Category: Blog

Conversation with George Rable

Conversation with George Rable

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In today’s Muster, JCWE Book Review Editor Megan Bever chats with Professor George Rable about his latest book, Conflict of Command (LSU Press, 2023).

From the press: The fraught relationship between Abraham Lincoln and George McClellan is well known, so much so that many scholars rarely question the standard narrative casting the two as foils, with the Great Emancipator inevitably coming out on top over his supposedly feckless commander. Conflict of Command, acclaimed Civil War historian George C. Rable rethinks that stance, providing a new understanding of the interaction between the president and his leading wartime general by reinterpreting the political aspects of their partnership.

Rable pays considerable attention to Lincoln’s cabinet, Congress, and newspaper editorials, revealing the role each played in shaping the dealings between the two men. While he surveys McClellan’s military campaigns as commander of the Army of the Potomac, Rable focuses on the political fallout of the fighting rather than the tactical details. This broadly conceived approach highlights the army officers and enlisted men who emerged as citizen-soldiers and political actors.

Conversation with Justene Hill Edwards

Conversation with Justene Hill Edwards

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In today’s Muster, Dr. Justene Hill Edwards, associate professor of history at the University of Virginia, discusses her new book Savings and Trust: The Rise and Betrayal of the Freedman’s Bank with the JCWE’s digital editor Robert Bland. Savings and Trust was released October 22, 2024 by W. W. Norton.

 

Robert Bland

Robert D. Bland is an Assistant Professor of History and Africana Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Civil War Bluejackets: Citizen Science, Machine Learning, and the US Navy Common Sailor

Civil War Bluejackets: Citizen Science, Machine Learning, and the US Navy Common Sailor

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The “digital turn” in Civil War era history has now reached the age of artificial intelligence (AI). ).  In 2022 Cameron Blevins and Christy Hyman challenged historians “even self-professed Luddites—to approach today’s shifting technological landscape with the same intellectual curiosity and rigor that they bring to their studies of the Civil War era.”[i] We have decided to take up the challenge.

Today, historians of all kinds are particularly concerned with the effects of AI-based Machine Learning (ML), especially generative models such as ChatGPT, on teaching and learning, fearing students will be “ghosting” their written assignments.[ii] Others have examined the potential and pitfalls of using ML in historical research.[iii] Our project, “Civil War Bluejackets: Race, Class and Ethnicity in the US Navy, 1861-1865” (CWB) falls on the optimistic side of ML in history research by making positive use of machine learning techniques to rewrite the history of the common US Navy sailor in the Civil . ML can, with the proper human input, enhance, in innovative ways, the social history of the Civil War era

CWB is a British Arts and Humanities Research Council grant funded project led by Northumbria University in partnership with information scientists at the University of Sheffield and the University of Koblenz-Landau. It centers on the US Navy Muster Rolls from the American Civil War, available on the US National Archives (NARA) website. The project’s main aim is to transcribe these recently digitized rolls, creating a powerful new database and research tool for the study of c. 118,000 wartime sailors, most of whom were drawn from among the poorest sections of nineteenth-century American society. This transcribed list will make the digitized rolls more accessible and usable. We will then use that transcription to machine-link to other digitally available resources connected to individual sailors, such as Rendezvous returns, hospital tickets, and most importantly, pension applications, all currently available online through Fold3.com. The resulting internet resource of these Bluejacket common sailors, so named for their short French-style navy jackets, will link tens of thousands of working-class wartime servicemen to all their digitally available military records. This result will also allow us to use the data generated to understand how the composition of Navy vessel crews changed over time—such as in this example from our pilot study

[Crew Ethnicity and Nativity on USS Louisville, 1862-1865]

which examines the ethnicities and nativities of the crew of the City-Class ironclad USS Louisville between 1862 and 1865. We should also be able to measure other demographics at scale, such as occupation, age, nativity, and even height, perhaps allowing us to understand the health of many working-class Americans in the mid-nineteenth century.[iv] US Navy records are particularly suited to such analysis, because, unlike the Army, a wide range of complete or near-complete naval personnel records have been digitized, including practically all pension records.

In designing the project, inspired by the work of climate scientists collecting historic weather data from Royal Navy and US Navy deck logs, we decided to use “Zooniverse” to facilitate our crowd sourcing, “Citizen Science” effort. Zooniverse is an online platform developed by the Citizen Science Alliance to allow the public to actively participate in major research initiatives.[v]

 

[Civil War Bluejackets on Zooniverse: Phase 1]

Initially utilized primarily for scientific analyses such as the examination of space and the cosmos, the access it provides to large numbers of willing volunteers is increasingly attracting humanities projects, especially those seeking to examine large data sets. Since project launch on Zooniverse in September 2022, Civil War Bluejackets has attracted over 1,600 volunteers, who have made almost 33,000 classifications (individual transcriptions). In this first phase of the project, volunteers were presented with an individual muster sheet and asked for any information on the muster date. Volunteers then transcribed certain workflows (columns in the original muster sheets), among which were name, birthplace, age, occupation (prior to enlistment), citizenship and rating (rank) and height. Another workflow we wanted to analyse was “eyes, hair and complexion.”  It was here where race was often identified, either in physical description or more bluntly with terms such as “contraband.” The quarterly musters regularly recorded how many “contrabands” had been enlisted into the ship’s compliments, and officers (and the Navy) used the records to aid in the administration of the ship’s crew.[vi]

We also asked the Citizen Science volunteers to draw a colored bounding box around each entry in their chosen workflow and transcribe what they read.

 

[Creating a “Golden Set” of Data ].

These bounding boxes helped our information science co-investigators at Sheffield to develop a “gold standard” set of data, which they then used to create sets of training and test data. The training data is split by workflow, with each being processed by a separate Deep Learning Neural Network-based transcription model to learn how to “read” the handwriting on the muster sheets.  As a result, all our citizen scientists have helped us reorient the overall Zooniverse project. The separate set of test data is then used to evaluate how accurately the models are able to transcribe handwritten text they have not seen before (i.e., been trained on). This gold standard dataset has proved fruitful. The 33,750 or so transcriptions on vessels beginning with the letters A and B have been enough to train our models to read the nineteenth-century handwriting of various US Navy junior officers. The machine learned how to transcribe numeric columns, such as terms of service and ship’s number, fairly quickly. Non-numeric data, such as names and place of birth proved the trickiest, but our models are now capable of achieving character-level accuracy rates of around 98% on numeric columns and around 94% on non-numeric ones. As well as producing the most probable transcription of a piece of handwritten text, the models also provide an estimate of their confidence in the transcription.

We then had to build a different form registration model capable of taking a digitized image of a muster sheet and splitting it into the individual columns and rows present on the original form. Achieving this means that we are able to automatically process the remaining vessels (i.e., those with names starting C-Z) without requiring humans to manually draw the bounding boxes around each cell I the form – a laborious and labor-intensive task. Once the form registration model has identified all of the cells in a new muster sheet form, each of these can be passed to the relevant transcription model to be further processed to obtain a most-probable transcription and a confidence score.

The next step on Zooniverse will become one of checking the machine output rather than transcription, a much simpler and more user-friendly task.

 

[Civil War Bluejackets on Zooniverse: Phase 2, Correcting automatic transcriptions]

We are pleased to announce that we are about to move to Phase 2 of the project where , based on its own self-assessed confidence level in its transcription. This means that we will only ask our volunteers to check those pieces of transcribed handwriting for which the model has a low confidence score, further significantly reducing the amount of work that humans need to do. We encourage Muster readers to sign up for this second phase to see how the platform works for historical projects.

This initial transcription effort led to a certain self-satisfaction among the team but a challenge from our advisory board made us reflect more on our citizen scientist pool. The ethical awareness of other digital humanities projects encouraged us to think harder about the ethical implications of our work.[viii]  In seeking initial ethical approval for our project, we had been aware of the literature around citizen science “crowd sourcing” and the reality that this is “free labor” people provide without remuneration.[ix] Of course, people volunteer for this kind of work and Zooniverse has terms and conditions which allow for the use of the data they collect.[x] It also has a strong privacy agreement against sharing any volunteer personal data. All it asks for is a valid email and a username—even providing your real name is optional. No other information is needed to participate. Yet, the challenge was how did we know who our volunteers were? In a project dedicated to understanding class, race, and ethnicity in the US Navy, how diverse were our transcribers?

With Zooniverse not collecting any user personal data our only way to progress was to contact our volunteers collectively through Zooniverse intermediaries. Zooniverse staff, for example, distribute our citizen scientist newsletter, and group mail everyone who signed up to the project with any major updates. We decided to tackle the issue through reaching out to genealogical groups that would potentially make our citizen science base more diverse. One of the groups we worked closely with was the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society (AAHGS), who were particularly interested in identifying African Americans in the musters

After initial discussions and a workshop, the AAGHS launched a “Memorial Day to Veterans Day” drive encouraging its members to transcribe on Zooniverse, ultimately transcribing thousands of records. An example of the rewards of such collaboration came when one of those volunteers, R. Roberts, who uses the handle @Grobster on Zooniverse, drew our attention to the age of one African American Third Class Boy aboard USS Brandywine.

 

[In the Footsteps of Frank Branch, African American Bluejacket]

His name was Frank Branch, listed as just 12-years-old. But @Grobster went further than just highlighting Branch on the muster roll- they directly engaged with the Bluejackets team in the knowledge creation process, conducting research that greatly aided our efforts to uncover this story. Using multiple digital resources created as a result of his naval service, it revealed a level of detail about Branch’s life that illuminated not just his wartime experience, but also his life (and escape) from enslavement and the post-war trials and tribulations he faced as he sought to make a life for himself in the post-war United States.

Grobster has since gone on to become a CWB Project Zooniverse Moderator helping other Citizen Scientists to understand and explore the muster sheets. Together with our other volunteer Zooniverse moderator, Robert Croke (Zooniverse handle @SandyCycler) they are continuing not only to play a major role in administrating the public face of the project but are engaging in significant amounts of personal research into these sailors and their vessels. What is very apparent to us is that the success of citizen science initiatives depends on a consistent and honest engagement with our citizen scientists. A volunteer community rarely generates organically and requires encouragement and nurturing through the lifetime of the project. At CWB, this has come in the form of aids and guides on the Zooniverse platform as well through mechanisms such as YouTube videos, public/online talks/training sessions, and, most importantly, through the dedicated Zooniverse project “Talk” forum where users can raise questions and queries. We also highlight the work volunteers do in a series of posts on our webpage entitled “Bluejacket Community Discoveries.”[xii]

 

[Bluejacket Community Discoveries]

We believe that the citizen scientists should be publicly acknowledged, with their permission and while preserving their anonymity whenever we can.

CWB is also interested in exploring user motivation and reward at a deeper level. An integral component revolves around learning when, why and how volunteers engage with humanities projects on Zooniverse. We have currently based our recognition of their work on those who engage the most, our superusers, but what about the more casual user? Our superusers, who have become moderators, help us understand what volunteers like about the tasks and what they do not. They tell us of frustrations in transcription, for example, helping us adjust workflows. As moderators they also provide support and encouragement to other users, exploiting their acquired expertise to pre-empt potential mistakes common among new volunteers and to guide them through the Zooniverse process. They have helped us too in co-creating Phase 2.

Ultimately, we intend this project to produce another digital resource for those interested in their ancestors, not just to fill out their family trees, but also to understand the lives of their historical relatives. In turn, the data generated, will help us and other scholars analyse the macro issues of the Civil War Union Navy and how its leaders managed a racially and ethnically integrated service. Though there is not nearly as much work on common sailors as there is on soldiers, there are some excellent surveys from Michael J. Bennett, Steven J. Ramold, Dennis J. Ringle, and Joseph P. Reidy. The new database, however, and the fact that most the major records for all US Civil War US sailors, musters, pensions, etc., are digitized, gives us an opportunity to examine the subject in innovative macro ways. Black and white, native and foreign, served together on vessels, but, for example, how did those ratios change over time, and from vessel to vessel, across the entire navy? Another is what was the occupational and age profiles of all sailors over the War?[xiii] Using this mass of new data that ML has helped provide us, we plan to write a new history of the Civil War common sailor in the US Navy focusing on class, race, and ethnicity.

This machine transcription of the nineteenth-century handwriting of hundreds of US navy officers, may be applicable to other manuscript records, perhaps providing more opportunities to rewrite the social history of the Civil War era and beyond. This potential is just one issue we want to discuss with others in CWB’s final conference, to be held in partnership with the US Naval Academy Museum, in Annapolis, Maryland, January 30-February 1, 2025. Among other topics are the racial, ethnic, and class relations in navies around the world between 1775 and 1914, and the impact naval life had on the working-class communities from which the sailors originated. We, therefore, invite all those interested in Civil War sailors, or any sailors around the world, in the long nineteenth century, to join us for that conference.

Our call for papers is here. For more information, please contact david.gleeson@northumbria.ac.uk or wwshieh@gmail.com

 

[i] Cameron Blevins and Christy Hyman, “Digital History and the Civil War Era,” Journal of the Civil War Era 12 (March 2022): 80-104., quote on page 97.

[ii] See, for example, Jonathan S. Jones, “Students Critique a ChatGPT Essay,” Perspectives (Sept. 2023) available at https://www.historians.org/perspectives-article/students-critique-a-chatgpt-essay-a-classroom-experiment-september-2023/ accessed July 25, 2024. Royal Historical Society, “Education Policy,” available at  https://royalhistsoc.org/policy/education/, accessed Jul 25, 2024.

[iii] See, for example, the essays in R. Darrell Meadows and Joshua Sternfeld “Artificial Intelligence and the Practice of History: A Forum,” American Historical Review (Sept. 2023): 1345-1349.

[iv] On height, nutrition and health see Roderick Flud, Kenneth Wachter, Annabel Gregory, Height, Health and History: Nutritional Status in the United Kingdom, 1750–1980 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

[v] “What is Zooniverse?” https://www.zooniverse.org/about accessed, July 25, 2024/

[vi] For important of recording “Contraband” see, for example, See for example, E. K. Owen to [David D.] Porter, Jan. 4, 1864, David Dixon Porter Papers, Huntington Library, Pasadena, California; June 3, 1863 S F Dupont to W. E Le Roy, June 3, 1863, Record Group 45, Subject File US Navy, 1775-1910, Box 263, NARA

[vii] For more information on how the computer learns how to “read” this writing, see “Machine Learning and Your Transcriptions” on CWB’s YouTube channel here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1l6giQr5qTg&t .

[viii] See “Colored Convention Project Principles” at https://coloredconventions.org/about/principles/   accessed, July 25, 2024.

[ix]Hauke Riesch and Clive Potter, “Citizen science as seen by scientists: Methodological, epistemological and ethical dimensions,” Public Understanding of Science 23 (Jan 2014): 107-120; Julie McDonough, “The ethics of crowdsourcing,” Dolmaya, Linguistica Antverpiensia, New Series – Themes in Translation Studies 11 (2011) online at https://lans-tts.uantwerpen.be/index.php/LANS-TTS/article/view/279  accessed July 25, 2024; Vanessa Williamson, “On the Ethics of Crowdsourced Research,” Political Science and Politics 49 (Jan 2016): 77-81.

[x] “Zooniverse User Agreement and Privacy Policy,”  https://www.zooniverse.org/privacy  accessed, July 25, 2024.

[xi] You can read about this research into Frank Branch on our website here https://civilwarbluejackets.com/2023/09/20/bluejacket-community-discoveries-on-the-trail-of-an-african-american-child-in-the-union-navy/ and here https://civilwarbluejackets.com/2023/11/14/bluejacket-community-discoveries-an-update-on-the-search-for-frank-branch-african-american-child-in-the-u-s-navy/.

[xii] See “Category: Citizen Science Discoveries,” https://civilwarbluejackets.com/category/citizen-scientist-discoveries/ accessed July 25, 2024.

[xiii] Michael J. Bennett, Union Jacks: Yankee Sailors in the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Steven J. Ramold, Slaves, Soldiers, Citizens: African Americans in the Union Navy (De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2002); Dennis J. Ringle, Life in Mr. Lincoln’s Navy (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1998); Joseph Reidy, “Black Men in Navy Blue During the Civil War,” Prologue 33 (Fall 2001), available at https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2001/fall/black-sailors, accessed, July 30, 2024.

 

 

Greetings from the New Editor

Greetings from the New Editor

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Greetings JCWE community,

 

I am Robert Bland and I am excited to be joining this robust online community around Muster as the Journal’s incoming associate editor for digital content. As a prior contributor and longtime reader of Muster, I deeply value the digital world that has been curated by the past editors of the Journal of the Civil War Era. Here, I want to thank and acknowledge and thank Hilary Green for the tremendous amount of labor she has done to shape the most recent iteration of Muster.

 

By way of introduction, I am an assistant professor of history and Africana Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. A historian of the emancipation and Reconstruction, I am currently completing a monograph that examines the legacy of the political generation of teachers, Freedmen’s Bureau agents, and aspiring officeholders who travelled to the Lowcountry during the Civil War, established South Carolina’s postbellum Republican Party, and connected this new political world to a nascent, national Black public sphere. The site of a “long Reconstruction” that persisted into the first decade of the twentieth century, the Lowcountry anchored the production a generational countermemory that not only confronted the myths of the Lost Cause but also guided the archival practice of the scholars that built the modern field of African American history.

 

My passion for Civil War-era history emerged from a long, personal journey with the nineteenth century past. Growing up in Virginia Beach, I lived in the shadow of Fort Monroe and Hampton University. During my childhood, I heard countless stories of the Battle of the Monitor and Merrimack. I was one of the last cohorts of high-school aged students in Virginia to experience the bizarre Lee-Jackson-King holiday. Before graduate school, where I trained with scholars who helped shape the modern story of emancipation, I taught high school social studies at one of the handful of schools in the United States named after a nineteenth-century Black officeholder.

 

In my role as incoming digital editor, I seek to continue the mission of making Muster the premier site for discussion of the Civil War era. Like my predecessors, I want to ensure that Muster remains a place where readers can encounter cutting-edge and original writing, author interviews, and reflections of the meaning of the long Civil War in our current moment. I seek to amplify a wide-range of voices and will try to make Muster a place where both established and early-career scholars can find their footing. Most importantly, I want this to be a place of community and decency where a large online public can gather and discuss important issues with intensity, good faith, and a sense of commonweal.

 

I look forward to beginning this journey with you. If you ever want to offer feedback or have an idea that you would like to pitch to Muster, you can reach me at rbland4@utk.edu

 

Onward and upward,

RDB

Robert Bland

Robert D. Bland is an Assistant Professor of History and Africana Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Editors’s Note for June 2024 JCWE

Editors’s Note for June 2024 JCWE

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This issue demonstrates the ongoing methodological breadth of the Civil War Era, as scholars bring numerous different ways of approaching history to reckon with the turbulent mid-nineteenth century in all its facets. This issue includes one research article, a book award talk, a roundtable, and a historiographic review essay, along with the sterling book reviews that anchor the journal and the field.

In her Tom Watson Brown Book Award address, R. Isabela Morales approaches the Civil War era through family history. Drawing from her prize-winning book, Happy Dreams of Liberty: An American Family in Slavery and Freedom, Morales discusses the relationship between family history and the broader political and economic dynamics that influence them. Demonstrating the sterling prose and eye for detail that the award committee noted, the essay is also a reminder of how narrative writing and individual human stories can bring the past to life.

In “‘We Died Here Obedient to Her Laws’: The Reception of Sparta in the Lost Cause and Confederate Memorialization,” Jase D. L. Sutton explores how white southerners turned to classical analogies to make sense of the Civil War and to develop the myth of the Lost Cause. Delving into under-studied but relatively common references to Sparta, Sutton argues that memory-makers utilized the Battle of Thermopylae to deflect blame for the Confederacy’s losses and defend the honor of Confederate soldiers. Lost Cause purveyors also explored Spartan analogies for Confederate women’s loyalty and sacrifice. He argues that such references not only advanced a specific Lost Cause narrative but also buttressed white southerners’ ongoing use of classical analogies to support their conservative vision of southern values.

Sarah Handley-Cousins moderated “Disability in the Civil War Era: A Roundtable.” Here, several historians and literature scholars discuss the growth of interdisciplinary disability studies and how scholars have brought insights from that field to the study of the Civil War era. They argue that the disability history framework helps us better understand the Civil War era by casting new light on critical issues such as slavery, emancipation, military service, federal bureaucracy, the home front, and veteran-hood. They also point toward areas for future research in material history and disability during the postwar era.

In our historiographical review essay, Brian P. Luskey analyzes scholarship on the cultural history of the North during the Civil War. In “The Union’s Culture Industry,” Luskey helpfully discusses recent work that has emphasized the wartime production, circulation, and consumption of products like newspapers, magazines, songs, minstrel shows, and pornography. More could be done, he argues, to investigate both how mainstream cultural producers operated (for instance, by marketing directly to soldiers) and also how people and organizations with relatively little economic power—for instance, enlisted men, or Black women who worked for the US war effort—became cultural producers in their own right. In the end, the essay reveals a great deal about northern cultural production during the war and urges historians to continue the work with an emphasis on how “culture” was constituted not just by words, images, and performances but also by material relationships.

This issue also includes the run of excellent book reviews that make the journal a crucial part of the field. As always, we are grateful to the editorial staff and our readers for making the issue a reality. 

 

Kate Masur and Greg Downs

Kate Masur is an associate professor at Northwestern University, specializing in the history of the nineteenth-century United States, focusing on how Americans grappled with questions of race and equality after the abolition of slavery. Greg Downs, who studies U.S. political and cultural history in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is a professor of history at University of California--Davis. Together they edited an essay collection on the Civil War titled The World the Civil War Made (North Carolina, 2015), and they currently co-edit The Journal of the Civil War Era.

Exit Interview with Hilary Green

Exit Interview with Hilary Green

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What has been the most rewarding part of your time with Muster?

It has been rewarding to introduce the amazing work of more diverse Civil War era scholars to more diverse audiences of academic, K-12, and non-academic audiences. As such, I have been able to see more people engage with their work while simultaneously see collaborations and research blossom into fuller pieces.

How have you seen Muster change and grow in the past three years?

It has grown in terms of the pieces developed but also how Muster became a venue to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic and new realities of conferencing, closure of archives, and politicalization of the Civil War era. Some pieces directly responded to current events, including a roundup of pieces contextualizing the failed January 6, 2021coup d’etat, monument removals, Civil War soldiers’ support animals, and even the ethics of colorizing historical photographs.

Both African American and white descendants have had a place to develop pieces showcasing their unique family histories for wider audiences. For instance, Holly Pinheiro’s interview with Michelle Mardsen, a descendant of the Rothwell family explored in The Families Civil War (UGA Press, 2022) was one of our most popular ones.

Teaching pedagogical posts have remained a constant presence, especially after COV19-19. But I truly marveled at seeing Muster posts cited in published works. These short pieces are quality public scholarship. As such Muster has remained a go to place for accessible Civil War Era scholarship that complements the articles, roundtables, and reviews of the JCWE.

What projects are you looking forward to exploring now that you are cycling off your tenure with the JCWE?

I am currently in the last stages of a second book manuscript exploring how African American communities remembered and commemorated the Civil War from 1863 to the present. It centers the ordinary memory work of men, women, and children from their porches to their churches and schools to the reenactment battlefield. Afterwards, I will develop a third book building on my campus history work at the University of Alabama and tell the collective biography of the enslaved campus laborers and their legacy in Reconstruction era Alabama.

What is one piece of advice that you would offer your successor?

While you are building on the past, remember to develop your vision for Muster through every post, contributor, and desired audience. Be encouraging. Be supportive of authors at all stages of their respective career. And be mindful of your vision for Civil War era scholarship cultivated through Muster.

What is one piece of advice that you would give a junior scholar who is thinking about writing a piece for Muster?

You should never be afraid to pitch a Muster post. With a broad readership, you will get invaluable feedback and exposure. These short pieces often serve as the first thought to larger projects and can be beneficial.

Hilary N. Green

Hilary N. Green is the James B. Duke Professor of Africana Studies at Davidson College. She previously worked in the Department of Gender and Race Studies at the University of Alabama where she developed the Hallowed Grounds Project. She earned her M.A. in History from Tufts University in 2003, and Ph.D. in History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2010. Her research and teaching interests include the intersections of race, class, and gender in African American history, the American Civil War, Reconstruction, as well as Civil War memory, African American education, and the Black Atlantic. She is the author of Educational Reconstruction: African American Schools in the Urban South, 1865-1890 (Fordham, 2016).

Production by Enslaved Workers and the US GNP

Production by Enslaved Workers and the US GNP

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Sad to say, the gulf between economic history and mainstream history is as wide today as ever.  Undoubtedly many forces have contributed to this state of affairs, but one historical breakpoint was the controversy over slavery during the 1970s, prompted by publication of Time on the Cross, by Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman, in 1974.[1]  Perhaps because of the subsequent divergence, when a new round of studies appeared some years later, written by historians specifically concerned with economic aspects of slavery, the authors drew very little on research by economic .

One claim in recent literature that is often repeated is that in the antebellum period, enslaved workers produced an outsized proportion of the total value produced in the U.S. economy – the Gross National Product (GNP).   A case in point is this statement on the website of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture:  “Men, women and children, pushed by the whip, produced cotton, rice, sugar and tobacco valued at well over half the gross national product.”[2]  The exhibit provides no source for this claim, but it seems likely to originate with Edward Baptist, who wrote: “All told, more than $600 million, or almost half of the economic activity in the United States in 1836, derived directly or  indirectly from cotton produced by the million-odd slaves.”[3]  Baptist’s calculation is egregiously exaggerated, conflating inputs with outputs and adding items that are not even part of GNP.  As such, it has been roundly criticized by economists.[4]  But what would be a more accurate answer to the question?

It is not an easy question to answer because there is no direct aggregate data on the value of the goods and services enslaved people produced. Because enslaved persons represented only about 12 percent of the US population in 1860, one might simply dismiss the “One-Half” claim out of hand as a physical impossibility.  To get closer to the answer, Paul Rhode recently constructed a bottom-up estimate of the aggregate value of goods and services produced by enslaved people, adding their share of each of the major staple crops, agricultural improvements, home production, and domestic service.[5] Applying the same methodology to each of the antebellum census years, Rhode’s results are summarized in Table 1.  The bottom-line conclusion is that the enslaved produced about the same share of GNP as their share of the population.  On the one hand, one might have expected the share to be larger, because the “labor-force participation rate” of the enslaved was higher. This is economics-speak for the fact that enslaved women were compelled to do field work, while enslaved children began work in their pre-teen years.  On the other hand, most of the enslaved worked in agriculture and domestic service, where the value of output per worker was lower than the economy-wide average.

The Rhode article may be compared to another recent article, co-authored by economist Mark Stelzner and historian Sven Beckert, author of Empire of Cotton: A Global History.[6]  The objective is the same: to estimate the value of goods and services produced by enslaved workers as a share of GNP.  But the approach is entirely different.  Lacking direct aggregate data on enslaved production, the authors reason that the expected value of that production should have been reflected in the market prices of enslaved workers.  On its face, this method epitomizes model-based theoretical analysis, complete with references to “rational economic agents in a perfectly competitive economy” (144) and “present value [asset] pricing theory” (145), exactly the features that historians so often find objectionable in economic .  The approach seems particularly questionable in that slave prices reflected expectations of production value across many years into the future, whereas the objective here is to estimate the value of production in one particular year (so that it can be compared to GNP).

Despite these issues, the Stelzner-Beckert results invite comparison with those of Rhode.  Table 1 presents both sets of figures.  (The range for Stelzner-Beckert reflects alternative assumptions for the discount rate: the interest rate at which future returns are “discounted” because of their remoteness in time.)  As may be seen, both studies find that the share of the GNP produced by enslaved people was about equal to, or slightly below, their share of the population.  To some degree at least, it seems reassuring that two such different approaches yield roughly convergent results.

The share of GNP produced by enslaved workers is of course only one item in the larger conversation about the place of slavery in US history.[7]  But when a topic engages a broad segment of the public, as slavery does, mistaken or misleading factoids can have great staying power.  We cannot expect to control or curtail this process, but awareness of basic magnitudes belongs in the knowledge sets of historians of all stripes.

 

 

[1] The book itself is Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974).  A critique by economic historians was Paul A. David, Herbert G. Gutman, Richard Sutch, Peter Temin, and Gavin Wright, Reckoning with Slavery: A Critical Study in the Quantitative History of American Negro Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976).  For a recent overview, see Eric Hilt, “Revisiting Time on the Cross after 45 Years: The Slavery Debates and the New Economic History,” Capitalism: A Journal of History and Economics 1 (2020): 456-483.

[2] Agriculture: Nature’s Harvest https://www.searchablemuseum.com/a-nation-bound-by-slavery#section-start downloaded May 16, 2024.

[3] The Half Has Never Been Told (New York: Basic Books, 2014), p. 322.

[4]  For example, Alan Olmstead and Paul W. Rhode, “Cotton, Slavery and the New History of Capitalism,” Explorations in Economic History 67 (2018), p. 13.

[5] Paul Rhode, “What Fraction of Antebellum US National Product did the Enslaved Produce?” Explorations in Economic History 91 (2024): 1-15.

[6] Stelzner and Beckert, “The Contribution of Enslaved Workers to output and Growth in the Antebellum United States,” Economic History Review 77 (2024): 137-159. Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Knopf, 2014).

[7] For my take on the role of slavery in US economic growth, see “Slavery and the Rise of the Nineteenth-Century American Economy,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 36 (2022): 123-148.

 

 

 

 

 

Gavin Wright

Gavin Wright is the William Robertson Coe Professor of American Economic History Emeritus at Stanford University, where he has taught since 1982. His book Sharing the Prize: The Economics of the Civil Rights Revolution in the American South (2013) won the Alice Hanson Jones Prize from the Economic History Association. Wright’s most recent publications are “Slavery and Anglo-American Capitalism Reconsidered,” Economic History Review (2020); and “Slavery and the Rise of the Nineteenth-Century American Economy,” Journal of Economic Perspectives (2022).

2024 Tom Watson Brown Book Prize Winner

2024 Tom Watson Brown Book Prize Winner

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The Society of Civil War Historians and the Watson-Brown Foundation are proud to announce that Yael A. Sternhell is the recipient of the 2024 Tom Watson Brown Book Award. Dr. Sternhell earned the award for War on Record: The Archive and the Afterlife of the Civil War which was published in 2023 by Yale University Press. The $50,000 award is funded by the Watson-Brown Foundation in honor of Tom Watson Brown, a dedicated student of the Civil War.

Author standing in front of book shelves

In making its selection, the prize committee stated:

“This volume explores how the documentary collection best known as the Official Records was assembled by officials of the US government in a process that reflected embedded agendas, various priorities, assumptions about what to include and exclude, issues of organization, and other concerns that fundamentally shaped the most important documentary editing edition ever produced by a federal agency. Historians will have to wrestle with this revealing work and its implications for the writing of Civil War history; thanks to Sternhell’s trailblazing scholarship, they will never again view the Official Records in quite the same way.”

The Watson Brown Book Award jury consisted of Brooks D. Simpson (chair), Diane Miller Sommerville, Susannah Ural, and Tad Brown, President of the Watson-Brown Foundation, Inc.

Dr. Sternhell will be honored at the SCWH banquet taking place this November during the 2024 Annual Meeting of the Southern Historical Association, held this year in Kansas City, Missouri.

Winner Biography

Dr. Yael Sternhell is associate professor of history and American studies at Tel Aviv University. She is the author of Routes of War: The World of Movement in the Confederate South (Harvard University Press, 2012) and War on Record: The Archive and the Afterlife of the Civil War (Yale University Press, 2023). Her work has won awards from the Southern Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians and both of her books were shortlisted for the Lincoln Prize. In 2024-2025 she will be the Weinstock Visiting Associate Professor of History at Harvard University.

Hilary N. Green

Hilary N. Green is the James B. Duke Professor of Africana Studies at Davidson College. She previously worked in the Department of Gender and Race Studies at the University of Alabama where she developed the Hallowed Grounds Project. She earned her M.A. in History from Tufts University in 2003, and Ph.D. in History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2010. Her research and teaching interests include the intersections of race, class, and gender in African American history, the American Civil War, Reconstruction, as well as Civil War memory, African American education, and the Black Atlantic. She is the author of Educational Reconstruction: African American Schools in the Urban South, 1865-1890 (Fordham, 2016).

Uncovering Black Voices in Civil War Era Digital Archives: The Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi Project

Uncovering Black Voices in Civil War Era Digital Archives: The Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi Project

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While pondering the future of digital history, historian Edward L. Ayers argues the field should not only replicate archives and build new tools. It must also feature interpretation, explanation, and explication, and when it accomplishes these things, it can contribute original knowledge and perform a democratic service in meaningful and enduring ways.[1]Digital history, therefore, presents a unique opportunity and responsibility to preserve, interpret, and disseminate historical resources to scholars and the public alike, an especially important goal to the recovery work of Black voices during the Civil War era.

Launched in 2019, the Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi project (CWRGM) aims to do just that. Co-directed by Dr. Susannah J. Ural (The Frank & Virginia Williams Chair for Abraham Lincoln & Civil War Studies at Mississippi State University) and myself (Digital Humanities Assistant Librarian at the University of South Dakota), CWRGM is making the state’s Civil War- and Reconstruction-era governors’ records freely available online at CWRGM.org. With support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Historical Publications & Records Commission, CWRGM is digitizing, transcribing, subject tagging, and annotating over 20,000 of the letters, telegrams, and petitions sent to the state’s governors between 1859–1882. Presently, we offer over 11,500 of these diverse records to genealogists, educators, students, scholars, and others at the site.

The CWRGM collection is far less about Mississippi’s governors than readers may assume. Rather, it allows us to listen to the concerns, frustrations, and fears of thousands during one of the most pivotal periods in U.S. history. While the majority of the authors are white men, the collection is rich with African American history. For instance, we can see Lambert Moore, a freedman from Holly Springs, challenge a tax on the earnings he made from hiring himself out during the war.[2] Users can hear Albert Snowden’s pleas to Governor James Lusk Alcorn for protection from the white supremacist violence erupting in the state in the early 1870s.[3] Letters about Permilia Finley, the matron of Vicksburg’s City Hospital, highlight challenges to her leadership by disgruntled whites in 1871.[4] Others, like a letter supporting the pardon of Franklin Dunn, a white man who was convicted of killing the white employer of a biracial freedwoman named Eliza Row, reveal postwar tensions over Black women’s labor.[5]

By editing a collection full of resources authored by and about African Americans it became our responsibility to increase its public access in a responsible manner. Information management scholar Purdom Lindblad reminds us of this ethical imperative, “There is an inherent violence in archival work, silencing and obscuring…people and sources….”[6] These concerns are magnified when working with materials pertaining to the histories of impoverished people, indigenous peoples, people of color, women, and members of the queer community, among others. While CWRGM employs a number of strategies to combat this, we also launched an expansive effort to subject tag the collection with the goal of ensuring the discoverability of its marginalized voices.

One of the most dynamic solutions to document discoverability has been the ability to explore the collection by topic, in addition to keyword and advanced search mechanisms. When CWRGM researchers review transcriptions, they add subject tags from internally controlled vocabularies in the following nine categories: people, places, organizations, businesses, events, occupations, military units, vital statistics, and social identifiers. For example, references to enslaved people (such as servants, slave, servile population, etc.) are tagged with the subject term “African Americans–Enslaved People.” Users can then use this tag to access all documents in the collection that contain this subject tag.

The vocabulary for subject tags is internally created by CWRGM editors who attempt to mimic LOC Subject Headings wherever possible but eschew them when their terminology is outdated or minimizes discoverability, or does not exist, which is the case for most named people in the collection.[7] While the LOC Authorities are expansive and offer a vocabulary shared by numerous other projects, their terms frequently fail to capture the experiences of historically disempowered people, especially enslaved and freed people, so it became necessary to create a new vocabulary. And, as the “African Americans–Enslaved Peoples” subject tag demonstrates, creating our own controlled vocabulary allows us to engage in reparative metadata practices by adopting more appropriate, contemporary terminology.[8]

Our subject tagging features serve as the backbone of CWRGM, ensuring content discoverability and accessibility. Keyword searching limits user access to documents that include terminology verbatim in the transcriptions. For example, at CWRGM keyword searching the transcriptions yields 56 results when using the term “Negros,” 343 for “Negroes,” 248 for “Negro,” and 239 for “Black.” “African American” never appears in the transcriptions. Applying the subject tag “African Americans” within transcriptions allows users to find 1,495 documents, significantly improving user access to the collection regardless of the authors’ variable terminology and spellings.

Screen capture of the “Crimes (alleged)–Cadaver Procurement and Sales” subject tag
https://cwrgm.org/item/S32083811

The vastness and diversity of the collection presents numerous challenges, however. Deciding what to tag, for instance, was no easy task and required an expansive review of the historical literature. For example, we turned to Tera Hunter’s Bound in Wedlock to identify, tag, and explain unlawful cohabitation laws, and Daina Ramey Berry’s The Price for Their Pound of Flesh was critical to our efforts to tag illegal cadaver sales.[9] Adding subject tags to these topics increases their discoverability, but their connections to a white supremacist legal system also risk depicting Black actors in the collection as inherently criminal. Adding annotations to subject tags, therefore, is key to contextualizing the term for users. Consequently, CWRGM is indebted to the experts whose research recovers the histories of slavery, colonialism, and racial, gendered, and sexual violence because their critical theories in race, gender, sexuality, class, and anti-colonialism drive our tagging and annotation mechanisms.

Screen capture of the pop-up annotation associated with the subject tag, “Crimes (alleged)–Unlawful Cohabitation” in “Letter from Major C. C. Shackleford to Mississippi Governor Adelbert Ames; July 20, 1868.” See the fill subject list here.
https://cwrgm.org/item/mdah_784-968-01-31
https://cwrgm.org/item/S32030987

Our desire to create interoperability within and between our project and others, also threatened overregularization as one subject term may encompass many different meanings of experiences, depending on its context. For example, subject tags do not capture the intersectional nature of people’s identities found in the collection. The “African Americans” tag captures one identity but cannot account for factors like gender or class, and fails to highlight multi-racial identities, which are rarely straightforward in the text regardless.

These concerns drove CWRGM’s adoption of nested tags and faceted search. We began to nest subject tags, moving from the more general to the more specific, “African Americans–Enslaved People” and “African Americans–Enslaved People. Contraband of War,” for instance. Users can now find all references to African Americans regardless of their labor status under the more general subject tag “African Americans,” but they can also parse their research by specific labor and military identities. We realized early on we could not apply nested subject tags in intersectional ways, however. The tag “African Americans–Historically Free and Newly Freed. Women,” for instance, would help users find documents specifically referring to freed women, but they would no longer be findable under the “Women” subject tag. The limitations of subject tagging in this format meant we had to focus on a single group identity per subject tag and instead, create more access points to the collection.

Screen capture of the facet options available for the Social Identifiers category.

The introduction of advanced and faceted search to the website, however, allows users to select multiple facets to customize their search. For example, the Social Identifiers page organizes documents by family structure, sex and gender, and legal status, among other facets. Other subject categories pages, such as Events, offer even more facets. Users can even narrow down results to those documents that include more than one subject tag, such as documents containing the “African Americans” and “Women” tags, in some ways rectifying our inability to apply single intersection subject tags. They can also be placed into more than one facet category, highlighting the multidimensional aspect of a term. For example, the “Emancipation & Self Emancipation” tag is discoverable under the legal, military, and political facets on the Events page.

Scholars invested in the recovery of African American histories, especially Black women’s voices, work under some of the most difficult archival conditions. Historian Ula Taylor asserts Black women’s efforts at self-protection shaped their representation in the public record, which therefore requires innovative strategies when researching African American women’s histories. Those untrained in African American studies are therefore at risk of misinterpreting Black women’s lives. Prolific scholars Saidiya Hartman and Thavolia Glymph offer models for “retrieving minor lives from oblivion” in their scholarship. Scholars like Taylor, Hartman, Glymph, and many others, therefore, have had to rely on some of the most creative and rigorous historical methods and theoretical ideas to uncover the lives of Black women in the archive.[10] By rooting CWRGM’s collection and its subject tagging in their critical histories, however, digital history can help users with diverse backgrounds and interests access an equally diverse and rich collection.

Lindsey R. Peterson, Ph.D. is the Digital Humanities Librarian at the University of South Dakota (Vermillion), co-director of the Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi project, and incoming Managing Director of the Society of Civil War Historians. You can learn more about her work at lindseyraepeterson.com.

 

[1] Edward L. Ayers, “Does Digital Scholarship Have a Future?” Educause Review (July/August 2013): 24–34, accessed March 5, 2024, https://er.educause.edu/articles/2013/8/does-digital-scholarship-have-a-future. See also Julian C. Chambliss and Scot A. French, “A Generative Praxis: Curation, Creation, and Black Counterpublics,” Scholarly Editing 39 (April 2022), accessed March 4, 2024, https://scholarlyediting.org/issues/39/a-generative-praxis/.

[2] “Petition from Lambert Moore to Mississippi Governor William L. Sharkey; September 28, 1865,” Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi, accessed April 22, 2024, https://cwrgm.org/item/mdah_771-956-10-16.

[3] “Letter from Albert Snowden to Mississippi Governor James L. Alcorn; March 19, 1871,” Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi, accessed April 22, 2024, https://cwrgm.org/item/mdah_786-972-11-15.

[4] “Letter from John R. Hicks to Mississippi Governor James L. Alcorn; January 3, 1871,” Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi, accessed April 22, 2024, https://cwrgm.org/item/mdah_786-972-01-01.

[5] “Letter from E. Jeffords to Mississippi Governor Ridgley C. Powers; January 6, 1872,” Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi, accessed April 22, 2024, https://cwrgm.org/item/mdah_794-979-03-03.

[6] Purdom Lindblad, “Archives in the Anthropocene,” Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, February 15, 2018, accessed April 25, 2021, https://mith.umd.edu/archives-in-the-anthropocene/. See also J. J. Ghaddar and Michelle Caswell, “‘To Go Beyond’: Towards a Decolonial Archival Praxis,” Archival Science 19 (2019): 71–85, accessed March 5, 2024, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-019-09311-1. See also Christina Boyles, Andy Boyles Petersen, Elisa Landaverde, and Robin Dean, “Postcusodial Praxis: Building Shared Context through Decolonial Archiving,” Scholarly Editing 39 (April 2022), accessed March 4, 2024, https://scholarlyediting.org/issues/39/a-generative-praxis/.

[7] For an explanation of the Library of Congress’s Subject Headings, see “How do subject headings work?” Library of Congress, accessed July 27, 2023, https://ask.loc.gov/faq/381064. For an analysis on the LOC Authorities’ limitations, see Celeste Brewer, “On Outdated and Harmful Language in the Library of Congress Subject Headings,” Columbia University Libraries: News from Columbia’s Rare Book  & Manuscript Library, September 19, 2021, https://blogs.cul.columbia.edu/rbml/2021/10/19/on-outdated-and-harmful-language-in-library-of-congress-subject-headings/ and River Freemont, “Exploring Bias and the Library of Congress Subject Headings,” Unbound: Smithsonian Libraries and Archives, August 4, 2021, https://blog.library.si.edu/blog/2021/08/04/exploring-bias-and-library-of-congress-subject-headings/.

[8] See Laura Coyle, “Right from the Start: The Digitization Program at the Smithsonian’s Nat. Museum of African American History and Culture, Public Historian 40, no. 3 (2018): 292–318, https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2018.40.3.292; Adwoa Adusei, “1619 Project: The Power of Naming,” Brooklyn Library, November 13, 2019, https://www.bklynlibrary.org/blog/2019/11/13/1619-project-power-naming; and “Guiding Principles for Reparative Description at NARA,” National Archives, accessed July 17, 2023, https://www.archives.gov/research/reparative-description/principles.

[9] Tera Hunter, Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2019) and Daina Ramey Berry, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation (Boston: Beacon Press, 2017).

[10] Ula Taylor, “Women in the Documents: Thoughts on Uncovering the Personal, Political, and Professional,” Journal of Women’s History, 20, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 187–196.

Lindsey R. Peterson

Lindsey R. Peterson, Ph.D. is the Digital Humanities Librarian at the University of South Dakota (Vermillion), co-director of the Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi project, and incoming Managing Director of the Society of Civil War Historians. You can learn more about her work at lindseyraepeterson.com.

Introducing the New Digital Media Editor

Introducing the New Digital Media Editor

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The Journal of the Civil War Era is pleased to announce that Dr. Robert Bland will become the journal’s new Digital Media Editor in June. He succeeds Dr. Hilary Green, who served as Digital Media Editor since 2020. Dr. Bland is assistant professor of History and Africana Studies at the University of Tennessee. He is a historian of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States with an emphasis on the African American experience and the postbellum South. His research and teaching engage questions of racial formation, electoral and cultural politics, and battles over historical memory. He is currently at work on a book project that examines the legacy of Reconstruction in the African American public sphere. The book explores the efforts of Black South Carolinians and their northern allies to preserve the last bastion of radical Republicanism in the South during the half century that followed the so-called Compromise of 1877. It illuminates a series of connections between grassroots struggles in the South Carolina Lowcountry over political patronage, disaster relief, and local schools and the simultaneous debate in the national Black press over how to contest the cultural and intellectual dimensions of the emerging Jim Crow order. His research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

 We are excited to welcome Dr. Bland to the journal, and we thank Dr. Green for her outstanding service to the journal. She creatively guided the JCWE blog, Muster, through the pandemic; stewarded our social media presence in a complex time, and expandedMuster’s readership. We are grateful for all her work and hope she won’t be a stranger.

 

Kate Masur and Greg Downs

Kate Masur is an associate professor at Northwestern University, specializing in the history of the nineteenth-century United States, focusing on how Americans grappled with questions of race and equality after the abolition of slavery. Greg Downs, who studies U.S. political and cultural history in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is a professor of history at University of California--Davis. Together they edited an essay collection on the Civil War titled The World the Civil War Made (North Carolina, 2015), and they currently co-edit The Journal of the Civil War Era.

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