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Call for Submissions: Anthony E. Kaye Memorial Essay Prize

Call for Submissions: Anthony E. Kaye Memorial Essay Prize

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 The Society of Civil War Historians and the Journal of the Civil War Era invite submissions from early career scholars (doctoral candidates at the writing stage and PhDs not more than two years removed from having earned their degree) for the Anthony E. Kaye Memorial Essay Award. Papers on any topic concerning the history of the Civil War era, broadly defined, will be considered.

 

The winning submission will earn the author a $1,000 award and an additional $500 travel stipend to the Society of Civil War Historians biennial conference in 2026 where the award will be presented. Authors must be willing to attend the conference in order to be eligible for the award. The winning essay also will be eligible for publication in the Journal of the Civil War Era. The Richards Center, SCWH, and UNC Press sponsor the award.

 

 

Submission information: The submission deadline is June 1, 2025. Submissions should be sent to the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center (RichardsCenter@psu.edu) with the subject line Anthony E. Kaye Memorial Essay Award. Submissions should be double-spaced and not exceed 10,000 to 11,000 words, including notes. The award committee prefers submissions written according to The Chicago Manual of Style. The winning essay will be selected by a three-person panel chosen by the JCWE editors.

 

The award honors Anthony Kaye (1962-2017), an innovative scholar of slavery at Penn State University and the National Humanities Center. Tony was an active member of the Society of Civil War Historians and one of the founding editors of the Journal of the Civil War Era. This award honors his passion for putting scholars in disparate fields in conversation with each other to enrich our understanding of the past.

Robert Bland

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

Call for Papers: JCWE Special Issue on Politics, the State, and American Capitalism in the Civil War Era

Call for Papers: JCWE Special Issue on Politics, the State, and American Capitalism in the Civil War Era

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CALL FOR PAPERS                                                                                                                  Politics, the State, and American Capitalism in the Civil War Era                                Special Issue of the Journal of the Civil War Era

Guest Editors: Ariel Ron, Southern Methodist University, Nicolas Barreyre, EHESS, Noam Maggor, Queen Mary University of London, Sofia Valeonti, American University of Paris

Submission Deadline: April 25

The American Civil War Era was transformative for American capitalism. The destruction of slavery proved the occasion for an unprecedented mobilization of economic resources, dramatic changes in the nature and scale of federal taxation, financial experiments that included a wholesale revamping of the banking and monetary systems, struggles over corporate privileges and labor protections, a slew of expressly developmental policies ranging from railroad subsidies to agricultural research and education, and still more. That all this occurred in a time of governmental crisis, breakdown, and reconstruction underscores the connections between the economy and the state.

This special issue seeks original papers that explore the Civil War Era as a defining period in American economic development. We seek to publish original scholarship that will reenergize an ongoing conversation among historians about political economy, capitalism, and governance. Our goal is not only to uncover American state capacity – which has by now been revealed beyond any doubt – but to explore government’s concrete role in shaping the country’s economic trajectory during this formative period. We are particularly interested in studies that examine specific government actions and policies, on the federal, state, and municipal levels, that shaped important economic outcomes by reconfiguring markets in various ways. Contributions may address any aspect of economic statecraft, including finance, monetary management, legal doctrine, infrastructural projects, tariffs and trade policies, mobilization of labor, and acquisition and use of land. They may also look into political alignments, divisions, mobilizations, and conflicts around any of these issues. The proposals need not be limited to the war itself or its consequences. We finally seek to prioritize historical work that positions the US in a comparative light and engages themes and questions from disciplines across the social sciences and humanities.

Submissions                                                                                                                     We welcome proposals in the form of a title, a short abstract of 500 words or less, and a one-page curriculum vitae. If selected, full-scale original scholarly articles of no more than 10,000 words (including notes) will be due in mid-February 2026. Participants in the special issue will convene for a workshop at Penn State in spring of 2026. Papers will undergo the Journal of the Civil War Era’s peer review process. Full submission guidelines and the editorial statement are available on the journal’s website at www.journalofthecivilwarera.org.

Send submissions to Ariel Ron (aron@smu.edu) with the subject heading: “Submission for JCWE political economy special issue.”

Robert Bland

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

Photography, Visual Culture and Building a Black Civil War Memory Archive

Photography, Visual Culture and Building a Black Civil War Memory Archive

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I am a collector of early African American photography and visual culture. I began my collection after attending a NEH Summer Institute focused on the visual culture of the American Civil War. I initially applied to expand how I historicized the diverse African American experience of the Civil War and Reconstruction eras in my teaching. After this introduction, I became attuned to how photography and visual culture functioned as a form of individual and collective refusal to accept the myth of criminality, collective forgetting of their Civil War patriotism, and second-class citizenship. Whether through the tintype, carte-de-visite (cdv), cabinet photograph, or real photo postcard (RPPC), I was drawn to these subtle acts of Black resistance.

As I began researching and writing about African American Civil War memory, I curated my collection habits to expand the archive used. Due to previous anti-Black archival practices, much of African American evidence remains in the attics, basements, scrapbooks, and communal based archives and not in the traditional archival repositories accustomed by most historians. With every death of the family and communal historians, these collections find their way to the market. As a historian, I became intentional. I created an archive as an act of preservation but also in recovering these experiences in my own scholarship and teaching.

As a result, I drew on select items from my own constructed archive in the analysis and conclusions made in Unforgettable Sacrifice: How Black Communities Remembered the Civil War. For instance, I did not include a cdv of Joseph B. Kiddoo, the commander of the Twenty-Second USCT regiment in which my Civil War ancestor served. Rather, I chose three collection items that demonstrated competing claims of Civil War memory in Virginia. Collectively, these images show how African American communities understood the power of technology as a form of both erasure and resistance in the ongoing Civil War culture wars.

Purchased at a private sale, the first photographic image offered a rare glimpse into the Lee monument unveiling in Richmond, Virginia. During the celebrations, Captain M. F. Wyckoff of Company D, Second Regiment, West Virginia National Guard documented his presence with studio photography. In his souvenir photograph, Wyckoff posed with a barefoot African American boy. As one of his first public events as a commissioned National Guard captain, Wyckoff noted the living prop in the personal inscription to his brother whom he gave a copy. He wrote: “I am Cap. of a Militia Co. This is my little n****r waiter. I weigh 214 lbs. in my shirt sleeves. I brought my Co. to the unveiling of Lee’s statue that was a great time.”[1] This rare, intimate photograph highlights the Lost Cause narrative scripted for the occasion and how its rising dominance in shaping the Civil War commemorative landscape in the city, state, and region.

Photograph of M. F. Wyckoff and unidentified African American boy taken during the Lee Monument unveiling in Richmond, Virginia in 1890. Courtesy of author’s personal collection.

Neither the Reconstruction-era gains nor Emancipationist collective memories meant anything to the white West Virginia National Guardsman. The Lee Monument unveiling allowed him to enact the Lost Cause fantasy of the faithful slave trope. Elderly African American men and women often served as props at Confederate monument unveilings. Some African Americans willingly played the part at these public events and even in their Confederate pension application. Financial considerations and fear often motivated these actors as discussed by historians.[2] This waiter, however, was too young to have served as a Civil War camp servant. Born after emancipation, the African American youth’s motivation is unclear, except possibly cash payment. Yet, Wyckoff perpetuated the lie to his brother who received the staged photograph. Both the photograph and the inscription demonstrate the emerging racial power dynamics and selective whitewashed remembrances being resisted by African Americans in the city, state, and region.[3]

Estate sales provided specific examples of how African Americans used photography and visual culture for countering Lost Cause narratives and lynching imagery circulating in the era. A souvenir photograph and a postcard from the Jamestown Ter-Centennial shows how Black Virginias challenged accepted Civil War narratives by embracing a post-emancipation progress narrative.

The Jamestown Ter-Centennial Exposition of 1907 celebrated the three hundredth anniversary of the establishment of Jamestown by English colonists at the Norfolk, Virginia, fairgrounds. From April 26 to November 30, the segregated Negro Exhibit showcased the history and achievements of Black Virginians in the two-story Negro Building from their 1619 arrival as captured Africans through the Civil War and post-emancipation progress. From the exhibitions to the August third address by Booker T. Washington during “Negro Day,” African Americans flocked to the exposition in large numbers.[4] While the exposition failed to bring in the expected revenues, Black Virginians saw the Ter-centennial exposition as a major success for celebrating African American achievements and contributions to the state.[5]  In short, it became a significant Emancipationist event for the Black Virginians.

Official souvenir Jamestown Ter-Centennial Exposition of 1907 showcasing the postcard of “Negro Building.” Courtesy of author’s personal collection.

As suggested by the two collection items, Black Virginians and out-of-state attendees purchased the souvenir postcard of the Negro Building that housed the dedicated post-emancipation progress narrative. Instead of mailing the commemorative postcard, some attendees, like the one in my collection, carefully preserved the memento in their scrapbooks as an act of counter-archival resistance. The discoloration caused by the photo corners on the postcard notes the preservation practice and the impulse to preserve the memory for future generations. Some, as the other item suggests, even posed for souvenir tintype photographs placed in a special commemorative cardboard sleeve. Unlike the living prop used in the Wyckoff souvenir photograph, presumed African American mother and daughter embraced the inexpensive technology for capturing their status as modern citizens and racial progress achieved since emancipation.

Jamestown Ter-Centennial Exposition of 1907 souvenir photograph of an unidentified African American girl and woman. Courtesy of author’s personal collection.

These two items offered necessary texture to the moment not captured by the traditional archive of the Black newspaper coverage and post-exposition publications. The New York Age coverage, for instance, praised the Jamestown exposition for disarming anti-black proponents “who have made the wholesale accusation that the Negro race is incapable of achievements that require intelligent initiative, scientific skill, original methods, business acumen and unceasing application.”[6] Recognizing the historic 1619 arrival “in chains,” Thompson, commended the Negro Building exhibitions for serving as “a ‘star witness’ in support of the Negro’s claim to full-fledged American citizenship” while remaining critical of the “Jim Crowing” of their racial achievements as separate from the “main body of the Jamestown Exposition.”[7] Following this successful event, two exposition organizers published The Industrial History of the Negro Race of the United States (1908). This volume embraced an essential tenet of the Emancipationist tradition–African American post-emancipation progress demonstrated a people on the rise from its dark slave past and post-Civil War emancipation.[8] For attendees, the souvenir photograph and postcard became additional evidence of an alternative Civil War understanding carefully preserved in their scrapbooks and communal archives. They rejected the Lost Cause photographic usage of Wyckoff and others and maintained their own traditions on their own terms of the what the Civil War and its aftermath meant to them and their respective communities.

In her award-winning book, Laura Helton explored African American collectors, librarians, and archivists of Black life, history, and thought over the late nineteenth and twentieth century.[9] In this sense, I am not different. By collecting and constructing new archives, I am seeing more of the archival abundance of Black Civil War memory that has yet to be captured in traditional archives and in turn within the gaze of most historians. By including these images in the book and this post, it is my hope that additional photographic and material cultural examples find their way within the scholarly gaze and that our collective understanding of Black Civil War memory might become more complete in the future.

[1] “M. F. Wyckoff and unidentified African American boy,” photograph, n.p., 1890, Author’s personal collection.

[2] David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001), 284-289; Micki McElya, Clinging to Mammy: The Faithful Slave in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 5-13, 38-40; Kevin Levin, Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019), 97-99; Adam H. Domby, The False Cause: Fraud, Fabrication, and White Supremacy in Confederate Memory (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2020), 104-131.

[3]“M. F. Wyckoff and unidentified African American boy.”

[4] Brian de Ruiter, “Jamestown Ter-Centennial Exposition of 1907,” in Encyclopedia Virginia, Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, Richmond, VA, https://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Jamestown_Ter-Centennial_Exposition_of_1907; “Negro Day at Jamestown,” Evening Star (Washington, DC), July 29, 1907, 2; “Negro’s Gala Day,” Washington Bee, August 10, 1907, 1.

[5] “No. 119, Negro Building, Jamestown Exposition of 1907,” official souvenir Jamestown Ter-Centennial postcard, 1907, accessed in author’s personal collection; “Unidentified African American girl and women,” Jamestown Ter-Centennial souvenir photograph, Norfolk, 1907, tintype in embossed paper mat, accessed in author’s personal collection; De Ruiter, “Jamestown Ter-Centennial Exposition of 1907.”

[6] R. W. Thompson, “A New Page of History on Hampton Roads,” New York Age, December 5, 1907, 1-2.

[7] Thompson, “A New Page of History on Hampton Roads,” 2.

[8] Giles B. Jackson and Daniel Webster Davis, The Industrial History of the Negro Race of the United States (Richmond: The Virginia Press, 1908), 53-137.

[9] See Laura E. Helton, Scattered and Fugitive Things: How Black Collectors Created Archives and Remade History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2024).

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).

The Perils of Pardoning: Ulysses S. Grant and the Legacy of the Ku Klux Klan Pardons

The Perils of Pardoning: Ulysses S. Grant and the Legacy of the Ku Klux Klan Pardons

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Toward the end of his first term President Ulysses S. Grant faced a dilemma. He had campaigned on the slogan “Let Us Have Peace,” yet extralegal violence by the Ku Klux Klan was threatening peace in the South. On April 20, 1871, Congress passed the Ku-Klux Act to combat that threat. It gave the president authority to suspend habeas corpus and use military power to fight conspiracies designed to deprive US citizens of rights under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. In the fall of 1871, for the only time in his presidency, Grant used his full powers to crackdown on the Klan in the hill counties of South Carolina. In his best-selling biography Ron Chernow calls that campaign the “imperishable story of Grant’s presidency.”[1]

Indeed, Grant broke the back of the Klan. As commendable as his actions were, however, his success was not as sweeping as it may seem to a public that imagines the Klan, with its disguises and secret rituals, encompassing all white terrorists at the time. As Allen Trelease noted years ago, after Grant’s crackdown, “Southern violence now assumed other forms, almost as lethal, probably more effective, and certainly more lasting than the Ku Klux Klan.”[2] Despite that ongoing terror, after his re-election in early 1873, Grant started pardoning Ku-Klux. Pardons continued after the horrible racial massacre in Colfax, Louisiana, on Easter 1873. Eventually, all sent to federal prison received pardons, including one responsible for the murder of African American Thomas Roundtree. In late March 1871, eighty Ku-Klux raided Roundtree’s home looking for weapons and warning him not to vote. When Roundtree shot to defend himself, the mob filled his body with thirty-five rounds and slit his throat from ear to ear. As if that pardon was not enough, in Grant’s last days in office, he asked his attorney general if any more “political prisoners” deserved clemency.[3]

“Ku Klux Klan” from Invisible Empire by Albion W. Tourgee (New York: Fords, Howard, & Hulbert, 1880)

Grant’s pardons are an often-unrecognized precedent for president-elect Donald Trump’s promise to consider clemency for convicted January, 6, 2021, insurrectionists. If granted, Trump’s pardons would, as Grant’s did, provide comfort for white supremacist terrorists. Likewise, although Grant pardoned all convicted Ku-Klux, he claimed that he considered each case individually, as Trump says he will do. History, however, does not always rhyme. Grant was no Trump. Trump deployed his promise as a campaign tactic. Grant’s 1872 opponent former abolitionist Horace Greeley also advocated pardons in his campaign, but to combat charges that he was trying to corral votes, Grant deferred consideration of them until after the election. Most importantly, as outrageous as Trump’s promise is, it makes partisan sense. The insurrectionists supported him. Grant pardoned insurrectionists who opposed him. Trump’s pardons would exacerbate partisan divisions; Grant tried to heal them.

Grant’s efforts to heal pose challenges to Reconstruction scholars. There is a long history of victors extending clemency to bridge divisions after civil wars. Few Unionists disagreed with Andrew Johnson’s first proclamation of amnesty for thousands of Confederates in exchange for oaths of loyalty, especially because he refused to extend it to many covered by Abraham Lincoln. Efforts to reconstruct the nation would have been impossible without some such act of reconciliation. National harmony did not, however, depend on pardoning white supremacist terrorists who refused to accept the terms of peace and violated their oaths. Nonetheless, the few scholars who acknowledge the pardons in the wake of the resurrection of Grant’s presidential reputation are not very convincing in addressing that distinction. When Fergus M. Bordewich first mentions the pardons in Klan War: Ulysses S. Grant and the Battle to Save Reconstruction he describes a Grant “worried that leniency would be misinterpreted as a confession of federal weakness rather than strength.” After describing Colfax, Bordewich returns to the pardons, this time describing a Grant who “desperately hoped” that pardoning Ku-Klux “would gradually encourage obedience to the law and quell resistance to the government.”[4] What about Colfax made Grant abandon his worry that leniency would be misinterpreted and start hoping that it would encourage obedience?

The answer to that question requires substantial speculation. As Elaine Frantz Parsons emphasized in Ku Klux, scholarship on the Klan has to rely on unreliable or non-existent documents. Secrecy demanded deception or destruction. Pardons can pose similar problems. The Constitution requires no rationale for pardons. The one for unrepentant Randolph Abbott Shotwell cited “good and sufficient reasons.” What were those reasons? Was Grant flattered when white Southerners assured him that pardons would make him president for the entire nation, not just the North. Was Grant imagining a third term after reelection? Was he influenced by the support of reputed Klan leader Nathan Bedford Forrest in 1872?[5] We can’t tell with certainty. Nonetheless, the quest for reasons can raise possibilities that have gotten little recent attention. For instance, acts of the Klan were so horrendous that it is easy to forget that prosecution of it produced injustices. Only eighty ended up in federal prison. Some of the worst offenders escaped west or to Canada. Pardons coincided with the attorney general’s halt to prosecutions, allowing murders like Rufus Bratton to return home and resume medical practice while convicted Ku-Klux suffered imprisonment.

Even if we can’t know with certainty whether Grant factored such disparities into his thinking, we can recognize that Grant’s pardons have to be considered in the context of other acts of executive clemency at the time. Numerous scholars note that Republicans blamed the Black Codes on the thousands of 1865 pardons Johnson issued to leading Southerners. Fewer note that Grant had encouraged Johnson to grant amnesty to those with property from the start. And the issue goes beyond Grant. None of those who protested Johnson’s pardons, including Frederick Douglass, publicly protested Grant’s Ku-Klux pardons, despite numerous private warnings recorded in Grant’s papers.

President Andrew Johnson Pardoning Rebels at the White House, Harper’s Weekly Magazine, October 14, 1865

The Supreme Court also had a role. Although generally ignored in the countless legal studies of Reconstruction, the period witnessed leading cases on the pardoning power. In Ex parte Garland a divided Court proclaimed that except for cases of impeachment, the president’s pardoning power is “unlimited” and “not subject to legislative control,” only to qualify that absolute pronouncement in a subsequent decision. The Court also sided with the executive branch when Congress claimed that, because “amnesty” is not mentioned in the Constitution, the president cannot proclaim it without congressional authorization. The stakes were high. Traditionally, pardons are designed to address individual cases. Amnesty applies to groups. First declared after the Peloponnesian Wars, amnesty tries to heal divisions after civil strife. Pardons are legal acts of forgiving. Amnesty, linked to the Greek word for “amnesia,” is a legal act of forgetting. Clemency after Appomattox was as much concerned with legal forgetting as with forgiving. Yet the Supreme Court conflated these crucial distinctions, although in numerous countries only legislatures can declare amnesty.

Congress could have asserted its sole authority to proclaim amnesty when it framed the Fourteenth Amendment. Instead, in Section Three it confined itself to limiting the scope of Johnson’s pardons by incorporating into the Constitution the provision prohibiting insurrectionists who violated their constitutional oath from holding public office, granting Congress, not the president, power to remove the disability. Long forgotten, Section Three was back in the news because of the unsuccessful effort to use it to disqualify Trump from the presidency. But that brief news cycle did not suggest its possible links to Grant’s Ku-Klux pardons. Prior to the 1872 election Grant urged Congress to pass an amnesty act allowing most affected by Section Three to hold office. Grant had no need to sign the bill, but with a public ceremony he did. Perhaps in his mind Ku-Klux pardons followed logically from this act of reconciliation.

“Dam Your Soul. The Horrible Sepulchre and Bloody Moon Has at Last Arrived.” from Albion W. Tourgee (New York: Fords, Howard, & Hulbert, 1880)

Of course, as noted above, there is a clear difference between allowing former rebels to hold office and forgiving white supremacist terrorists. Grant, however, did not see the difference or care. To make matters worse, even though he claimed to be considering the merits of each case, collectively his pardons and the decision to halt further prosecutions had the effect of a proclamation of amnesty. Ironically, although amnesty is a legal act of forgetting, if Grant had granted amnesty to Ku-Klux, as the late Jimmy Carter did for Vietnam draft evaders, perhaps his mercy for acts of terrorism would not be so frequently forgotten. Indeed, in this time of partisan divisions, Grant’s Ku-Klux pardons are a telling reminder of how difficult it can be for someone intent on peace to know when it no longer makes sense to heal through acts of forgetting and forgiving.

[1] Ron Chernow, Grant (New York: Penguin Books, 2018), xx.

[2]Allen W. Trelease, White Terror: The Klux Klux Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction (Baton: Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 1971), 418.

[3] The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, ed. John Y. Simon (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967-2012), v28, 511.

[4] Fergus M. Bordewich, Klan Wars: Ulysses S. Grant and the Battle to Save Reconstruction (New ork: Alfred A. Knopf, 2023), 307-08, 330.

[5] William B. Hesseltine, Ulysses S. Grant: Politician (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1935), 283.

Brook Thomas

Brook Thomas is Chancellor's Professor Emeritus of English and the Center for Law, Society, and Culture, UC Irvine. His specialty is 19th-century law and literature in the US. He has published six single-authored books and a case book on Plessy v. Ferguson. The Literature of Reconstruction: Not in Plain Black and White (John Hopkins University Press, 2017) won the Hugh Holman Prize.

Interview with Brian Matthew Jordan and Jonathan W. White

Interview with Brian Matthew Jordan and Jonathan W. White

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In today’s Muster, JCWE Book Review Editor Megan Bever joins Brian Matthew Jordan and Jonathan W. White to talk about their edited collection, Final Resting Places: Reflections on the Meaning of Civil War Graves, which was published by UGA Press in 2023.

Interview with Brandon Byrd on JCWE’s Black Internationalism Special Issue

Interview with Brandon Byrd on JCWE’s Black Internationalism Special Issue

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In today’s Muster, JCWE associate editor Robert Bland interviews Dr. Brandon R. Byrd, editor and organizer of the journal’s December 2024 special issue on Black Internationalism. Dr. Byrd is an associate professor of history at Vanderbilt University and the author of The Black Republic: African Americans and the Fate of Haiti (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019).

Robert Bland

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

Teaching the Civil War: Disrupting the Conventional Antislavery Narrative and Engaging Students in Visual Analysis

Teaching the Civil War: Disrupting the Conventional Antislavery Narrative and Engaging Students in Visual Analysis

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This post is the first in a new Muster series that will highlight innovative ways that classroom instructors have approached teaching the Civil War era. Today’s post is written by Professor Bonnie Laughlin-Schultz and offers a creative approach for introducing students to a more expansive vision of the antislavery movement through nineteenth-century art.

 

It is only in the last few years that I have started teaching our upper-division Civil War survey at my university, a regional public comprehensive university in rural Illinois. The Civil War survey draws in from our approximately one hundred majors (about ¾ of which are in our teaching track) as well as from the ROTC program, and a handful of students just interested in the Civil War. For our majors, the Civil War survey fulfills an upper division credit requirement as well as a required “inclusive history” option, a new addition to our curriculum in recent years that has students take at least one course during their study that addresses historically underrepresented groups and looks at historical questions of equity, oppression, and power.

There are many challenges that come with teaching the Civil War survey, from effectively teaching the military history of the war to effectually teaching Reconstruction, both addressed in recent issues of this blog. This past fall, however, I found myself thinking more about the start of the course: the coming of the war, and particularly the antislavery movement. I redesigned two class sessions to engage students with a more inclusive narrative of antislavery and to draw them into more intentional analysis of nineteenth-century visual culture and ask them to explore beyond the written artifacts of the antislavery movement. In both assignments, the students examine not just the coming of the war but also how history is produced and archived, thinking about how our histories and historiography reflect the perspectives (and possible prejudices) of writers and scholars at any given time.[1]

Our conventional antislavery narrative makes for a compelling story. The Second Great Awakening spurs on Theodore Dwight Weld, he meets the Grimkes, and voila—the abolitionist movement begins. Introduce William Lloyd Garrison, The Liberator, and the American Antislavery Association; move forward, recount the poignant story of Frederick Douglass addressing audiences and writing his first autobiography. Conclude the story’s third act with the rise and fall of John Brown. The narrative feels seamless, and students can easily follow it. We find it reinforced in many places, from PBS’s documentary The Abolitionists to John Green’s Crash Course History series.[2]

But as much compelling scholarship has made clear, this narrative is so incomplete — and distressingly focused on white actors. Historians from Kerri Greenidge to Manisha Sinha to Kellie Carter Jackson to Aston Gonzalez to Kate Masur (and many others) describe the many ways we need to complicate this narrative, rethinking our chronological scope of antislavery as well as the key actors and moments that defined it.[3]

Over two days, I worked to engage students in the Civil War class in both rethinking the antislavery movement and reconsidering our evidence base for it. On day one, we assembled and then disassembled a so-called traditional narrative. I used the easy foil of the Crash Course Video, showing a three a half minute segment, and then built from that to remind students of some basic content, including the entrenchment of antebellum slavery and a new rhetoric by enslavers. I showed Lincoln Mullen’s powerful visualization map of census data showing the spread of slavery – and the sale and movement of enslaved people in the domestic slave trade.[4] We talked about Garrison’s about-face on colonization, and I showed the masthead of The Liberator – but also the cover of David Walker’s Appeal, though I did not do much with the last beyond mentioning it.[5] John Green references Elijah Lovejoy’s murder in 1837, so I did too. I handed out a visual of this traditional timeline, moving it forward to the 1840s and 1850s by including an image of Douglass, the cover for the Hutchinson Family Singers’ song “Get Off the Tracks,” and an image from Harpers Ferry.

We then moved to part two of the class, where the aim is to have students see that while this timeline has lots to offer, it is wildly incomplete. I showed an image of the cover of Manisha Sinha’s The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition, and then we listened to excerpts from Liz Covart’s interview with her on her fabulous Ben Franklin’s World podcast.[6] (Alternately, in a second iteration of this lesson, I assigned students to listen to the whole podcast outside of class and arrive with a few notes.) In either case, students are asked to bring Sinha’s story of a multi-wave, interracial, and often Black-led abolitionist movement into conversation with our timeline, and to suggest revisions to it. After students marked up the timeline, we turned to primary sources. In one iteration of the class, we turned to an excerpt from David Walker’s Appeal and talked about how the “story” looks different if that, not The Liberator, is our starting point.[7] In a second iteration, I offered a slide with links to a variety of sources that extended our timeline and diversified our participants. When I approach this day this coming spring, I will also return to Lovejoy, allowing students to think about how we highlight violence inflicted upon white abolitionists and overlook the fact that most of the antebellum violence was inflicted upon people of color.[8]

On the next day of class, we continue to complicate our narrative. I drew inspiration from Aston Gonzalez’s Visualizing Equality: African American Rights and Visual Culture in the Nineteenth Century (2020), which argues that Black activists made use of a variety of visual culture (from photographs to lithographs to moving panoramas depicting the history of slavery) to argue not just against slavery but to claim Black equality and rights. [9]

 

Cinque, The Chief of the Amistad captives. Painted by Nathaniel Jocelyn. Commissioned by Robert Purvis. Engraved by J. Sartain. Philadelphia, 1840. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division. https://www.loc.gov/resource/pga.08220/]

 

“Crispus Attucks, the first martyr of the American Revolution, King (now State) Street, Boston, March 5th, 1770.” In William Cooper Nell, The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution: With Sketches of Several Distinguished Colored Persons. Boston: R. F. Wallcut, 1855. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, The New York Public Library. New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed October 31, 2024. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47db-e3a9-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99

 

Henry Bibb, engraved by Patrick Henry Reason. In Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, An American Slave, Written by Himself (New York: Henry Bibb, 1849). Documenting the American South, https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/bibb/bibb.html. Note: This image is included in Aston Gonzalez’s Visualizing Equality, p. 76.

 

As the Gallery Walk name implies, I borrowed an empty classroom and hung the artifacts around it, and students walked around taking notes and looking at sources. Sources ranged from excerpts on Cinque and Nat Turner from William Wells Brown, The Black Man: His Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achievements (NY, 1863) to John Henry Bufford’s lithograph of W.L. Champney’s Boston Massacre painting that centered Crispus Attucks from 1856 to the cover and an image of Ball’s Mammoth Pictorial Tour to woodcuts from The Slave’s Friend to a poem by Francis Ellen Watkins Harper to Robert Purvis’s editorial decrying colonization from The Liberator in 1862. Students analyzed the many approaches and tactics that appeared here. Astute students might make connections – that the Robert Purvis who appeared in The Liberator was the same person who commissioned the Cinque painting from 1840.[10] And they might note the ways in which Black history – particularly these narratives and visuals centered on Attucks—appeared here.[11]

In these recent years, when teaching histories of the long Black freedom struggle, slavery, and the meaning of framing 1619 as the nation’s true founding, have become controversial and under attack in some states, it is notable here that both the written and visual sources show Black activists invoking American history and their place within it to fight slavery and claim an equal place in the United States. One of the written sources I include is an editorial written by Robert Purvis in The Liberator in 1862 where he decries colonization and reminds readers that while “it is said this is the ‘white man’s country.’ Not so, sir. This is the red man’s country, by natural right, and the black man’s, by virtue of his sufferings and toil.”[12] Purvis’s written account is reinforced by multiple representations of Crispus Attucks – written about in William Cooper Nell’s history but also depicted in a painting (and subsequent lithograph) in 1856.

Champney, W. L. (artist) and John Henry Bufford (lithographer). Boston Massacre, March 5th, 1770, Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor Lenox & Tilden Foundation, Arts & Artifacts Division.

 

This exercise puts students to work analyzing visual, and not just written, sources. I benefited greatly from attending the NEH Visual Culture of the Civil War and Its Aftermath seminar in summer 2023. There I first encountered Aston Gonzalez’s work, for one, as well as learned new ways to think about – to read, even – visual artifacts. And to think about how technological change that allowed lithography, engravings, mass reproduction gave activists a tool to use. The Gallery Walk engages students in analyzing visual sources as well as in thinking about the ways in which visual culture was utilized in the 1840s and 1850s.

After students had ample time to browse and make notes, we reconvened and discussed these questions, drawing on their notes about the many examples they had just reviewed.

  • How did Black abolitionists fight against slavery and argue on behalf of Black citizenship and rights?
  • How did they use written and visual efforts to do so?
  • What people appeared multiple times – what were their roles? What does that tell you about their understanding of the power of visual culture and imagery? About the technological changes of the 1840s and 1850s?
  • Where does American history appear – and how is it used?
  • What else stood out? What questions do you have?

After discussing as a larger group, I showed again that original timeline from the first day, and we again noticed the many ways that incorporating these sources disrupted it.

Finally, these classes engaged students in thinking about how history itself is written and produced, about why we still have new questions and perspectives on the past, and to challenge themselves to consider their own identities and biases as they formulate historical argument. Late in this course, we read excerpts from W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction, specifically from his last chapter entitled “The Propaganda of History.”[13] I try to use that moment to return to this early moment in the class and think about the ways in which our antislavery narrative – much like our Reconstruction narrative – has been challenged and changed.

 

[1] Thankfully, I live in a state where this is in line with state standards for our future teachers, as the Illinois Learning Standards for History include language referring to historical narratives and counternarratives and the need to consider many perspectives, including those from historically marginalized groups.Illinois State Board of Education, Illinois Learning Standards for Social Science, 2023, https://www.isbe.net/Documents/IL-Social-Science-Standards.pdf, p. 20.

[2] Rapley, Rob, Sharon Grimberg, Richard Brooks, Neal Huff, Jeanine Serralles, Kate Lyn Sheil, T. Ryder Smith, et al., The Abolitionists (Boston, MA: WGBH Educational Foundation, 2013); Crash Course, “19th Century Reforms: Crash Course US History #15,” May 14, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t62fUZJvjOs.

[3] Kerri Greenidge, The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family (Liveright, 2023); Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (Yale University Press, 2016); Kellie Carter Jackson, Force and Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019); Aston Gonzalez, Visualizing Equality: African American Rights and Visual Culture in the Nineteenth Century (The University of North Carolina Press, 2021); Kate Masur, Until Justice Be Done: America’s First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction (W.W. Norton and Company, 2022). See also Stephen Kantrowitz, More Than Freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic, 1829-1889 (Penguin Press, 2012); Martha S. Jones, All Bound up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture, 1830-1900 (University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Patrick Rael, African-American Activism before the Civil War: The Freedom Struggle in the Antebellum North (Routledge, 2008).

[4] Lincoln Mullen, “The Spread of U.S. Slavery, 1790–1860,” interactive map, https://lincolnmullen.com/projects/slavery/, doi: 10.5281/zenodo.9825. With thanks to Signe Peterson Fourmy, who introduced me to this map in a teaching webinar for the Last Seen: Finding Family after Slavery project out of Villanova University. https://informationwanted.org/historical-context

[5] I do not show this section, but Green has a mystery document segment and the document in this episode is one by Walker – and on point, he references getting a pass score on the APUSH exam but not knowing who Walker is. Time permitting, it would make a great end point to class that first day.

[6] Sinha, The Slave’s Cause; Manisha Sinha, Interview with Liz Covart, Ben Franklin’s World Podcast, July 17, 2017, https://benfranklinsworld.com/episode-142-manisha-sinha-a-history-of-abolition/. The cover image to Sinha’s book can be found at the podcast page or here: https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300227116/the-slaves-cause/.

[7] David Walker, An Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World (Boston: 1830), excerpts, The American Yawp Reader, https://www.americanyawp.com/reader/religion-and-reform/david-walkers-appeal-to-the-colored-citizens-of-the-world-1829/.

[8] Kellie Carter Jackson notes that despite the stress on violence against folks such as Lovejoy, it was Black people who were much more vulnerable to violence during anti-abolition riots, etc. Jackson, Force and Freedom, esp chapter one.

[9] Gonzalez, Visualizing Equality; “Teaching Strategy: Gallery Walk,” Facing History and Ourselves, https://www.facinghistory.org/resource-library/gallery-walk-0. This is one of many active learning approaches that could be used to address this. For more on the importance of active learning to engage students and create real learning, see Cathy N. Davidson and Christina Katopodis, The New College Classroom (Harvard University Press, 2022).

[10] The National Endowment for the Humanities’ “Visual Culture of the Civil War” summer seminar introduced me to this idea. Aston Gonzalez spoke there about his work, and the efforts by seminar leaders Greg Downs, Sarah Burns, and Joshua Brown are much appreciated. https://www.neh.gov/programinstitutefellowship/visual-culture-american-civil-war-and-its-aftermath-0

[11] For more, see Stephen Kantrowitz, “A Place for ‘Colored Patriots’: Crispus Attucks Among the Abolitionists, 1842-1863,” Massachusetts Historical Review XI (spring 2009), 97-117.

[12] Robert Purvis, Editorial, The Liberator, Sept. 12, 1862, in Liz Varon, ed., Sources for the Armies of Deliverance (Oxford University Press, 2021), pp. 29-31.

[13] W.E.B. DuBois, “The Propaganda of History,” in Black Reconstruction: An Essay toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880 (Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1935), pp. 711-730.

 

Bonnie Laughlin-Schultz

Bonnie Laughlin-Schultz is a historian of the 19th century United States who specializes in in American women's history and the broad Civil War era. Her first book, The Tie That Bound Us: The Women of John Brown's Family and the Legacy of Radical Abolitionism, was published in 2013 and was named a Kansas Notable Book in 2014. She has written articles and book chapters about the 19th century women's rights movement, the antislavery movement, Civil War memory, and other 19th century topics. She is currently at work on a book manuscript about antislavery activists and ideas of history in the United States prior to 1865. Dr. Laughlin-Schultz also serves as coordinator for History with Teacher Licensure in Social Science and works with the Illinois Civics Hub as the Preservice Teacher Liaison and write about civics teaching topics for IllinoisCivics.org.

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.

 

 

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