Category: Muster

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.

Call for Entries: Teaching Experience and Pedagogy

Call for Entries: Teaching Experience and Pedagogy

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The SCWH Outreach & Membership Committee and Muster Blog are soliciting pedagogy focused entries for the Muster Blog. Have an innovative lesson plan, an engaging student activity, or even just a unique primary source that you want to share with fellow SCWH members? We want to see them!

We are specifically interested in: A full lesson plan that is detailed out and explained (Ex: Ann Tucker’s Juneteenth, Public Memory, and Teaching Reconstruction through an International Perspective ) An innovate or insightful activity that is detailed out (Ex: Andrew S. Bledsoe’s Teaching Civil War Battles and Leaders through Classroom Simulations) A document or primary source (or collection of primary sources) that you like to use and why (Ex: Nick Sacco’s Teaching the Reconstruction Era through Political Cartoons) Virtual Roundtables on teaching the Civil War and/or Reconstruction Eras (Ex: Reconstruction in Public History and Memory at the Sesquicentennial: A Roundtable Discussion)

Posts average 1,100-1,300 words, including up to three images, and are footnoted in Chicago style. Please download our PDF of guidelines for publishing on Muster. You may direct questions and post submissions to the new Digital Media Editor, Robert Bland at rbland4@utk.edu. Please include “Muster Submission” in the email’s subject line.

Robert Bland

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

The Past That Persists: The Springfield 1908 Race Riot National Monument Designation

The Past That Persists: The Springfield 1908 Race Riot National Monument Designation

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On August 16, 2024, in the presence of civil rights leaders, community members, and elected officials, President Biden used his authority under the Antiquities Act to designate the Springfield 1908 Race Riot National Monument. The designation was made during the 116th anniversary of the racist riots in Springfield, IL that resulted in the lynching of two black men, Scott Burton and William Donnegan and the creation of what is now known as the NAACP.

The National Monument designation was decades in the making. It is the culmination of a diverse local and national group of individuals and organizations coming together in pursuit of a common cause.

“We Will Drive Them Out”

The violence began on August 14, 1908, when a mob formed at the county jail demanding the Sheriff turn over Joe James and George Richardson, two black men accused of committing violent crimes against white people. James was being detained for the murder of Clergy Ballard. Richardson had been accused of raping Mabel Hallam and was detained on August 13. (Hallam later recanted her story.) Sheriff Charles Werner managed to distract the mob and relocate James and Richardson. Rather than this resulting in the mob dispersing, it resulted in it escalating in size and violence. Local authorities were overwhelmed by the mob.

Thousands of white rioters, both native-born and immigrants, lynched two Black residents, William Donnegan and Scott Burton, and committed other violent crimes, including arson, battery, robbery, and assault over the course of three days. The mob marched past Lincoln’s former home, which was already being operated as a tourist destination at the time. They also reportedly made direct references to the president during the riots, chanting “Abe Lincoln brought them [Black residents] to Springfield and we will drive them out.” The mob targeted Black homes and businesses as well as those owned by white residents perceived as sympathetic or allied with the Black population.  As many as nine individuals, including those lynched and those participating in the mob, were killed during the riot. Two days after the riots began, the Illinois National Guard was called in to restore order. The violence forced anywhere from hundreds to thousands of Black residents in Springfield to flee.

“The Final Tipping Point”

The Springfield 1908 Race Riot occurred in the middle of what historians have referred to as the “Lynching Era,” in which mob violence and extra-judicial killings of mostly Black, ethnic minority, and immigrant populations surged. Data shows that the ratio of Black lynching victims to White lynching victims increased from 4 to 1 in the late nineteenth century to 17 to 1 after 1900. It occurred at a time of notable social and economic upheaval, political corruption, and demographic shifts. Springfield—and Illinois generally–also had a history of issues with segregation, oppression, and bigotry.At the same time, lynchings were considerably less common in “northern” states.

The Springfield mob violence and lynchings were especially disturbing to Black civil rights leaders and white liberals because it took place in Springfield, a town that actively promoted its association with Abraham Lincoln, whose legacy was linked to emancipation and the fight for greater equality.  In her autobiography, Ida B. Wells-Barnett wrote that the Black men were lynched “under the shadow of Abraham Lincoln’s tomb,” a comment that underscored the symbolic magnitude of what had happened. The victims were not connected to the events that sparked the mob violence in the first place. One of them was, however, connected to Abraham Lincoln. Wells noted that one of the victims was “an old citizen of Springfield who had been married to a white woman for twenty years and had reared a family of children by her.” That man was William Donnegan, a shoemaker who had, many decades prior, once made a pair of shoes for the future President and had been a known conductor on the Underground Railroad.

The Springfield 1908 Race Riot became what the NAACP has described as “the final tipping point.” It spurred a multi-racial coalition to come together to fight back against racial violence and inequity.  Six months later, 7 Black leaders and 53 white leaders – including W.E.B. Du Bois, Mary White Ovington, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Mary Church Terrell, and Oswald Garrison Villard – published a call for racial justice on February 12, 1909, Lincoln’s 100th birthday. The decision to establish the NAACP on the Centennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birthday was connected to established traditions. In addition to celebrations like Freedom’s Eve and Juneteenth, Lincoln’s birthday held significant importance for many African American communities and was a day where celebrations were held to commemorate emancipation.

“The Springfield what? I didn’t know.”

For decades, the history of the “Springfield 1908 Race Riot” went unacknowledged by the city. Then, in the early 1990s, two local sixty-graders, Lindsay Price and Amanda Staab appeared before City Council presenting a petition, signed by dozens of their classmates, that asked the city to formally acknowledge the riot. The mayor responded by establishing a committee to commemorate the Springfield Race Riot. The city installed eight historical markers about the riot, later updated to include quotes from Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Barack Obama. There were other efforts over the years to preserve and share the history. For example, an oral history project in the 1970s collected first-hand accounts of what happened. The centennial of the race riot resulted in exhibits and a new sculpture by artist Preston Jackson. A walking tour allows visitors to trace the route, including a stretch called “Reconciliation Way.” And Lincoln Home National Historic Site partnered with others to publish a history brochure for visitors.

In 2014, a major rail infrastructure project in Springfield uncovered extensive archaeological finds from the structures destroyed because of the “1908 Springfield Race Riot.” The discovery was a catalyst for the decades-long push by a broad-based coalition for federal designation and protection of the site. The coalition grew to include local and national representation from NAACP, ACLU, Sierra Club, National Religious Partnership for the Environment, the Lincoln Presidential Foundation, and others. Advocacy efforts were bipartisan from the start, a fact that undoubtedly helped the effort transcend multiple changes to elected leaders (and political parties in control) at the local and federal level. The effort was also bolstered by the unwavering support of Senators Duckworth and Durbin and the Congressional Black Caucus. 

A breakthrough came in 2020, when Congress directed the National Park Service to conduct a Special Resource Study (SRS) to evaluate the national significance of the Springfield 1908 Race Riot site and feasibility of adding it as a unit of the National Park Service. Official visits by NPS officials and a public meeting followed. After the study was completed, Senators Tammy Duckworth and Dick Durbin re-introduced legislation to designate the site a National Monument.

In June 2024, between 250-400 people gathered in Springfield for a public meeting hosted by the U.S. Department of the Interior and The White House Council on Environmental Quality. Dozens offered testimony in support of designating the Springfield 1908 Race Riot site a national monument. Echoing similar stories, one young woman recounted the day she asked her father for help coming up with an idea for a6th grade history report . When he suggested the Springfield Race Riot, she replied, “The Springfield what? I didn’t know.” Multiple speakers applauded the incredible diversity of the assembled audience. Each person who rose to speak offered a unique perspective on the importance of federal designation. There was not a single voice of dissent.

Tragically, a month after the June meeting, a white deputy from Sangamon County Sheriff’s Office shot and killed Sonya Massey, a 36-year old black woman, in her own home.  She was pronounced dead at a local hospital run by the Hospital Sisters Health Systems, the same order of Sisters who cared for the dead and wounded, including William Donnegan, in the wake of the brutal attacks and lynchings in 1908. The Massey family later revealed to reporters that Sonya was a Donnegan descendant (genealogical research confirms that her Great-Great-Great Uncle was William Donnegan).  Peaceful protestors, reporters, and elected leaders noted the tragic connection between the past and present.

President Biden’s proclamation designating the Springfield 1908 Race Riot National Monument notes that it, “will also showcase the power of individual Americans who came together across racial lines and took action in the face of injustice.”  While the designation is a tremendous milestone, the work is far from complete. The National Park Service is now faced with the task of preserving and opening this new unit to the public.  Recognizing this, the coalition continues to convene, preparing to support “America’s Storytellers” in their ongoing efforts to share a more inclusive history of our nation.

 

 

Erin Mast

Ms. Erin Carlson Mast has over 20 years of experience in cultural nonprofit excellence and leadership. She joined the Lincoln Presidential Foundation as its President & CEO in 2021. She has led the organizational revisioning, rebranding and relaunch, establishment of new partnerships, including with the National Park Service, and award-winning programming. Prior to serving as the Foundation’s leader, Mast was the CEO & Executive Director of President Lincoln’s Cottage, a National Monument in Washington, DC. As CEO, Mast built and led the organization through steady growth, groundbreaking scholarship and programming, unprecedented press and awards recognition, and its transition to an independent, 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Under her leadership, the organization received over two dozen awards and diverse recognition including a Presidential Medal for its international Students Opposing Slavery program, “50 Great Places to Work” in Washington DC, “Best Museum off the Mall” four years in a row, and a must-see destination by Time magazine. In 2017, Mast received the EXCEL Award for Chief Executive Leadership from the Center for Nonprofit Advancement. Prior to serving as the CEO & Executive Director, Mast had served the organization in other leadership roles, including Curator & Site Administrator. She was an original member of the capital project team leading to the National Monument’s grand opening in 2008.

Congratulations to the Winner of The Journal of the Civil War Era’s 2024 George and Ann Richards Prize

Congratulations to the Winner of The Journal of the Civil War Era’s 2024 George and Ann Richards Prize

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Tian Xu has won the $1,000 George and Ann Richards Prize for the best article published in The Journal of the Civil War Era in 2023. The article, “Chinese Women and Habeas Corpus Hearings in California, 1857–1882 appeared in the December 2023 special issue, Transpacific Connections in the Civil War Era, organized and guest edited by Hidetaka Hirota.

The prize committee wrote of Xu’s article: “Among the terrific articles considered for the 2024 George and Ann Richards Prize for Best Article, the committee has selected Tian Xu’s “Chinese Women and Habeas Corpus Hearings in California, 1857-1882” as its recipient. The article explores the ways in which Chinese women – allegedly the victims of trafficking or attempting to immigrate into the US— and the men claiming to be their lawful guardians – or owners— used habeas corpus proceedings in California to construe and contest rights and freedoms, gender constructions, transpacific relations and the nature of law. Through a close, thoughtful reading of court-room sources, the author makes the petitioners’ experience come alive, while throwing light on the complexities of the Chinese-American community’s constrained legal position in the US and the contradictory aspirations and paradigms engendered by Reconstruction. We think that this beautifully written article will become a go-to piece on habeas corpus cases.”

Dr. Xu is assistant professor of US History at Peking University. His research examines the sociolegal experience of Asian American and African American communities in the understudied field of administrative state-building. He is working on a book project that explores the Pacific genesis of immigration lawyering in America, while preparing for another project that looks at Black Union families’ interactions with military pension attorneys. His work has received support from institutions such as the Huntington Library, the Gilder Lehrman Institute, the Wilson Library at UNC, and the Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy at the University at Buffalo.

The Richards Prize committee consisted of Erika Gabriela Pani Bano, El Colegio de México, Joanna Cohen, Queen Mary University of London, and Aston Gonzalez, Salisbury University. 

 

Robert Bland

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

Joining Forces: Seven Take-Aways from a Biennial Meeting Roundtable

Joining Forces: Seven Take-Aways from a Biennial Meeting Roundtable

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Many of us love the idea of close cooperation with the National Park Service (NPS), and of forging ties between academics and public-facing historians more generally, but we are not always sure how to put those ideas and intentions into tangible, sustainable practice. At the Society of Civil War History’s Biennial Meeting in Raleigh in June, a roundtable brought together academic historians at all career levels with National Park Service professionals to consider what makes the most productive collaborations work, and what can get in the way. Three current NPS employees, one Organization of American Historians public programs professional, an advanced graduate student, and four professors all shared their personal experiences and perspectives, each of which contained its own important and useful particularities. In addition to these unique views, seven common themes emerged from the conversation as a whole.

 

Local Community Involvement is Crucial. Successful collaborations depend upon building relationships with local residents, local schools and colleges, and local institutions. Part of good relationship building is being careful not to discount efforts that are underway. Nobody likes to work hard at something and then hear criticism for its absence, as though their efforts never existed.

Begin by asking what parks need. Collaboration is far more likely to be productive if it begins by academic historians finding out what would be of help to parks rather than simply assuming that they have a great idea and a National Park should implement it. Two specific suggestions stood out. First, professors have the time and resources to do research, far more than NPS personnel do. Making findings available to parks for programming is a clear way that academic historians can offer something beneficial to parks, but academics need to be open to NPS input on accessible ways to present research findings. A second thing that the NPS could really use from academic historians is advocacy around specific park needs. For example, interpretive rangers (the rangers who design and offer tours and programs) are currently most likely to be Park Guides at the GS 4/5 pay grade, which is not at all a fair compensation level for the work of interpretation, and also is not permanent and does not have promotion potential. Parks really need interpretive staff to be hired as Rangers at the 7/9 pay grade. Park staff themselves cannot advocate for that change, but professors from the relative security of their academic positions can.

Recognize that collaboration can be mutually beneficial. Well-intentioned academic historians can be so eager to share what they know with parks that they come across like nineteenth-century missionaries secure in the knowledge that they are saving people who can’t help themselves, which does not make an ideal foundation for collaboration. Professors will benefit themselves and parks if they recognize that academic historians have as much to learn from parks as the NPS does from them, and if they notice and acknowledge the ways in which they, their students, and their work benefit from interaction with the NPS.

Be good neighbors. Conversation with each other is going to lead to better results than calling out. Tours and interpretive signage based on dated or even discredited scholarship might well exist and need to change. A temptation might be for an academic historian to write a critical Op-Ed or in some other public facing way call out the issue. Putting an agency on the defensive, however, is almost never the way to change things expeditiously. More constructive results come more quickly if instead an academic historian approaches NPS staff as fellow professionals, expresses the concern collegially, and then asks if they can think together about ways to move forward.

Be mindful of each other’s constraints. Professors working in universities and NPS staff working in parks share a dedication to history, but they also work in professional environments with their own demands, limits, and expectations. Each side can sometimes discount or lose sight of the other’s responsibilities, realities, and obstacles. The NPS is working with chronic funding limitations and the reality that some changes, such as monument removal, can only come with an Act of Congress rather than on the Park Service’s own initiative. At the same time, professors operate in a world where specificity and nuance are demanded and they cannot always say or write exactly what would fit most easily within NPS conventions. Additionally, the “more time” that professors have for research is usually their own time, often unpaid; they don’t operate in a world that gives “comp time” for weeks that exceed forty hours (in other words, every week.) Moreover, each answers to multiple, but different, constituencies. Park historians and interpretive rangers answer to NPS superintendents, the Department of the Interior, Congress, and most of all the public in a very direct and daily way. Professors answer to other scholars in their field, university administration, intensifying public scrutiny of their work, and the many needs and demands of students. Those differing constraints are here to stay, but we can at least remember that they are there when working with each other, and extend a little grace.

Partnerships can help a lot. Great things happen through good personal relationships but at the same time, working to build formal partnerships that go beyond individual relationships can help a lot. Participating in a “Friends of the Park” group or other existing partnership, or working together to create such a group if one does not exist, can help ensure consistency and navigate unexpected circumstances, even if particular individuals move on or retire. Pairing a professor and an NPS professional on specific projects can also provide a reliable vehicle for translating different conventions for each other, ensuring that work products like reports and studies comply with needed format and language.

The SCWH and other historians’ organizations can elevate the value of collaboration with the NPS (and public historians more broadly) in some concrete ways. Some steps that that SCWH can take include:

  • Ensure an NPS presence at every biennial conference by allotting at least one panel or roundtable to NPS related issues and offering at least one workshop on some practical aspect of working with the NPS
  • Create a regular award for excellent historical interpretation at an NPS site
  • Work with the NPS to offer professional development opportunities at SCWH conferences and events, including for seasonal rangers
  • Systematize pathways for history students to apply for and take seasonal ranger positions with the NPS
  • Add an NPS liaison to the SCWH

 

Each of the participants in the roundtable discussion had more to add, and I hope some will speak up here by commenting on this overview! But these seven themes arose as good possible starting points for collaborating productively. While not exhaustive, we hope that they mark a beginning for ongoing conversations about how academic historians and National Park Service professionals can work together for mutual benefit and for the good of history.

Chandra Manning

Chandra Manning teaches U.S. history, chiefly of the 19th century, including classes on the Civil War, slavery and emancipation, Lincoln, citizenship, the American Revolution, and the History of Baseball (not necessarily in that order). Her first book, What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War (Knopf, 2007) won the Avery O. Craven Prize awarded by the Organization of American Historians, earned Honorable Mention for the Lincoln Prize and the Virginia Literary Awards for Nonfiction, and was a finalist for the Jefferson Davis Prize and the Frederick Douglass Prize. Her second book, Troubled Refuge: Struggling for Freedom in the Civil War (Knopf, 2016), about Civil War refugee camps where former slaves allied with the Union Army and altered the course of the war and of emancipation, won the Jefferson Davis Prize awarded by the American Civil War Museum for best book on the Civil War. A former National Park Service Ranger, she has also advised historical sites, museums, and historical societies, as well as community groups in search of historical perspective.

Editor’s Note for September 2024 JCWE

Editor’s Note for September 2024 JCWE

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The September 2024 issue continues to demonstrate the vitality and creativity of the fields that touch on the Civil War era and the vibrant discussion of methods, sources, and arguments that shape its future. There are reasons for concern—or even gloom—about aspects of the broader culture, including attacks on teaching good history at all levels and the contraction of history departments across the country. As this issue shows, however, historians continue to ask big questions and to improve our understanding of the past.

The issue begins with a creative variation on a common theme. Instead of the typical single-authored address, the Robert Fortenbaugh Memorial Lecture series in 2023 hosted a roundtable among three leading scholars of military history, moderated by Gettysburg College’s Peter Carmichael. In the free-wheeling yet well-grounded discussion, professors Lorien Foote, Jennifer Murray, and Craig Symonds discuss the state of Civil War military history as it continues to emphasize a holistic war-and-society approach and to incorporate methods, sources, and subjects from social and cultural history. Panelists note the relatively marginal status of military history in the academy and highlight the importance of studying military history in a world engulfed by conflict today. The panel promises to invigorate discussions of the future of military history and, perhaps, provide some ways to move beyond the silos that have shaped such discussions in the past.

The issue also includes two fine research articles. In “‘A Fit Resting Place for One Who Loved Liberty, Justice, and Equality’: Liberalism, Antislavery, and the American Expatriate Community in Florence, Italy, 1820-1865,” Scott C. Martin takes us far from the usual sites of Civil War Era history to Florence, Italy, where a lively community of U.S. and British expatriates drew upon the city’s cosmopolitanism to produce provocative liberal debates, including on the topic of abolition. Through study of the relationship between Florence’s conditions and the writings of expatriates, Martin finds an alternative node for the development of nineteenth-century abolitionism—far from England, Scotland, and New England—where reformers from the U.S. and Britain engaged in wide-ranging discussions of topics central to nineteenth-century liberalism, while also building a community of thinkers capable of facing such seemingly intractable issues.

In “‘They Were Married in Heart’: Race, Inheritance, and Interracial Common Law Marriage in Reconstruction Era Mississippi,” Kathryn Schumaker investigates the impact of Mississippi’s 1869 state constitution on existing interracial couples that could now claim the status of legal families. The new constitution, which repealed an earlier ban on inter-racial marriage and declared that cohabiting couples were legally married, seemed to open new possibilities for Black women who were in long-term relationships with white men. Through a careful study of several court cases, Schumaker reveals how Black women and their attorneys drew on the new policies to claim resources for themselves and their children, and she shows how those who rejected such claims sought to define Black women as “concubines” rather than as legitimate wives. In many instances, judges imposed strict racial divisions and cut off Black families from rightful inheritances. Still, Black women’s efforts to claim rights as wives of white men offers a window into the fluidity of claims-making in court and of the years immediately following Confederate surrender.

In this issue’s review essay, “Reconstruction, Religion, Politics, and Race: A Historiography,” Nicole Myers Turner examines shifts in how Religious Studies scholars have approached Reconstruction, and in how Reconstruction scholars have incorporated the study of religion. Myers Turner shows how scholars moved from the study of religion during slavery into examining how the Civil War and emancipation shaped the development of Black churches. She emphasizes work on how Reconstruction-era Black churches served as sites for politics and for the negotiation of relations of gender and class among African Americans, and she points to the potential for new scholarship that will explore nineteenth-century church history on its own terms, rather than through frameworks develop to understand twentieth-century developments.

The issue also includes 15 fine book reviews on topics ranging from the Black family to Civil War military strategy to guerrilla warfare to the history of the Ho-Chunk people. Altogether the reviews demonstrate scholars’ ongoing commitment to taking each other’s work seriously, assessing its arguments, and explaining its importance. In a moment when many of us feel burdened by many competing obligations, it is bracing to see our colleagues’ commitment to sustaining the professional practices that feed us all.

This issue went to print just after Peter Carmichael passed away. Pete, a professor at Gettysburg College and director of the Civil War Institute there, was a friend and mentor to many in our extended community, an influential scholar, and an advocate of public history who lived his values. We lament his untimely death and know that his memory will continue to inspire new scholarship and public engagement.

Kate Masur and Greg Downs

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

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.

 

 

Pete

Pete

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We grieve the sudden death of our dear friend and distinguished historian, Peter S. Carmichael.  As nearly everyone in the SCWH knows, Pete brought a rare invigorating spark to everything he touched.  Those lucky enough to interact with him encountered historical insights, probing questions, and his profane and hilarious sense of humor.  In preparing this piece, we kept hearing variations on this story, shared by Joe Beilein: “When I was in graduate school, I walked up to him at the Southern to introduce myself (as graduate students awkwardly do).  He was wearing his trademark scarf and drinking wine.  He was gregarious and more polite than he needed to be.  He asked me what I was working on and who I was working with.  It was very kind of him and I felt really good afterwards.”

Pete’s passion for the Civil War and telling its stories began at the age of six or seven, when he made his first trip to Gettysburg. That summer his family had driven from their home in Indianapolis to the battlefield where they hired a guide who told the most brilliant stories, sparking his imagination. “I came back from that trip,” he recalled recently, “and from that moment forward I was utterly obsessed with the Civil War.” Three years later, his grandfather helped fuel the obsession, giving him a jar in which to collect pennies that would fund a Civil War-odyssey. In a span of two weeks, they had visited Fort Donelson, Shiloh, Chickamauga, Appomattox, Petersburg, Richmond, Manassas, Antietam, and once more Gettysburg. As he often recounted in what might have been some myth making on his own part, “while other kids were going off to the malls, I’d go to the Indiana Historical Society and read letters of soldiers.”

At the age of nineteen he began his first job with the National Park Service (NPS) at Appomattox where he performed living history as a self-described “Yankee.” After several summers working at Appomattox, Richmond, and Fredericksburg-Spotsylvania honing his craft as a public historian, Pete studied under Gary Gallagher’s direction at Penn State.  His MA thesis on Willie Pegram, which began as a childhood fascination with the Confederacy’s “boy” general,  developed into an insightful book that anticipated many of the important themes of 1990s scholarship –the resilience and commitment of white Southerners to the Confederacy, the role of the army in Confederate nationalism, and the wartime genesis of the Lost Cause in the martyr-like treatment of killed officers. His dissertation, which became his second book, The Last Generation, brought a social historian’s eye to the shift in antebellum Southern political culture that brought white Southerners to secession and ruin.  The book has only gained relevance as commentators today struggle to explain our own confrontation with the sudden and unpredictable radicalization of national politics.

Pete developed friendships with colleagues at Western Carolina University, UNC-Greensboro, and West Virginia University before finding his intellectual home (in 2010) as the Robert C. Fluhrer Chair in Civil War History at Gettysburg College, where he also directed the Civil War Institute.  Over the next decade and a half, he gave hundreds of battlefield tours to students, teachers, and fellow historians.  His skills as a historian were never more present than leading people around the battlefield, where he could quickly set a scene in time and place to help listeners grasp a broader interpretive point about the war.  Pete combined infectious enthusiasm, a sharp sense of humor, a tremendous grasp of detail, and a storyteller’s pacing to convey the lessons of this most important place.  In the process, he endeared himself to thousands of visitors to the battlefield who carried away Pete’s respect for and engagement with the past.  Throughout his career, he continued to forge close ties with a wide range of NPS historians.  He hosted conferences to bring public and academic historians together, he placed dozens of Gettysburg undergraduates in internships at NPS sites, and he worked assiduously to bridge the too-often separate spheres of popular and archival history.

In 2018, Pete published The War for the Common Soldier, a book that demonstrated his ability to work as a cultural historian.  Having spent years reading in the history of emotions and growing increasingly skeptical about a straight reading of soldiers’ letters, Pete combined decades of reading those letters with a close analysis of a handful of semi-literate men.  Charged with synthesizing the writing on soldiers for the Littlefield History of the Civil War, he instead fashioned a new interpretation that emphasized the ambivalence of many volunteers and the coercive powers of the armies.  In the process, he offered a signal contribution to histories of sectional difference by showing how Northerners’ posture of skepticism and irony gave Federal soldiers a resilience that allowed them to persevere in the face of all the frustrations and challenges soldiers encounter.  White Southerners, reared in a slave society in which only the enslaved possessed the power of double-talk, had no comparable flexibility.  The ordinary and extra-ordinary setbacks of military life weighed more heavily on them and contributed to Confederate defeat.  Like all his writing, the insights derived from a reading of wartime evidence can be read both backwards and forwards in time to help us better understand the antebellum and Reconstruction eras.  At the time of his death, Pete was working on a ground-level history of the battle of Gettysburg, one that combined the soldier and civilian experiences.

Even while directing the Civil War Institute, teaching, and writing, Pete found time to contribute to the scholarly community in innumerable ways. As members of the SCWH will remember, he was a favorite attendee at conferences (often adorned with a scarf of some brilliant color). Always flashing his signature smile, he was quick to offer witty advice to anyone and everyone he saw. We are particularly grateful for his service alongside us as editors of the University of North Carolina Press’s Civil War America series. He was a master at searching out new and promising scholarship, always keen to open doors for younger scholars and encouraging innovative approaches. He could always be counted on to write judicious and supportive readers’ reports, offering clear paths forward and reassuring advice to authors.

While we will miss Pete the scholar, teacher, battlefield guide, and colleague, we will miss our friend most. A fountain of sage wisdom (at least he thought it was sage) was always forthcoming. He was a Renaissance man – a lover of Indiana basketball, art, music, CrossFit, and an expensive haircut. He was compassionate, always asking after our families and friends, and regaling us with tender stories about Beth and their girls. He made us laugh (even when we shouldn’t have) and he loved without fail. He was generous to a fault.

We will miss you, dear Friend. And we will try our best to contribute to the field and to humanity as you did so well.

 

Carrie Janney

Aaron Sheehan-Dean

Aaron Sheehan-Dean and Caroline Janney

Aaron Shehan-Dean is the Fred C. Frey Professor of History at Louisiana State University Caroline Janney is the John L. Nau, III, Professor of American Civil War at the University of Virginia

Greetings from the New Editor

Greetings from the New Editor

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Greetings JCWE community,

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Onward and upward,

RDB

Robert Bland

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

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