Civil Warriors

The past couple of weeks most of my scholarly work has been the on convergence of two of my projects, the edited diary and letters of Capt. Otis Whitney of the 27th Iowa and a history of the three-division detachment of the Army of the Tennessee that operated under the command of Maj. Gen. A. J. Smith (pictured) during the last year of the war. The men of the detachment had several nicknames for themselves, one of which was “A. J. Smith’s Gorillas.” So that’s what I’m using for a working title at the moment. Actually, the Gorillas aren’t quite at the front of the queue of my writing projects, but the Whitney diary is. So since I’m going to be working on Whitney, whose regiment was part of Smith’s command, I’m using the occasion to get in some preparation for the larger project as well, not only making note cards (yes, I do use note cards) from Whitney’s material but also gathering material from Texas Christian University library’s impressive collection of regimental histories on microfiche and sifting through a listing of Civil War articles in the National Tribune to identify the ones I’ll want to look at when our library’s new collection of National Tribune microfilms arrives next month.

At this point maybe I ought to explain why I believe Smith’s Gorillas merit coverage in a book. To lay the foundation for that explanation, I want to state first of all why I think traditional military history is still valuable. We need to face the fact that whether we like it or not — and I don’t — wars make major changes in the course of human events. They may well be as decisive as any other type of human interaction. The winner may not get to start the world anew or put Humpty-Dumpty back together again, but he does get to do a great deal of reshaping of previous arrangements. In the case of the Civil War, the victorious North was able to preserve national unity and abolish slavery. True, the defeated white South succeeded in hanging on to its third objective — racial control — but even on this point the North could probably have reaped a much larger result from its victory had it been unified in seeking the goal of full citizenship for the newly freed African Americans. The defeat of a determined effort by 5.5 million persons to take their states out of the Union and the eradication of American slavery in half a decade were achievements that would have made the most sanguine abolitionists giddy in 1860. Even the regrettable post-war system of Jim Crow was (though few could see it then) in the course of ultimate extinction.

All this was accomplished by a war, which in turn was decided by events on the battlefield, and the opposite conclusions could have been reached had those battles turned out differently than they did. As far as human agency was concerned, the outcome turned on a web of myriad contingencies. Some combinations of different outcomes to those contingencies would have produced a different outcome to the battles and thereby given us a different world to live in today.

(Continued)

Brian Dirck has offered a different perspective on a discussion between Eric Wittenburg and Kevin Levin in their blogs; while I want to get to the discussion Eric and Kevin have been having later (it’s distorting to characterize it as a debate), I want to first address what Brian has to say:

As a member of the board of directors of the Abraham Lincoln Association, I have some idea of the world of Lincoln scholarship, and I suspect that simply limiting the world of historians under 50 who work on Lincoln to three people (Brian, Ken Winkle, and Matt Pinsker) may go too far. I’d fit that category, for example, and I’ve done my share of writing and speaking on Lincoln, although I’m as wary of becoming a Lincoln man as I am uncomfortable with being labeled a Grant man (the Henry Adams fan club, on the other hand, views me with supreme ambivalence, so I doubt I’ll ever quite become a Henry Adams man). Now, it’s quite true that my work does not center on Lincoln, and I’m not making a case for inclusion with the likes of David Donald, Stephen Oates, or Benjamin Thomas, but in the areas of emancipation, conducting war, and reconstruction, where I have done some work, Lincoln looms large. At one time, I had contemplated writing a short biography of Lincoln, and two of a suggested eight chapters exist; I have two chapters on Lincoln in The Reconstruction Presidents: I have edited a book of Lincoln documents; I have published a few articles and chapters relating to Lincoln; I have written on Lincoln and the war in the East through Gettysburg for Farnsworth Military Impressions; and I have spoken twice on Lincoln topics to the Abraham Lincoln Association’s annual February symposium. So I don’t feel out of my depth here.

Brian revives the old question of whether the Lincoln theme has been exhausted. We’ve heard that before. As he points out, there’s still work going on about certain aspects of Lincoln’s life. The studies he cites, all examples of fine scholarship, are biographically-framed. In two projects I’m pursuing, I take a close look at two aspects on Lincoln’s presidential career: emancipation and the management of the Union war effort in terms of strategy and relationships with the military command. You would think these would be two of the most closely examined aspects of the Lincoln story, but in fact the last worthwhile scholarly treatment of Lincoln and his generals was done by T. Harry Williams in 1952, and recent studies of Lincoln and emancipation have concentrated on the “who freed the slaves” argument and the circumstances surrounding the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation.

I happen to think both of these subjects are due a new look using new assumptions and new questions as points of departure. Go to this link [History Cooperative; registration required] and you’ll find a taste of what I have to say about one of the standard themes in discussions of Lincoln and his generals:

As for emancipation, I’d start by saying that there are two ways we need to reorient ourselves when it comes to Lincoln and emancipation. First is that telling the story of Lincoln and emancipation is not the same thing as telling the story of Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation. The second is that the question, “who freed the slaves?” is flawed; if we ask, “how did freedom come?”, well, the answers are to my mind much more refreshing and interesting, and get around the “less filling/tastes great” debate over whether the slaves freed themselves, Lincoln freed them, someone else freed them, or whatever.

Does this make me a Lincoln man? I don’t know. I find it challenging enough just to be a historian.

Brian Dirck at A. Lincoln Blog notes an interesting dialogue between Eric Wittenberg and Kevin Levin concerning “the relative value of studying big vs. small and obscure topics in Civil War history. The relevant posts are here and here.”

He continues:

If Eric and Kevin don’t mind my butting in with my two cents’ worth…I come at this from the perspective of a scholar who studies one of the least obscure subjects of them all. In fact, I was warned several times in grad school that Lincoln was a bad career move. Lincoln studies is much too crowded a field, I was told. One professor, in fact, told me I had a lot of chutzpah to even think about tackling a man like Lincoln in my dissertation.

As a grad student, I had a different but related experience.  I very nearly went with European military history rather than the American Civil War because I had a sense that people felt the field was exhausted.  Luckily, just before I took my PhD general exams one of my professors, Wick Murray, held an authors’ conference in support of an edited volume to which a number of historians were contributing.  They were without exception major players in big institutions, and they all told me the same thing:  The Civil War is one of the two or three biggest events in American history, everyone knows it, and there will always be a need for scholars who can conduct research in it and teach the field.  I think the same logic applies to Lincoln.

To be sure, a lot of work on the Civil War is rather conventional and unsurprising.  But on the whole I’m surprised by how much important work still emerges on subjects you’d think someone would have tackled long ago; e.g., Michael Vorenberg’s book on the Thirteenth Amendment.

Ever notice the predictable pattern that often characterizes debate about various issues of interest to folks who dabble in the Civil War? That is, most interpretations tend to gravitate in some sort of inevitable Hegelian fashion to one of two poles, and in fact rarely does a real synthesis emerge, let alone a new transforming understanding?

Akin to this is the notion that historians take sides, that they become either advocates (or, less kindly, apologists) for their subjects or antagonists (or, less kindly, assassins) who can rarely portray their subjects in anything but a dim light? This cognitive pattern is so predicable, in fact, that at times it simply becomes the dominant way we look at biographical literature, blinding us to real differences, new arguments, and the like.

Doubtless there are some biographers who fit this mold. In the recent wave of Grant biographies (now a decade old), for example, several authors have prided themselves in boasting that their mission is to raise Grant’s standing as a general and a president. This, to me, is exactly what a biographer should not do. It may be the result of a biographer’s work, but it should not be the purpose of a biographer’s work. Biographers are supposed to help us understand their subjects, to get at, as best they can, what made them tick, to offer suggestive speculation while admitting to uncertainty, to admit that much of what is involved in recapturing a life is art and not science. In that process, it should be the biographer’s mission to make sense of as much as possible, the positive as well as the negative, and to call things by their right names.

Although I’ve written on other Americans, including Henry Adams, Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, and George Washington, clearly I’m usually associated with Ulysses S. Grant. There are things about Grant I like, things about Grant I don’t like, and some things I still don’t understand, although I try to. There are things for which he deserves credit and things for which he deserves blame, and I have no vested interest in either except insofar as I need to try to figure out what happened and why (no easy tasks in themselves). Nor do I have to embrace my subject’s friends and target his enemies. Indeed, good biography doesn’t work that way.

Whether readers always realize these points is another issue altogether. I suspect more careful readers do, but in cases where readers divide books into pro and con camps, there’s precious little chance for balance and judiciousness to survive unscathed. For example, I happen to think that Grant receives too much blame for Cold Harbor (and that the impact of Cold Harbor has long been exaggerated) and far too little blame for the failure at the Crater (by then, I argue, he knew more than he needed to know about Meade and Burnside). How does that fit into the pro and con categories?

I believe Grant receives less credit that he deserves for his commitment to black rights (although I also believe that commitment needs qualification and contextualization, lest we go too far) but that recent praise of Grant’s Peace Policy and its good intentions overlooks the way in which it still embraced cultural genocide and a failure of will when it came to the Black Hills. Again, how does that comport with pro and con categories?

And, when it comes to Grant’s drinking, an issue that has long been a measuring stick of a biographer’s orientation toward Grant, what is one to make of the fact that while I question some stories, I accept others, and have even pointed the way to more, all the while trying to understand how alcohol, functioned in Grant’s life and why it has assumed such importance in the literature. None of these positions fit into the usual boxes, but then I didn’t set up the boxes in the first place. People who want new views might think about thinking outside the boxes, or doing away with the boxes altogether.

Just a note to acknowledge the birth of another Civil War blog: War of the Rebellion Revisited, maintained by Sean Dail of Raleigh, NC. Stop by and say hi.

Next month I’m off to the University of Virginia to give an informal colloquium to some of the grad students there, most of them, I gather, students of Gary W. Gallagher, John L. Nau III Professor in the History of the American Civil War. Because of his energetic work as a series editor for University of North Carolina Press, extensive service as manuscript reviewer for other presses, and frequent organization of conferences, etc., Gary has made himself something of a gatekeeper in the field of Civil War history. But a gatekeeper in the best sense of the word: someone more interested in identifying and cultivating young talent than trying to exploit or put it in its place. He’s one of the people in this business I truly admire.

In preparation for my visit, we’ve begun trading emails, and at one point discussed our mutual interest in broadening military history so as to be better integrated into its political, social, and cultural context.

As both of us have discovered, this ambition excites an unaccountable resistance in some quarters. A minor but memorable episode in Gary’s case occurred when someone reviewed his edited volume, The Shenandoah Valley Campaign of 1862, and entitled it “Gallagher sells out — again.”

Gary mentioned it pretty much in passing, but inevitably I got curious to see the review myself. Jeez, I don’t know what that fellow’s trouble was — too little romance in his life, too little bran in his diet, or both — but it was one of the most fundamentally wrong-headed reviews I’ve seen in a while, even by the undemanding standards of an Amazon.com review.

So I could not resist the senile itch to compose a response, which I reproduce here:

Selling Out? Hardly!, March 25, 2006

Reviewer:

Mark Grimsley (Columbus, Ohio) – See all my reviews

I read with incredulity the review that accused Gary Gallagher of “selling out” because he has steadily broadened his “Military Campaigns of the Civil War” series to incorporate more political, social, and cultural context. Wars do not occur in a vacuum, and the direction of Gallagher’s series has shown both scholarly growth and real leadership.

Too much Civil War history falls into two categories. First, the category of operational/tactical studies — narratives of combat for its own sake, usually with no sense of a larger military context (for instance, whether the ranges of engagement in a given battle better support the argument that the rifled musket had a revolutionary impact, or whether the fighting was essentially just incrementally different from Napoleonic combat). Second, the category of political and social histories that virtually ignore the fact that the Civil War was, indeed, a *war.*

Gallagher is one of the finest examples of a Civil War historian determined to bring these two categories into active conversation with each other. He has trained some of the best young Civil War historians we have, and has influenced them to look seriously at the intersection of military, political, social and cultural developments. One of his proteges, Bill Blair of Penn State University, has revitalized _Civil War History_, the flagship journal of the field, and Gallagher’s two series for University of North Carolina Press–”Civil War America” as well as “Military Campaigns of the Civil War” — regularly showcase up and coming historians as well as established ones. He is, I would argue, the most important single scholar shaping the field today.

I don’t mind seeing historians criticized. That’s part of the business. I don’t even mind people who don’t know what they’re talking about, like the author of the “sell-out” comment. I do mind it when people can’t express their opinions in a civil manner.

What’s truly weird is that Gallagher’s essay in this volume is a classic bit of strategic command-level analysis, while Bob Krick — whom the “sell-out” reviewer praises for doing “pure” military history — here contributes an essay on the development of Stonewall Jackson’s public image.

It makes you wonder if the guy even read the book.

Oh, and one last thing: Mr. Sell-Out seems to think it’s easy to edit a volume of essays. In my experience, it’s as difficult as writing a book of one’s own, and sometimes more so.

Cross-posted from Blog Them Out of the Stone Age

As I mentioned in Part 1 of this series, back in August I received my royalty statement for And Keep Moving On: The Virginia Campaign, May-June 1864. Its performance was dismal, so much so that it convinced me I needed to educate myself in the art of marketing my books.

For many authors, this is an unnatural act. You think of yourself as a writer, not a salesman. That’s somebody else’s job.

But if that somebody else can’t do the job, either because they lack the competence or (more usually) the resources, then you’re in a fix. Because you also think of yourself as someone who seeks to connect with a reader, and this can’t happen if your book doesn’t reach the public.

So I needed to get in touch with my inner car salesman. I bought a few books and began to study up.

This created another bit of paradox, because every moment spent learning to market a book is a moment stolen from actually writing a book. And in any event, for professional historians the real money from publishing a book comes not from royalties but rather from merit raises.

Let’s say I publish a book and in the first year it brings me $2,000 in royalties (actually not a bad sum). My merit raise for that year will likely be at least that much, and then it becomes part of my base salary. Raises are usually bestowed as a percentage of base salary, so the next year’s raise — and all subsequent raises — will benefit from the merit raise that came from publishing the book. In that sense, it’s the gift that keeps on giving.

By contrast, the actual royalties on a given book tend to max out in the first year. They diminish thereafter, and eventually reach a point where the publisher informs the author that since the annual royalty for such and such a book is less than $25.00, that amount will be rolled over to the next year.

And yet. . . . And yet. . . .

And yet you still want to reach an audience.

That’s why writers write. It’s why historians struggle to bring the past alive on paper. Writing is inherently difficult, and the impetus to do it usually comes from passion, not pecuniary gain.

Back, then, to the question of marketing. Not for the sake of money, but for the sake of an audience.

(Continued)

. . . is the clever title of a Washington Post article about the town’s efforts to persuade the two million visitors who come to see the battlefield to spend more time among Gettysburg’s pubs, restaurants, and shops. An excerpt:

A new series of guided downtown walks, modeled on the popular licensed battlefield tours, seeks to reveal the “civilian experience” of those three days of horror and carnage in July 1863. The long-neglected downtown rail depot where Abraham Lincoln arrived to deliver his famous address has been restored and will reopen next month as a towncentric interpretive center; a few blocks away, the Wills House, where Lincoln polished his final draft, is also undergoing a renovation. And perhaps most ambitiously, the Majestic, a grand vaudeville-era theater, reopened in November after a $16 million restoration as an 850-seat performing arts center and twin-screen repertory movie house. Among its live offerings will be a summer-long staging of “For the Glory: The Civil War at Gettysburg,” a Broadway musical with a professional cast.

Add to that a slowly growing stock of restaurants, art galleries and antique shops, and downtown Gettysburg stakes a legitimate claim to weekend getaway status that doesn’t have to rely exclusively on the historical war zone that surrounds it.

“It’s not just the battlefields anymore,” said [Gettys Hotel manager Stephanie] McSherry. “People come to eat outdoors and walk around the shops. It’s becoming more popular to spend a night or two.”

I confess: it took me numerous visits to Gettysburg before I ever saw the town as much more than a gigantic traffic-calming device to slow my excursions from one part of the battlefield to another. But over the years it’s grown on me — even without the ambitious makeover described in the article. And I think I like it best in the winter, when the tourists are absent. It’s no longer hectic, and you have more of a chance to reflect not just on the events of July 1863, but on the fact that despite the most horrific events, life truly does go on.

It gives you a sense of perspective and inner peace. Until the inevitable pickup truck full of yahoos drives by with the stereo cranked and the bass throbbing. Then you wish you had a loaded and primed Napoleon smoothbore with its lanyard in your fist.

(Hat tip to Ethan Rafuse)

Kevin M. Levin at Civil War Memory is giving a presentation today for fellow faculty, students, and invited guests. “It is,” he says, “a chance to share my passion for Civil War history and the more specific interpretive approach that has come to shape my current research on memory and the Battle of the Crater.” As usual, it’s thoughtful in content and lucid in style:

Americans were exuberant in 1961 at the prospect of the upcoming Civil War Centennial celebrations. It was a chance to unfurl Confederate battle flags and ponder the character and heroism of such iconic figures as Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson. Families could watch as re-enactors brought to life memorable battles such as First Manassas and Gettysburg where lessons could be taught about the common bonds of bravery and patriotism that animated the men on both sides. There would be no enemies on the battlefields of the 1960’s.

Even as Americans geared up for celebration problems festered just below the surface. The decision of the Civil War Centennial Commission to hold its first ceremony in the southern city of Charleston, South Carolina in April 1961 raised the problem of how black delegates would be able to take part given the continued practice of segregation in local hotels. Even the intervention of President Kennedy (in office for only two months) and an attempt at compromise could not stop New Jersey, New York, California, and Illinois from protesting the opening ceremony. As much as white Americans wanted to celebrate and remember their preferred interpretation of the war, the continued problem of race and the ongoing Civil Rights struggle served as a reminder that not all was well. Indeed, the images of Lee and Jackson were being challenged on a daily basis by the names of Martin L. King, Rosa Parks, Medgar Evers, Emmett Till and news of school desegregation, lunch counter sit-ins and Freedom Riders.

The Civil Rights Movement presented a challenge for centennial event organizers and participants. It not only challenged the country’s self-proclaimed status as the leader of the free world at the height of the Cold War, but pointed out serious problems and omissions in the way Americans chose to remember their Civil War. These challenges pointed to the extent to which Americans had engaged in a collective act of amnesia in reference to their memory of the Civil War.

Full post

It is one thing to come up with an idea for a book, quite another to see it realized in print. Five years elapsed between our dinner at Kunz’s and the appearance of the first fruits: Gettysburg: A Battlefield Guide (co-written by Brooks and me); and Chickamauga: A Battlefield Guide (written by Steve).

I have beside me a fat three-ring binder filled solely with contracts, book proposals, readers’ reports, and (above all) a seemingly endless stream of emails, FAXes, and letters, all concerned one way or another with how to translate our vision into an accurate, interesting, and affordable product.It took ten months just to reach a point where the three of us actually signed a contract with University of Nebraska Press to edit “a series to be entitled ‘This Hallowed Ground: The Experts’ Guide to the Battlefields of the Civil War,’ or some similar title.”

By that time, however, we had actually submitted proposals not just for the series but for three specific books (Antietam as well as the other two), and had received favorable reader’s reports on the Gettysburg and Chickamauga submissions. (Antietam won approval in November 1995). And we had made the first of several forays to the relevant battlefields. Each of us had visited them numerous times before, of course, but we had to see them now with eyes conditioned to the task of designing a first-class tour.

Steve, as I recall, ventured to Chickamauga (and Chattanooga as well) with his oldest son in tow. In August 1995, Brooks flew from his home in Arizona to mine in Columbus, Ohio, and from there we drove to Gettysburg, followed by further excursions to Manassas and Antietam. Aside from our single encounter in Louisville, I had never met him in person — we conducted all our business via email and FAX — and still had little idea what to expect. It proved a real education.

(Continued)

Dimitri Rotov at Civil War Bookshelf has taken note of our new venture. He kicks himself a bit for not having noticed it sooner, but it’s no sweat, Dimitri. The blog hasn’t really been around since January, as you seem to think. That’s just a benign trick: I merely imported some (Blogger) posts from an experimental Civil War blog a few of my grad students and I tried out last year; i.e., January 2005. Civil Warriors actually appeared on March 15 — less than a week ago.

Dimitri has both high expectations for Civil Warriors and a word of caution:

“Civil Warriors” has the potential to become the diary of new thinking in Civil War history. Brooks Simpson, in fact, had been instrumental in recruiting Grimsley and Woodworth to write ‘new thinking’ Civil War books for series he’s edited since the late 1990s.

If the potential is great, there are some risks here. All three men are professors and may fall into shop talk occasionally. There’s going to be collegial reticence displayed towards the work of hacks. Additionally, being authors, their interesting and valuable “lessons learned in publishing” posts may crowd out their more important historiographic insights – insights that will help get us off the Centennial carousel.

Still, on the whole, Dimitri sees the appearance of Civil Warriors as a good omen: “I have mentioned before that there are large, positive changes in Civil War history,” he tells his readers. “This new blog is at the center of those changes. Expect much. Comment much.”

And finally this parting plea to us: “As to the future of ACW publishing, take us with you, gentlemen. Or rather, get us out of this hellhole.”

Gee, Brooks and Steve, I don’t feel any pressure. Do you?

I’ve read with some amusement my colleagues’ description of our dinner with Dan Ross at Louisville, and I’m tempted to ask Dan to add his recollections to the mix. Although Mark is certainly correct in saying that publishers and prospective/current authors play an interesting game over scoring free meals, that idea was not on my mind when we went to dinner that evening. I’d already had my business meeting with Dan over food, and he’d been very generous in the past, so I suggested that we’d go dutch to this dinner. It’s not that the menu prices were outrageous, but they were steep enough, and I did feel guilty when I’d realized what I had gotten folks into (well, I didn’t feel sorry for Dan). The rest is, as they say, history, or a reasonable approximation thereof.

But the idea of a guide series had been on my mind, too. Back in 1967 my family took me to Gettysburg. We stayed at the Howard Johnson Motel; after a dip in the pool, my father and I headed over to the wax museum. What followed the next day was fairly traditional: a visit to the NPS visitors center (then a fairly new building displaying the cyclorama), followed by a walk along the High Water Mark and a trip down to Little Round Top and Devil’s Den. Having carefully studied a July 1963 issue of the National Geographic covering Gettysburg and Vicksburg, I scanned the scene for images I had seen there, including the monument to the First Minnesota. On Little Round Top I saw good old General Warren and the castle erected by the veterans of the 44th New York; it would be years until I discovered that I had an ancestor who belonged to the 146th New York, one of the regiments that defended Little Round Top, and which was deployed where the Warren statue stands today (note: at that time no one spoke about Joshua Chamberlain).

(Continued)

I have a vivid memory of the night the “This Hallowed Ground” series was born, and if that memory doesn’t quite line up with what Mark and Brooks recall, the fact is a good reminder to all of us historians that the memories of participants in the same events can vary quite a bit.

As Mark has explained, the two of us, along with Brooks and University of Nebraska Press editor Dan Ross, had decided to find a restaurant near the convention hotel. It was Friday evening, and we passed up a couple of eateries that looked far too crowded, finally settling on Kunz’s Restaurant, of which none of us knew anything. I had assumed we’d all be paying for our own dinners, but I’ll admit the fare was somewhat pricier than I was in the habit of consuming on a regular basis in those days. It would not quite have meant financial ruin for me, but I guess Brooks felt some responsibility for getting me into the situation (it wasn’t his fault). He tells me that my facial expression indicated some alarm when I looked into the menu. Perhaps, though I’m not always prepared to concede everything Brooks claims to read in my expressions. At any rate, I definitely appreciate his friendly concern.

As Mark has noted, scholars go to conventions, in part, in order to score expensive meals from publishers. Publishers go to conventions in order to recruit scholars to write books. Knowing this, and hoping to turn our evening at Kunz’s into a business expense for University of Nebraska Press, Brooks launched a campaign as relentless as any Grant ever waged against a Confederate opponent. He began tossing out book ideas, things that needed to be written or classic works that might be due for reprint in Nebraska’s Bison series, and so forth. Mark and I tried to cooperate, but it wasn’t going particularly well at first. We simply weren’t having much success at coming up with concepts that even we found particularly compelling, and our ideas were falling rather flat. Then someone, I don’t recall whether it was Brooks or Mark, mentioned an idea the two of them had previously discussed for a series of historical readers — books made up of selections from primary sources. As they discussed it, someone raised the concept of an accompanying series of battlefield guides. That’s where the conversation really took off.

(Continued)

Cross-Posted from Blog Them Out of the Stone Age

Military historians endlessly bemoan the lack of respect, or even basic understanding, our field receives from colleagues. There’s a certain truth in the complaint, and certainly one can find specific examples to support it. But it’s important not to overlook the counterexamples, one of which is that my department’s web site currently spotlights, not some conceptually sophisticated and rigorously argued monograph, but rather Shiloh: A Battlefield Guide, which I co-wrote with my friend Steven E. Woodworth and which has just been published.

Let’s face it: Military history doesn’t get more “drums and trumpets” than this. You might think my colleagues would sniff with distaste or at least tacitly dissociate themselves from such a book. I mean, if you aspire to Top Ten status among public university history departments, is Shiloh really the first thing you want visitors to see when they visit your web site?

Perhaps not — if you’re as uptight, politically correct, and obsessed with academic orthodoxy as the caricatures insist. But I haven’t found my department to be like that. Sure, the coin of the realm is quality scholarship, and that’s just as it ought to be. But there’s also room for works that serve other purposes; in this case, to help interested visitors to Shiloh National Military Park get more from their experience.

Back in 1999 I published another battlefield guide, this one on Gettysburg and co-written with Brooks D. Simpson. The Columbus Dispatch wrote a feature on it that filled an entire page of the newspaper and even sported two photos of yours truly. Ooh, another embarrassment for the department. But unaccountably several of my colleagues clipped that page from their newspapers and gave it to me, just to be sure I had plenty of copies (I wound up with fifteen, including one laminated by Martha Millett, Prof. Allan Millett’s wife.) Someone even pinned a copy to the bulletin board in the department’s main office.

To my knowledge, just one individual ventured a sneer: A graduate student, who had faithfully internalized the commitment to scholarship of academic culture but had not yet come to understand that scholarship does not preclude other forms of historical work and, for that matter, doesn’t preclude having a little fun with history once in a while.

UPDATE: March 20, 10:11 p.m. A permanent promotional page for the Shiloh guide is now available. It includes a link to a PDF file where you can examine the table of contents and introduction.

Harry S. Stout, Upon the Altar of the Nation: A Moral History of the Civil War. Pp. xxii, 576. New York: Viking, 2006. $29.95

A review by Alison Efford, Ph.D candidate in the Department of History, The Ohio State University

Upon the Altar of the Nation is a provocative and disturbing moral history of the Civil War. It is not a merely a religious or intellectual history, but a history that explicitly makes judgments about “the distances between the oughts and the actualities” (xii). Harry S. Stout, professor of American Religious History at Yale University, goes beyond the realm of traditional academic historical writing. In short chapters filled with battles and sermons he argues that the conduct of the Civil War was immoral. It lacked the discrimination and proportionality that characterize “just war.” As civilians suffered and battlefield casualties mounted, clergy on both sides failed to provide a moral critique of the war and instead became champions of patriotism. Christian leaders ratified a new “civil religion,” a new sense of the nation’s “messianic destiny,” which Stout sees as the war’s defining legacy (xxi).

Full Review