Civil Warriors

Back in January I wrote a post about the issue of libraries culling their collections in problematic ways. That issue has arisen here at Ohio State, and the librarian in charge of the History and Political Science collections has requested our advice about how to decide which books to retain in the open stacks and which to place in storage. Over the past twenty-four hours about a dozen of my colleagues have weighed in on the subject. Here’s my take. It’s heavily informed by my Civil War-related research:

I share the general unhappiness with the decision to renovate the state’s most important research library in such a way that it actually hobbles the ability of scholars to conduct research. This new reality will probably force some of us to use grant money simply to visit other research libraries with access to books comparable to what we had before this development. Nevertheless, I concur that there’s nothing now to be done save damage control.

In pondering how to go about selecting the volumes to keep on the shelves, I’m inclined to think that emphasis should be placed on primary sources. It is a lot easier to figure out what’s in a secondary work than a primary source, and given the rapidity with which books can be requested and delivered, for me personally at least, this has not proven much of a hardship. The inability to browse the numerous memoirs, diaries, letter collections, etc., on which my research depends, however, has been a real pain.

All that said, it’s worth noting that Google is scanning and making completely available in pdf format works that are no longer protected by copyright, and providing “previews” of many works that are. I’ve been astonished by the number of old and hard to get works I have been able to find thereby, and although Google has not yet created a system whereby one can simply browse their holdings as one would the open stacks, the system is searchable by keyword, title, author, publisher, publication date, and ISBN. A keyword search often yields serendipitous finds of relevant works I didn’t know about.

Consequently, my own default position would be to emphasize retention of primary sources of obvious importance and those still under copyright, as well as major monographs, interpretive syntheses, etc., which can usually be identified by the strength of a publisher’s reputation, either overall or within a given field.

For anyone interested in having a look at Google books, here’s a list of research libraries who are partnering with the Google project. (The list includes Harvard, the New York Public Library, Oxford, Princeton, Stanford, and Wisconsin, among others.)
http://books.google.com/googlebooks/partners.html

For the search engine itself, see
http://books.google.com/

As I recall, Eric Wittenberg regards Google Books pretty much as a sign of the End Times, and for his take on it, one ought to consult his blog posts on the subject. But as I indicate above, I’ve found a good tool for dealing with a reality that is unlikely to change for the better.

PS: I have a sort of rueful sympathy for the problem of too many books, too little space, because I am currently having to cull my own personal library. Needless to say, Civil War books are pretty much sacred cows — I’m purging only duplicate copies.

Ethan has already made reference to his review essay on a quarter-century of scholarship on Ulysses S. Grant, and hinted that he is interested in how one of the subjects of that essay might respond to it. Well, I have a number of responses, each operating at a somewhat different level. It’s always interesting to see how someone sees how my career has evolved and compare it with my own understanding, the latter of which has the advantage of possessing some inside information. I think the best way to address that topic would be in a series of posts of intellectual autobiography that may be of interest to readers of this blog, and so I set that aside as a longer-term response. I was also struck by Ethan’s understanding of the interplay between my articles and my Grant biography. I intended my Grant biography as a way to bring many of the findings I had made in articles to the attention of a larger audience through a book, and if one compares the reviews of the book by non-Civil War specialists to those of Civil War specialists (and academics with certain agendas), one gets a sense of the different audiences one serves with the same book. That other biographers (with the outstanding exception of Josiah Bunting, and, I would say, Michael Ballard) tended to ignore or minimize the impact of my work on their narratives (Eric Foner made especial mention of this in his review of Perret’s book) is best left to them to explain. Ethan displays a far better command of the body of literature than do some of Grant’s own biographers.

I was also struck by the notion of the biographer’s obligation to explore the puzzle of personality. I’m going to take that on in a separate post, because I think that’s an important question. Suffice it to say at this time that that was one of the things I was interested in exploring, but only one of them: that they dominate the narratives offered by McFeely and Fellman in his Sherman book comes at some significant cost to discussing other matters, and comes close to reducing generalship to a matter of personal psychology (something which a student of George B. McClellan’s career and the writings about him might do well to heed).

(Continued)

I say “even more amusing” because professionally, Sherman is the commander with whom I am most identified. Plus, I like to play with matches. And I have bipolar disorder, as perhaps did Sherman, according to some historians. See especially Janann Sherman, “The Jesuit and the General: Sherman’s Private War,” Psychohistory Review 21:3 (Spring 1993):255-294. Michael Fellman has told me that his view of his subject in Citizen Sherman (1995) was informed by the possibility that Sherman had bipolar disorder. Personally, I am convinced that he did.

Lee Kennett, in his biography of Sherman, postulates that Sherman had narcissistic personality disorder. I don’t think so, though I believe that, thanks to his father’s early death and his mother’s giving him over to the Ewings, he surely had a deep “narcissistic wound,” which though similar sounding, is not the same thing. John Marszalek’s biography rejects speculation as to any disorder, and judging by a conversation I once had with him, he seems to believe that a high-functioning person cannot, by definition, have a serious mental illness. Obviously, I reject that proposition.

Dimitri Rotov posted about this quiz in his blog.  I took it.  Which Civil War general do I most resemble?

Robert E. Lee.

In line with the mission of this blog to give us an opportunity to blow our own horn when the chance arises (or “sell our children”, but in this case no money is involved), I call readers’ attention to the just-published July 2007 issue of The Journal of Military History, which contains my essay “Still a Mystery? General Grant and the Historians, 1981-2006”. The abstract reads:

In 1879 General William T. Sherman remarked that, although he had known Ulysses S. Grant for years, “to me he is a mystery, and I believe he is a mystery to himself.” Over the last quarter-century many authors have claimed to have solved or at least shed fresh light on the mystery of Grant. For the most part, these works have portrayed Grant as a great general and good man, dissenting strongly with the highly negative portrayal of Grant contained in William S. McFeely’s 1981 Pulitzer Prize winning study. This essay traces the evolution of Grant scholarship since 1981 and suggests possible lines of inquiry for future Grant scholars.

Needless to say, I am interested in hearing from those who get a chance to check out the full essay and find my observations worthy of comment or critique—especially regarding works published in, say, 1991 or 2000.

Although college and professional minor league sports teams sometimes reference the American Civil War, it is rarely done on the major league professional sports level (and no, the New York Yankees don’t count).  The one significant exception is the National Hockey League, which this summer strengthened its claim to be the official sport of the American Civil War.  How so?  I thought you would never ask.

In 1972, the National Hockey League expanded from fourteen to sixteen teams with the addition of franchises in Long Island (or is that on Long Island?) and Atlanta.  I happen to be rather fond of the former, as some folks will tell you, but for purposes of this blog, it is the latter team that should grab your attention: the Atlanta Flames.  Gee, I wonder what inspired that name?  The team logo was a flaming A.

Unfortunately for hockey-minded students of the Civil War (or hockey fans who had an interest in the Civil War), the Flames eventually moved to Calgary, although they retain the team name and the assistant captains wear the “A” borrowed from the original team.  When Atlanta picked up a second hockey team, it was christened the Thrashers … after a bird.

So, when the Flames won their only Stanley Cup in 1989 (after that Long Island team won four in a row), there was no interest in a Civil War connection.

Hope springs eternal, however, in that tiny little hamlet of Columbus, Ohio, which, or so I am told, is the headquarters of a few people who blog about the American Civil War.  Columbus was fortunate several years ago to get a real NHL franchise (we in Phoenix should be so lucky).  The team bears the name of the Columbus Blue Jackets.  My good friend Eric Wittenberg has celebrated the team a few times in his blog, notably here.  But the Civil War connection was not evident to all viewers. 

This is no longer the case.  This summer all thirty NHL teams are announcing new uniforms, based on a prototype developed by Reebok.  In a league dominated by tradition, even shifting uniform templates can cause a great deal of angst, to say nothing of possible logo changes.  As an Islanders fan, I’m well aware of this.  In 1995 my team dropped the classic image on the left for this … growling … thing on the right … 

I was annoyed.  Others were even angrier, because the fisherman resembled some company logo for a company that sold frozen fishsticks.  Coming on top of the New York Rangers’ Stanley Cup run in 1994, it was almost too much.

Sanity has since returned to Long Island: the old logo reappeared within a few years. However, some of us are worried about whether the team will stumble again when it unveils new uniforms based on the Reebok template in September. 

So Blue Jackets management knew what might be at stake.  It did not help that the team had embraced a bug that resembled a kepi-wearing yellow jacket as a Blue Jacket icon.  People squabbled about the origins of the name.  They need do so no more.  The Blue Jackets took this opportunity to make their Civil War ties more evident than ever.

Thankfully, they succeeded.  Although the kepi logo has been on uniforms before, as this photograph of forward Rich Nash shows, it is now more evident than before due to the team’s decision to simplify things a bit and have the patch on both shoulders.

I just may have to pick one of these up someday.

Eric, this blog entry’s for you, as you and your family go through some trying times.  Best of luck to all.

Sean’s post brings back some interesting memories for me about titles and dust jackets.  Sometimes they are the product of negotiation.  Sometimes they are simply imposed.  Sometimes the results are interesting.  In truth, I’ve been fairly lucky when it comes to titles: dust jackets have proven more interesting, and in truth that’s because many publishers are reluctant to share cover art prior to publication.

Sometimes book titles can be a bit tricky.  The first book I worked on, a collection of letters sent to Andrew Johnson by several visitors to the South after the war who were in one way or another presidential advisers (even if some were self-appointed) eventually bore the title I selected, Advice After Appomattox:  Letters to Andrew Johnson, 1865-1866.  Had it stayed there, that would have been fine, but the editor of the Andrew Johnson Papers, LeRoy P. Graf, had different ideas, and so the book also bears another subtitle: Special Volume No. 1 of The Papers of Andrew Johnson.  In truth, the letters in the volume are part of the Johnson papers, and the book needed to be sold to libraries and collectors as part of the regular series, although it was not always marketed that way.  There’s been no “Special Volume No. 2,” and there never were any concrete plans for any.

I pressed the University of North Carolina Press to go with Let Us Have Peace over objections that the subtitle, Ulysses S. Grant and the Politics of War and Reconstruction, 1861-1868, should be the title.  I got a letter from an author who noted that this expression of Grant’s also adorned his biography of Grant for teenaged readers, published over a quarter-century before; more recently, a good colleague, Michael Les Benedict, reminded me that he planned to use the title for a book he’s been working on about Reconstruction.  Les and I like title-swapping, as you’ll see someday.

I can’t say that there was any trouble for the next few books in terms of titles or dust jackets: I had the most input with Harlan Davidson on my short Civil War text, America’s Civil War, with title, color of cover, and title all mine.  The Reconstruction Presidents is a play on John Morton Blum’s The Progressive Presidents, although it turned out to be a much longer book.  The Political Education of Henry Adams was, of course, a play on Adams’s own The Education of Henry Adams, a major target of my book.  Sherman’s Civil War was originally Sherman’s War, until someone claimed they were using the shorter version, and I didn’t care much, anyway.  My only complaint there was that the press reversed the image of Sherman on the cover, as you can see from comparing the jacket to the photograph. 

Without a doubt, my most difficult dealings with a press concerned the first volume of my Grant biography.  The press not only crafted its own title, Ulysses S. Grant: Youth to Appomattox, but insisted on showing Grant holding up that tree at Cold Harbor.  Mark Grimsley seems fond of that version, as he highlighted it on his own web page.  But I hated it.  It did not help that other people had used that image of Grant, including Geoffrey Perret: the fact is that I was tired of the image (which had also been used on the paperback edition of Let Us Have Peace).  Members of a discussion group dedicated to Grant agreed, and when yet another book came out with the Cold Harbor photo, I was able to substitute it with another one, which, by the way, is also a favorite of William S. McFeely, judging from this and this.   The battle over the subtitle was even sharper, and it took some time for Ulysses S. Grant: Triumph over Adversity, 1822-1865, to triumph over blandness. 

I think about titles more than perhaps I should, and I also think about dust jackets.  Not only are they important marketing tools, but somehow, at the end of the day, that’s how people will first encounter something I’ve worked on for some time.  We’ll see whether I’m as pleased with how future projects turn out as I’ve been with past publications.  I hope Les Benedict feels the same way when he sees Ulysses S. Grant: The Fruits of Victory, 1865-1885, which incorporates a title he used in a subtitle.

I beg forgiveness for my extended absence from this blog. Work obligations and family illnesses were partially responsible – the rest of it was, well… I have no real excuse. Fortunately, my fellow Civil Warriors have more than made up for my absence by seeing to it that this site continues to be a source of excellent content.

I was cleaning and rearranging the shelves today, and began thinking about the titles of Civil War books. Most of them are sort of perfunctory and simply descriptive of their content. Which is understandable, since the subject of a biography or battle study is what the author generally wants to convey to a potential reader. But Civil War titles also tend to use some of the same words pretty frequently: “honor”, “glory”, ”valor”, and similar terms seem to show up over and over again.

And that’s not a criticism, because often a title is tied to a quote from a biographical subject or a famous or particularly vivid description of a battle or other event. But I’m sure I’m not the only one who has read and filed away a positive review of a book, only to be uncertain of the title when I get to the bookstore. Was it something about bayonets, or maybe something about fighting for freedom?

Anyway, here is a short list of some of my favorite titles, based upon their distinctive or memorable nature – i.e., can I remember them when I get to the bookstore? I’m sure there are plenty of others that I’m not familiar with or that simply didn’t occur to me today, so I invite our readers to supply their favorites in the comments.

To Purge This Land With Blood by Stephen Oates

Embrace An Angry Wind by Wiley Sword (who, by the way, has a particularly appropriate and memorable name for a Civil War author)

They Died by Twos and Tens by Kenneth Hafendorfer

This Band of Heroes by James McCaffrey

To Battle for God and the Right by Glenn Longacre and John Haas

The Hard Hand of War by Mark Grimsley

Stand Firm and Fire Low edited by Walter Holden, William Ross, and Elizabeth Slomba

Beware the People Weeping by Thomas Turner

Come Retribution by William A. Tidwell, James O. Hall, and David W. Gaddy