And use actual images so this is something of a departure for me. Here is how the structure is gonna work, im gonna give very brief introductions for the people sitting here at the table with me and i do all of them at once i will have each panel member talk about why they decided to be part of the project and why they selected the image they selected and they will talk a little about the image. Then we will see where the conversation goes after that so very briefly, let me introduce everybody i will start with Carol Reardon who was the professor of American History at penn state university, one of the important books on the military side of history, with a sword in one hand and germany and the other the problem of military thought in the civil war north and to field guide books of the battle of gettysburg and antietam. Next on the line is edward ayres who is a professor of humanities and president of the university of richmond. The most recent publication is a thin line of freedom and in the heart of america, they won the 2018 lincoln prize. The Louisiana State university and the author as you know most recently from the calculus of violence, how americans fought the civil war and to my far right is steve barry, gregory professor of the civil war era at the university of georgia the author and editor of six books lincoln and the family divided by war and a book of essays that had a Significant Impact of what goes on in the world titled wording the war stories from the civil wars ragged edges. Here is the dust jacket and im proud to do so that all the images in this book were taken by my son, will gallagher who is a photographer in austin, texas. It was in a wonderful opportunity for willing me to spend a good deal of time together and it was a great joy to work on this book with him. Ive gotten that out of the way and here we will start, i will start with steve barry, his essay leads off the book and this is an image of the inside of Shiloh Church. I want to give credit to jay matthew common where the book came firm hes the coeditor of the book with me. We coedited an earlier book and a number of senior historians contributed essays on one image taken during the war that really spoke to them for whatever reason. If they could think about one Place Associated with the civil war, very distinctive place, not a great battlefield or not all of gettysburg and not a city that entered the war but a particular place that they believed would allow them to talk about their relationship with the war, how they might look at the war, they could go wherever they wanted with it, they wanted these essays which would run to about 10 pages to be as personal as they wanted them to be. Come at it as a scholar you could come out it much more personal than that but the idea was to find people who had a place that would make them want to take the time and these are mostly very senior people with a great many things on their plates and were asking to do something that will not make their Bank Accounts any better so they are really doing it as a favor because they think that there is something really useful in this. Im happy to say that when matt and i put together the list of potential contributors, not one person turned us down among the roster. This was really matts idea, he was the one who said we talked about various things we could do but a he said how about getting people to focus on one place and thats what we did and now that is what we talk about and steve apologized for being cumbersome. I thought about the fact that wars are fought outside but made inside and so, they are made in kitchen tables and parlors and they are made in state legislatures and before wars get made they get fought outside so i thought we needed to do an interior and almost immediately i thought Shiloh Church shiloh has been a touchstone for me, it was an early battlefield that i went to it has a story all of the battles of the civil war have their own story and sometimes like the Founding Fathers are the xmen, each one has a different pattern or power, so they had these personnel actually in the way they can enshrined in the story and gettysburg as far as the great test, but shiloh is this loss of innocence. The thing about Shiloh Church is that it was formed by a separate methodist congregation after 1844, started in 1851 and they left the church named union to form a proslavery church, then that church is in the middle of every aspect of the battle, so albertson and johnsons body is there and they use it as a hospital in a more and its the headquarters of both armies and then its destroyed mostly to take relics, people traveling one piece of it. So, the church was all but destroyed and so they rebuilt it but its a good facsimile and my favorite part of the process is working with will and asking him, this is whats in my head and i want this church to be a place where you dont know if everyone has left or if everyone is about to come in, it sunup or some down because the sun is setting and it would look like a place of possibility where really we wouldnt make a war or maybe we would and that, they just got it so really hits a fantastic process. It says 4 to 6 and i am 4 to 6 inches from this thing [ laughter ] its a fantastic process and one of the most rewarding things ive done as an academic and it was a treat to be involved. Next up. I said yes because this sounded like a lot of fun but to be honest cannot everything we do is just fun for only 99 is fun i think but, i admit i made an atlas many years ago this took a lot more energy than i anticipated and im not a typographer but in the process of doing this i spent a lot of time thinking about how it is that we might tell stories or even make arguments with things other than words. We are trained as historians to write and that is what we do, read and write and we know how words work and we understand paragraphs, sentences and chapters and those are the kind of constituents parts. Visual imagery has a different grammar and structure to it and it took me a long time to figure that out which is why im proud of the atlas most of the images are not frame and put on your wall beautiful, like this which every photograph is extraordinary but ive been thinking about geography and about place and so this idea of not just the photographs that we all know from gardner and brady and the other people, which was the lens of war but to sort of commission something new that required that we think seriously about what things look like anthropologists and others get trained to do this and some of us learn our way into it about thinking about what i pictured as and how a picture works to convey information. It interprets what its representing much more natural in the text. So i took it as an interesting challenge. Speckled mostly looking back in south and and the reader gets into hindsight and defeat an inevitability to try to challenge those, i think ed alluded to this in his comments when he was talking about the likelihood of slavery going away in 1860. And about fear and the collapse of slavery and i think most people at least appear was not a reasonable interpretation of people who in fact felt quite confident of what they were doing but this is typically presented as a place of defeat, the linchpin in the Union Success and arguably vicksburg is the more important one for opening up the mississippi and cutting off the trans mississippi confederacy to the rest of the confederacy. I wanted to pull the back and stay where the confederate stood and see what it looks like as an impregnable position in the preposterous nest but they want to conquer the gibraltar of confederacy. This might help us get into the mind of the people who led the confederacy and led the Southern States out of the union and into a new nation that they anticipated with survive and flourish. This is a superpowerful drug and you have to dose yourself carefully with that because the more you take the more its impossible to think your way out and the potentiality of what history shows. I hope the picture pulls us back from that. He talked about some of the images in the challenges at the end of the book and what he enjoyed and what was difficult but he used a drone as you can tell to get this one , to get the kind of perspective that he wanted here so theres a very great range of kinds of images in this book as well as a great diversity of places we will move on to carols image which is the third one and i will into the mic hand you the microphone. When i was asked to be part of this it was easy to say us because gary didnt give me an opportunity to say no. That is perfectly fine is what it comes down to. But, as i began to think about it, as soon as i came to penn state in 1991 and started doing programs at gettysburg, i started doing stuff right that gettysburg i built my retirement home here in gettysburg and it would be easy for me to pick my backyard is the favorite place and go from right there but he gave me one requirement and i couldnt pick gettysburg but this presents a new challenge, if not my backyard, where . So steve alluded earlier to what got us started care what is the foundational moment since we were allowed to pick not just a place connected with the civil war itself and the civil war memory that was just the of inspiration, how many of you in the audience of from the pittsburgh area . So, some of you have been to a place called the soldiers and sailors Memorial Hall in the oakland section of pittsburgh, carnegie mellon, busy area with lots of traffic. The easiest way to describe it as baseball. My grandmother was a Pittsburgh Pirates fan in the bus that would take us from pirate gains, the bus stop was in front of soldiers Memorial Hall and that was it. You are standing there waiting for the bus and youre looking up at this large lawn and there are a couple of large cannons on the front lawn and these large statues beckoning you to come forward, you have a historical itch i needed to scratch there is my foundational story, she took me into soldiers and sailors Memorial Hall. From chancellorsville, course like a lot of places of battle from chickamauga with a lot of cannonballs in it but you could go up and touch and that was cool. Those were the kinds of things that got me intrigued and got me started. But, it was also something i walked away from after a while, some of you know that my bachelors degree is in biology, the course i took to end up where a. M. Goes a lot of different ways. But, one of the things that really intrigued me was on the walls around the exterior of the building, theres a north hall, east talk to sl, but they wouldnt name a southall this was a testament to the northern veterans of the pittsburgh area. Around those walls were large plaques reminiscent of the plaques on the pennsylvania memorial get listed by regimen the allegheny countty recruit i couldnt wait to get back to find my connection to the civil war, i had to find him. I went and saw the 14th pennsylvania calvary and looked at the black and i looked at every name on it and i had a name with the right last name but the wrong first name and talk about devastation. The name is there but they got it wrong. But to be perfectly honest, once i ended up finding the thing the official record of the civil war in the bates history of pennsylvania volunteers, began to learn something about research, i was hooked. That little visit to a place in pittsburgh , the money for which was raised because the people of Allegheny County voted to tax themselves, talk about the power of place, when i wasnt allowed to do a gettysburg place, that was the first place that popped into my mind. I mention the other night that the most obvious problem with oral histories is that people remember things differently, i have absolutely no memory of telling carol she can write about gettysburg and i find it difficult to imagine that i would tell carol she couldnt write about gettysburg because i know there are places that resonate powerfully and pretend that i did tell you that. We will go on to eds image from triticum. Thanks, i didnt have to think twice, but im especially eager to be a part of this book and also anything gary does, he does write and matt, first rate. So, i thought i would try to live up to that standard. I think, its kind of strange and anything ive ever thought about in the past is a gap between the old and the new but trapped in the past and static but the south was the economy in the world by itself and arrogant thinking thinking they could going on their own was the end a real emergence of richland. This is the waterwheel for ironworks and it came off a canal that were imagined by George Washington from the late 18th century. But they suggest that virginia and the south were not born old they were not born backward looking. They thought they were going to be able to adapt to the modern world. On his way to china two weeks after he arrived in the Chesapeake Bay made it up as far as richland and so we will come back in 100 years we have some plantations to establish and chesapeake and is out there all that time and they get the at the time that the Falling Water would be an advantage but it will take a long time for them to make their way back up to trigger to the falls. Then, they imported workers from wales its a welsh name because there were not enough indigenous workers that knew how to take some of the first coal outside of richland and iron is there something you can actually employer by out there that enslaved people can do this work and that be something that the south will be able to adapt themselves to. It turns out that yes, but not alongside the immigrants who instead wanted to train their sons so then with these great ironies, one reason that virginia like i talked about earlier goes into the confederacy in some ways very reluctantly become suddenly the capital its because of this anomalous piece of machinery and this is essential if the confederacy will make it some canon and Railroad Track and so forth and so virginia goes from being kind of highly reticent to finding itself the target of the entire war again partly because of this wheel. So there is a case where we think of something as being old the way that we think of the confederacy and of the slaves south its an artifact of the past and it somehow finds itself trapped in the booming 19th century with all the industrialization but i like this wheel because it kind of disrupts the image. Is it harder for us to imagine that its all cotton fields in the south and smokestacks in the north. So the other reason i to this is ive been trying to take this whole thing and make it into something new. When i first came to richmond they asked me to join the board of the museum of confederacy and at the Virginia Historical society and i could see i can see incredible strength to make a museum to having been the center of the war from start to finish and the center of the largest slave state. But as you could imagine it was hard for people to give up with the confederacy hundred years old. The confederacy is trying to keep alive the memory, the American Civil War center is telling the story of the war from africanamerican confederacy, the waterwheel had stopped turning and had to find a way to get water from the now dry canal to turn the wheel its disconnected from the machinery underneath. The real question was is good we have the waterwheel of memory turn again and we take things that have been arrested and covered with vines and overgrown with weeds of neglect and we turned it into a museum with a new way in a new vocabulary. Its ironic were using the beautiful black and white or grayscale photographs but they decided the past was actually in color it was not all music and sepm blue and gray but in fact the people of the past have been alive as we were gonna persuade young people of that we have to find ways to make the museum talk in some ways color is a part of that. Ive been taking about ensuring the board for six years and ive managed an essay now so we break ground in 2017, many days i wasnt sure that would happen, many days it seemed it was just too hard to raise the tens of millions of dollars and take this Old Industrial site that they think about this but what could possibly be in an old iron producing ground next to the james river. A cannonball larger than any canning could fire and xray it and make sure it wouldnt explode on us. But also we could build basically a glass box around the buildings without knocking them down and will be able to put this priceless collection, the largest collection into this new place, i didnt know we had the waterworld spinning again, i knew you could come see the way you driven the power and maybe we could get the waterwheel turning again in the wheels of memory turning again to see things in new ways. Thats what it means for me and the fact that now you can come see not only the real turn but the doors open it feels good to be able to share and we will take names and i expect to see every single one of you in richmond in the near future. Thank you. The process of selecting the images varies from author to author. With steves picture, he and will and i and matt were all on exactly the same page. Will and carolyn i were on the same page for ed scott will take a number of shots with his drone that showed iconic buildings that trigger that could be related to some of the photographs taken right at the fall of richland at the end of the war. Neither of us, neither will know i know matt, none of us imagined that ed would pick the image that he picked. I never wouldve taken the image and will explain to me why he was a photographer and i wasnt, when he took it. He said he thought ed might appreciate having a different option than just what i considered the best pictures for this work in the end, i deferred and they were right and it worked out perfectly and now im over that my original thought in this book was not to pick something obvious, as someone who grew up in the shadows in souther colorado from new mexico i thought it would be nice to have an image of the real west, what i would call the real west in the book and i initially was going to use the monument in the plaza in santa fe, as my place. One of the very earliest civil war monuments, went up immediately after the war and in various ways, that was my idea, and then i decided to defer the one person who was going to take part in this and in the end couldnt and it was tony horwitz who is going to. But tony was going to do some ing in the farr west with the Union Monument for the texas german union, they were very badly treated in the midst of the war and i decided that that would take and i decided to do the first heavy artillery in petersburg where they suffered the highest number of men killed of any battlefield in the war and its a wonderful monument that lists all the names with a very serious reconciliation and its a great interpretive site where you can talk about the juncture between the carnage of the war where people cared passionately about which side was right or wrong and on the back the reconciliation, the message, bringing people together. But, in the end, matt and i talked about whether i had to do something relating to charlottesville because charlottesville is so much in the news because of the violence and relating to the statues in charlottesville. So, i decided to do something on the confederate memorial landscape in charlottesville with thoughts about the broader confederate memorial landscape and not focusings civic and what had happened in charlottesville, i think the last thing anyone needed was something from me in a book like this on that with the timestamp on it and i just wanted to do something in broader strokes. So, i select did one of five rentable confederate monuments in charlottesville which include this one thats in the university cemetery, the first one that went up and they are confederates who died when uva was converted early in the war by the confederacy. The people invited the confederate government to leave in 1862 and moved to hospitals elsewhere but the reason the cemetery is there is because itd been a hospital and mainly casualties running from the valley campaign. This is the earliest of the five monuments. There were a pair of tablets on the rotunda which has since been removed that lists the five undergraduates or men who attended the university. Theres a kind of generic confederate Soldiers Monument in front of the courthouse downtown and the two equestrian statues at the center of so much in august, one of Stonewall Jackson a very fine equestrian statue and a much clunkier statue originally going to be executed by the same artist who did grant in front of the National Capital in washington who died before hes gonna be finished. So anyway i chose this one because it was the earliest of them and i used my essay to talk about how i had use the confederate memorial landscape in charlottesville over the years as a professor to talk about history and memory and how important it is to be able to disentangle those if youre gonna come to grips with the past and how it has affected later generations. These are a wonderful tool and the fact that there are a wonderful tool complicates the issue of whether they should be taken down but they decided take them down and they should come down. But, but for me as someone who thinks and writes and teaches about the civil war but its a loss of a tool that i have found useful over the years and that i used my essay to get it how you shouldnt flatten out the memorial landscape and pretend that all of them came about for the same reason i would call actual confederate memorials were former confederates and women who were alive and the ladies memorial associations played key roles in putting them up. The two equestrian statues largely came from the brain of very wealthy individuals who funded lots of things in charlottesville including two other statues at almost the same time that lewis and clark, George Rogers clark and were part of the City Beautiful Movement towards the end of the second decade and into the 1920s talk about how when the statue went up and it was almost the same as when United States congress made this robert e. Lee memorial. The United States government put lee and jackson on a . 50 piece cannot some collectors . 50 piece but a . 50 piece that paid tribute to confederate soldiers, this gave me a chance to talk about this much Broader Movement in the United States as you move towards the third decade and they gave the dedicatory speech to the statue in dallas that dallas took down a few months ago. These are valuable teaching tools and are complicated in my view and thats what i get at to try to think about the memorial landscapes in ways that make them complicated. If theres one thing that you think you understand about the past i promise if you learn more about its more complicated but we love hes a black and white and there are shades of gray in many of these questions. I thought i had to and it was my first inclination on my second and will take wonderful pictures of the main artillery at petersburg and i hated to let those go. We didnt get to the plaza although i recommended but look at the monument and it looks at both the civil war and native american issues, its a wonderful lightning rod of memory. I wanted to talk a second about some of the variety of the images in the book and i watching carols watch because i dont have a timepiece appear and i left my cell phone appear and i dont want to go up and get it and the range is the image that people chose range from the extremely familiar and famous on one end of the scale and judy gettysburg wrote about and she wrote about how she loves to jog in washington earlier in the morning, its great in the middle of the morning but Steve Cushman wrote about the beautiful equestrian statue and theyve recently been rebuilt as many of you know and they are on the famous end of things and Elizabeth Baron wrote about the Maclean House just written a book about appomattox and the Maclean House was on her mind and i wont mention all 25 of the sites. And there are other places that almost no one has been to a wilson green selected Camp Allegheny in the wild and will and i had a hard time finding the place and the hard time getting to it in a harder time getting away from it the day we found it. Kim martin wrote about the soldiers home in milwaukee which is a grand old building one of wills favorite things to photograph and Brenda Stevens wrote about emancipation oak in hampton which was a grand old oak tree and it will decided emancipation oak was more impressive than any of the spectacular live oaks in austin which was quite his concession. Writing about the National Cemetery on santa monica boulevard in los angeles california, not the first thing you would think of if you thought about civil war sites but there were 12,000 Union Veterans buried in the National Cemetery on santa monica boulevard. Its a place that joan used to teach her students for many years and several years into doing this her brother became interested in genealogy and found out the greatgreat grandfather in the second minnesota is buried in the cemetery off wilshire boulevard in los angeles and that is part of what she wrote about in her essay. So, there are a lot of different sites here and at the book that lends itself to you dont have to start at the beginning, you should because steves essay leads off but i will tell you right now that started steves essay and i will say it doesnt matter if you start with steves essay, you can open the book to almost anyplace and then range backward and forward much like winds of war, i think this appeared in the series at the university of georgia and its a book you can sample and go in any direction that you like. I want to come back because have a followup question then i promise to leave time but steve, im curious, this is a reconstructed shiloh chapel. Did you go there before it was there . Do you remember the battlefield before it was there . If it had just been a reconstruction it wouldnt have been as interesting a story. Its the story of how it got deconstructed that everyone who visited the battlefield wanted to take this home and it didnt exist on the landscape and then i went back and it was a different feeling when you go out onto the battlefield, youre trying to figure out where things happened and thats great but there was a weird quiet and when youre sitting in an interior battlefield and you know the battle is raging around you and the feeling really stuck with me and moved me i will speak to the point about grammar and photography, it has the same kind of stillness to it, it focuses you and makes you Pay Attention to something you sort of drop into this contemplative place when you look at a still photograph. Capture the mood perfectly of how it felt for me to sit there and contemplate the enormity of what went on outside but was made inside. And that was the key insight that i had during that process. Carol, i cant resist asking you that if i hadnt been brutally restrictive with you [ laughter ] and wouldve allowed you free will and free reign to do what you really wanted to do , what place at gettysburg would you have selected and why . I dont know. [ laughter ] he knew that i had to say that. When he first offered me the opportunity to participate and i started thinking about gettysburg locations, a lot of my interest at the time depended on what i was drilling down deep on. When we were working on the gettysburg field guide except we dont. One of the things we struggle with her at the park these days is trying to find ways to tell the story and im sure edits on the same issue with the museum, how to tell the story to a broader audience so that everyone feels that the gettysburg story is part of theres. And it really came down to two soldiers that have intrigued me and i intend to tell their story in some way they wouldve taken me over to coatesville and spanglish bring area. One is a name you probably wouldnt expect to hear at gettysburg, private Antonio Lopez, 10th leeann infantry listed in missing in action and killed after the end of the battle here. But when youre talking about underrepresented audiences here gettysburg, trying to take the story to include a hispanic or latino name in it, its kind of important its an important direction to go. You dont have to stretch or try too hard all you have to do is do what we do best. I didnt quite finish up my story about the importance of research. All of us appear in a lot of you out there are here because we love the research process, the importance of finding the story taking the story and finding the evidence for the story and also realizing when the story stops because the evidence trail runs out. Sometimes we havent gone down the path far enough to find it with the end of the story is. Binding Antonio Lopez was kind of an interesting story. The other side of the story takes me to the second massachusetts, the second regiment up at the monument back on the battlefield were fought and i was going through the roster for some reason i cant even remotely remember but i found the First Sergeant of company e wounded in the fight, what i noticed about him was his place of birth, cape town south africa. Who wouldve guessed really once you start down the path and you find out the locals like to say the world comes to gettysburg, we are beginning to be able to say that the world has already been here, we just have to go back and find them again. The playset has been focusing a lot of my attention to find the stories was coke sale. Im not sure where but if i hadnt done coatesville at gettysburg and hadnt had that place back home, the comment about finding the weird place or the unusual place is something that i thought about also. If i hadnt done anything for the sailors are gettysburg, the place i wouldve gone next is Natural Bridge florida. Natural bridge battlefield in florida. How many of you have ever been to Natural Bridge battlefield in florida. There is the one guy. And that is a lot for an audience to go there, when they count up the number of people who visited, it breaks 100 once in a while. But, its a state park in florida near tallahassee and it has a big Gettysburg Connection in the Union Commander was the Corps Commander that we always forget about, john newton. I would go back to tell the story if i hadnt done the other one. That wouldve been theres an essay in the book that does deal with coatesville and we could have another person that i know is in the building with us and that is Peter Carmichael whos right over there against the wall. Peter wrote about a very Small Confederate aerial site that you used to get at deems that you addressed in your recent soldiers book ive heard you do it. I know they cant hear you if you talk but im just saying that you are welcome to come up and talk. [ laughter ] my point is that this is represented by Peter Carmichael and its a site that
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