up not once, but twice, in the laundry list, but he has some kind words to say about the Ku Klux Klan as being somewhat misunderstood.

But here’s my favorite part of the rant:  “A defining trait of the PCM is the insistence that there is no such thing as the Politically Correct Myth of the American Civil War.  A second part of this argument is that there is no such thing as political correctness, just the truth.”  In short, to challenge this garbage is evidence that the author’s charges are true.

People who know me know I don’t suffer foolishness or stupidity gladly.  Sometimes the best way to deal with it is to circulate it for wider discussion in order to expose it for what it is.

Missed this on Strange Maps until now. The dots represent 1860 cotton production (each dot equals 2,000 bales). The shaded counties represent voting results in the 2008 presidential election.  The correlation is fascinating.

For details, see From Pickin’ Cotton to Pickin’ Presidents on Strange Maps.

It would be interesting to see the same overlay with previous elections — at least those since the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Here’s the list.

I thought today’s bad moment was when I saw that Winston Groom nicely cited my book in his new book on the Vicksburg campaign, only to dismiss out of hand the evidence that the oft-told Yazoo bender story is problematic.  Oh well.  Perhaps the truth should never stand in the way of a good story.

And that, in its way, leads us to today’s topic, succinctly summed up in the following observation made by Dana Shoaf, the well-regarded editor of several Civil War magazines:  “The problem with academic historians is they are not reaching a wide popular audience.”

Now, academic historians have many problems, collectively and individually, so I don’t think I’d single any one issue as “the” problem.   Moreover, I think it’s worth reminding folks that I reach a fairly wide audience several times a week, for thirteen weeks, and have done so year after year.  Sometimes people outside the academy forget that academic historians do more than research and write, regardless of the supposed size of our audience, and that some of those occupational responsibilities constitute occupational hazards to research and writing.  But as I’ve watched this conversation evolve in other blogs (here, here, and here), I think what we have here is a failure to communicate, and not necessarily by the academic historians.

First, some academic historians do have broad audiences.  That’s due in part to the mix of the scholar’s ability to research and present findings, the appetite of the audience(s), and the subject matter.  I believe Jim McPherson has a broad audience.  I believe Gary Gallagher does fairly well.  My own audience over the last five years has included Japan (2004 presidential debates), Turkey (2009 State Department trip … two weeks) and Israel (coming up next month), as well as two or three speaking engagements a month over the last year (usually presidential elections or Abraham Lincoln).  So I don’t exactly feel ignored.

Moreover, some of my colleagues don’t seek broad audiences.  They may seek select audiences interested in their research, or act as advisers on various matters, where their expertise is valued.  To paraphrase Henry Adams, if you want me to maximize the impact of my work, I can accomplish that by contacting five hundred especially selected people rather than five thousand randomly picked people.

So let’s frame our query a little more carefully, for we can reach many audiences in many ways.  Mr. Shoaf’s understandably talking about his own venue of choice, the “popular” magazine.  I’ve written several times for such magazines, and I hope to do so in the future (Mr. Shoaf’s even contacted me in the past about contributing, but work intervened.  Sorry, Dana–I owe you).   Toward that end, one might want to read the more developed summary of Mr. Shoaf’s paper, which he gave at a meeting in 2008.

One comment in one blog struck me with especial force:  “The point he is making here is that academics are missing out on great opportunities to reach a wider audience and so have a greater impact. “  Again, I think this observation misses the point.  What do you think goes on in a classroom?  What do you think goes on when I participate in teachers’ workshops, including the Teaching American History grant programs?  What do you think happens when I appear on television?

Here’s an interesting proposition: while I might indeed reach a certain wider audience more frequently by publishing in Mr. Shoaf’s publications, I’d observe that those magazine serve a particular audience.  I’d even argue that the readership is a niche audience.  That’s one of my audiences.  It is by no means the only one.  I’d argue it is not my most important one in certain circumstances.

Have you all forgotten that academic historians are teachers?  Do you not understand that we have multiple audiences?  For example, I know my work is read in military circles.  Given what I have to say about military policy, civil-military relations, and the like, that’s important.  I also know there are more ways to communicate findings and have conversations, whether through speaking to groups or by participating in internet discussion groups (there’s a tale for another day).  And exactly why do you think I post on this blog?

So let’s have this conversation, but let’s be serious about it.  After all, among my colleagues, I take flak for having a broad audience (an audience they often deride as undiscriminating in taste).  At the same time, I hear rather derisive comments from some corners of the non-academic historians crowd, who say we don’t know what we’re talking about … a sort of reverse snobbery.  Yes, I know of other people in that area who welcome me as a colleague, and with whom I’ve worked, but even thay know that some of their peers behave that way.  In short, as I’ve noted elsewhere, I am derided by many of my colleagues at work for pandering to an audience which includes people who resent me.

Pair this up with the professional/non-professional debate, the academic/non-academic historians debate, and so on … sigh.  Thank goodness for Facebook.    Let’s set it forth in clear, straightforward language:  Good history is good history.  Good historians go about their work in a professional manner.  Bad history is bad history, regardless of the training of the historian.  I evaluate historians by the work they do, not the degrees they hold (or do not hold).  There are many audiences for history, many appetites to be fed, and many ways to communicate with those audiences.  And, folks, “you” (whoever “you” are) aren’t the only audience I serve.

The blog Gettysburg Daily today offered a post on the vandaliasm committed at Gettysburg on the Eternal Peace Light Memorial.

Let’s put it this way: if I met these bozos who committed this act in the corners at the local hockey rink, only one of us would emerge, and I wouldn’t even look back over my shoulder afterwards as I skated over to the faceoff circle.

Not that these cowards would show up.

The Q&A after our presentations was shorter than I would have liked, but a steady flow of questions emerged, most of them with an undercurrent of anxiety about the advent of the digital age. It never ceases to amaze me how academe, the supposed lair of what passes for radicalism in American life, is in fact a conservative culture often bordering on the reactionary. Every innovation is initially ignored. If it can’t be ignored, it’s dismissed as irrelevant. And when that doesn’t work, it’s viewed as a threat. But this pattern, it should be emphasized, stems less from individuals than from the culture in which they are steeped.

One question came from an archivist concerned about what might occur as collections were digitized and made available online. Inevitably, this could only be done selectively. A great deal of material would remain accessible only in traditional form; i.e., by visiting the archive itself. The concern seemed to be that users would mistake the partial digitized collection for the whole, or else would lazily utilize only the digitized component. Neither Kevin, Anne, nor myself thought this likely to occur. Travel to an archive is an expensive proposition. For that reason it’s useful to have as much sense as possible of the content of a collection before one goes to visit it. It’s even more useful for detailed collection guides to be available online. In my experience, this so far is a pretty hit or miss proposition.  Some archives have a lot of good guides available on the web, others not so much.

Another question asked whether there was a published guide somewhere to the digital resources available online. Anne pointed out that a few years ago a book had come out dealing with the Civil War on the Internet, and that the book was already out of date. One might also have pointed to LSU’s Civil War Center, which made a heroic effort to catalog every Civil War-related web site, only to be overwhelmed by the proliferation of new web sites and the abrupt disappearance of many older ones.  Probably there’s no complete solution to the issue. It does seem possible, however, for an interested organization — I suggested the Society of Civil War Historians itself — to compile and update a list of major digital resources and make it available both online and as a downloadable PDF. The experience of the LSU Civil War Center suggests that the best model would be one in which the custodians of such resources submitted them to the organizers of the guide. A procedure could be put in place that would make this relatively simple to do.

There were other questions and I wish I could recall them all. But one of the most memorable — and useful — arose at the end of the session, when someone lamented the difficulty of getting undergraduates to read traditional academic works and averred that the shift to digital sources would intensify the problem. Personally I do not recall a time when undergraduates were eager to read academic works. Nonetheless, I think it is the case that the brain becomes in some measure “wired” to read, that the wiring involved in reading a book is different from the wiring involved in reading material online, and that if you do most of your reading online it tends to rewire your brain so that you take in information in shorter bursts, in a fashion that skips about from one source to another, and that this undercuts the sort of sustained attention to a single source that is the heart and soul of reading a book.  (For more on this theory, see Nicholas Carr’s “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” in the July/August 2008 Atlantic Monthly.)

Bottom line: As with most things, it’s important to find a balanced approach. For instance, when using the Official Records I find it best to use both the traditional bound volumes and the keyword searchable CDs. The same is true of other sources whenever practicable. It depends on which technique is best suited for the task at hand.

I was a little disappointed that more questions did not arise about blogging. Whether the audience knew it or not, in Kevin Levin it had access to perhaps the best historical blogger at work today. He is one of the true artists of this new medium. The problem here may simply have been the dearth of time — the Q&A as a whole lasted only 15-20 minutes. But I suspect it also reflected the conservatism of academe, which is among the last institutions to just Not Get It. Academics will continue to prize the monograph and the refereed journal and bewail the fact that amateurs and journalists shape history as most lay people understand it. This is not a new observation. Allan Nevins in the 1930s excoriated professional historians for their contempt of “popular history,” an indictment repeated in recent years by James M. McPherson among others. But in the age of Internet 2.0 (that is to say, an internet characterized by extensive interaction among its users), the ability to engage with interested lay people has never been greater.  Readers can “talk back” to bloggers via comments on individual posts.  The can also, if so inclined, create their own blogs.  Indeed, the most fascinating single aspect of blogs is the way in which they create networks of discussion.

After re-reading the above, I hope I haven’t conveyed the impression that the audience was in any way disinterested or unfriendly.  On the contrary, a lot of people told Kevin, Anne and myself afterward how much they had enjoyed our presentation and how valuable they had found it.  The questions we received were assuredly interested questions, not hostile ones. The point is worth repeating:  the skepticism about the Internet 2.0 is centered far less in the individuals who comprise the academy than in the organizational culture of academe.

Here is Anne Sarah Rubin’s presentation at today’s SCWH luncheon.

I want to come at these issues from a somewhat different perspective than Kevin and Mark.  While I use online sources extensively in my teaching and research, what I want to talk about today is not using these projects, but rather creating one-the pitfalls, challenges, and opportunities.  Once we finish, I can actually show you my prototype.

Before I talk about my current research, I want to give you a little background.  I was in on the ground floor of the digital history movement:  In 1993 I started working on The Valley of the Shadow project, directed by Ed Ayers.  For those of you unfamiliar with this, it’s an online look at the Civil War from the perspective of two communities:  Augusta County, Virginia, and Franklin County, Pennsylvania.  Basically, we created a massive digital archive:  maps, census records, church records, tax lists, letters and diaries, newspapers, service records, the OR, state claims, Freedmen’s Bureau documents, and images. I probably forgot something.  Anyway, the project took 14 years to complete, employed literally dozens of people (including some others in this room), and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

I loved working on the Valley Project.  I found the whole process of making the raw materials of history visible to be fascinating.  I loved thinking about images and using visual means to get an argument across. I liked having different audiences and knowing that students as young as elementary school were using the project.  It was exciting and challenging, and I felt like I had picked up a range of new skills and approaches.  And then I stopped working on the Valley Project, finished my dissertation, got a couple of jobs, and really put digital history aside for many years.

But I always wanted to get back to it in some way — I had these skills, I knew I liked it, it seemed like a shame not to.  Plus, I had gradually become dissatisfied with the kinds of historical sites I could find online.

(Continued)

Just heard Kevin Levin’s talk on blogging and concluded my own presentation at the Society of Civil War Historians luncheon here at the New Orleans Sheraton on Canal Street.  Am now listening to Anne Rubin’s review of her involvement in the famous Valley of the Shadow project as a grad student at U Va.  She has in recent years become a little disenchanted with the current availability of online Civil War sites because even the best of them are basically archival.  Historians haven’t used the medium as a way to convey historiography and interpretations to a broader audience.

I’ll leave aside the details of her talk, since it will shortly be uploaded to this blog — and maybe Kevin Levin’s as well.  But I’m curious to hear the group discussion all three papers after Ann’s presentation concludes.

UPDATE – It should have occurred to me that I’d be a participant in the Q&A and therefore couldn’t blog the Q&A.  But I made notes and I’ll be able to re-cap the discussion in a subsequent post.  In the meantime, it’s 3 p.m. in New Orleans and somewhere a beer has my name on it.