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