You. The gift to me is to have the opportunity to moderate this panel. Artifacts of the civil war. Starring the scholars you see seated on the stage before you. Joan is professor of American History at Ohio State University and the author of first lady of the confederacy. And the struggle for human and Environmental Resources in the American Civil War which was published last year. We will be talking a lot about things during the civil war area today and we will be using primary source analysis that was taken taken from her edited volume of essays also 2018 entitled war matters, material culture. For sale now. Or after this panel. This is the stewarthe is the author of more than 20 books on civil war topics and the last attack at gettysburg. Most recent book is fighting for atlanta tactics, terrain and trenches published by doing so you press in 2018. This is Jason Phillips the Eberly Family professor is the author of booming civil war how americans imagine the future which is published last year by Oxford University press and diehard rebels the confederate culture of invincibility published by university of Georgia Press in 2007. On the other side is Michael Wuertz associate professor at Marshall University you have met him before. Yesterday on a panel here is the author of two books as well bleeding kansas slavery sectionalism and civil war on the missouri kansas border published by routledge in 2016 and emotional and it sectional conflict. Our focus today is on convincing you persuading you, i think that things matter to our understanding of the civil war era and i think we are asking two big picture questions that you see listed here about Historical Context and historical method first, we want to encourage you to ask the question how did people in the civil war era value things. How did they make meaning of things. Those might be different from the ones we would give to things. As you will see through our presentation the meanings of things changed over time and in different contexts in which people interact with them. The methodological question we are asking is how do you go beyond studying a thing and to understand the era as a whole. We will be using this object which is in the collection of the museum in massachusetts on a thing that is as you see here are two things that came together some way and our job our job is to show you how we do our work. This question about method is going to be played out in the conversation that we have together today. At the end of our time before the period where you will get a chance to have your say we are going to give each one of the panelists time to talk about a artifact that has been central in their work and first, we will look at this bible new testament of a soldier in the army of the potomac. His name is Charles William merrill. Soldier in company a 19 massachusetts which was in the third grade second corps of the army of the potomac. We can use this document that you see which is a part of the compiled Service Record which are available in the national archive. We can also use the federal census to learn something about him the question, whose bible is this can be at least partially answered. We learned that she was a farm laborer in the household of Joseph Gordon in west newberry massachusetts which is west of his birthplace where his father still was a substantial landholder a farm worth 4500. The next slide will open up a discussion and the question i would like the palace to answer is what does this bible tell us about were start to tell us about the historical contact in which he lived and i want to read two short texts that we have associated with this bible. They are cited in an essay in the book war matters by historians ronald and mary wrote about books as shields the books that soldiers carried. The inscription of this bible reads from your affectionate pastor west newberry massachusetts august 12 1862. Three days after he enlisted and the second quotation, this is from a letter that charles wrote to his mother catherine in february 1863. He says when you see Mister Foster remember me to him. Hardly a day passes by without my thinking of him. This inscription tells us that the bible was a gift. Gifts friendships, family relationships and i think it is safe to say in the 19th century people owned fewer things. Our world, things are disposable. We consume so many things and on so many things and throw out so many things that the current trend is minimalist. They lived in that minimalist world and the gift of a bible would have meant more to him, i suspect, then any gift that we receive except for extremely special gifts because they owned fewer things and it is safe to assume probably valued them more for that reason. I would add to that that i think we will talk a lot of studying artifacts and we are still studying people. This is one way to trace the connections and i think people we are studying knew that. If you think about some of the iconic stuff from the 19th century the thing that people notice in museums is the hair jewelry and the jewelry made from hair of deceased loved ones. It has a gruesome sound, but it is the same idea that this is connecting you, this thing is connecting you to a person and we can see that in this case. One thing that is in my mind if i didnt make this, it is not handcrafted. Is something that was printed by the thousands and material culture operates on many different levels. One of the basic levels is to documentwho made it for what purpose, how was it used. All of that is basic and impersonal. If Something Like this happens it makes an impersonal thing into a personal object that has deep meaning for the individual and the family. I found an interesting article when working on this project, it was written by an english historian whose grandfather had won a major medal for being in the ref during world war ii. She was a material culturalist and she found it fascinating that that metal was kept generation after generation and it meant Different Things. Some thought it was important and others couldnt care less. It was a Family History. In that family had a special and changing meaning over time. Maybe i should make a few general remarks about material culture before we keep diving into the particulars. The phrase was coined in the early 1900s apparently by an anthropologist although there has been some debate about who coined the phrase and it has been defined in different ways by different people. One of my favorite definitions is by a folklore scholar and he described it as the tangible yield of human conduct which obviously covers a lot of human conduct and a lot of material objects and the field is very large. It has been dominated for long time by anthropologists and archaeologists and historians started to get into this about 30 years ago and civil war historians have held back sort of on the serious study of material objects, i think, because there is so much documentation. The manuscript to consult is an enormous body of paper, but over the last 15 or 20 years scholars have started to turn to the material record that has been left behind and to echo what everyone else has said it is your those objects mean Different Things to different people, but they often write about them so it turns up in the written record and they preserve the object like the book that we have here. I also want to get in a plug for ron and mary who wrote this essay, they are excellent scholars, nice people and they live and work right here in pennsylvania. We get from, i think, these early texts an understanding of how a book could connect communities together and also Families Together cross the divide of war and this represents the home front in a very tangible way and we see that from these texts. That local context isnt the only one. The question that may seem made obvious, but we need to explain is how did that get lodged in the bible the military campaign in which that happened and this is a map that many of you might be familiar with. As a soldier in john gibbons division of the second corps was attached to john cedric six core remaining at fredericksburg when he began his march. My question for the panel is to talk about that military context and also getting into and you have written at length. In a book that matthew this taken in the aftermath of the second battle. To talk about the experience of combat how it shaped this thing this bible something about the material artifacts in this image this is a photograph taken by an army officer who was early in his work career detached to the Railroad System as a photographer because he was a prewar artist and photographer so he made a lot of photographs largely of transportation facilities and he happened to be with the union forces that did this attack on may 3, 1863 he took this camera and he went out early in the morning according to the information this is less than 24 hours after this battle took place. Ive been fascinated by this photograph and i love writing the essay. There are maybe about hundred photographs taken in the entire civil war before they were cleaned up if you want to put it that way. This is more unique than most of them because it is taken a few hours after the battle and a few hours before the federals evacuated this and gave it back to the confederates so it is a unique moment in time. Ive been haunted by, look at the image of a dead soldier. Denoting hand to hand combat and maybe a horrid death. If you take this photograph on a computer and blow it up you can see a lot more in it then you can here. One thing i want to pointed out, also, battlefield photographers in the civil war had something of a tendency to kind of in a way fool the viewer and that they mlive deleted some aspects of the scene. There have been documented cases of battlefield photography where some soldiers have been talked into pretending to be dead so that they can enhance the image and the impact and you can detect that as a historian because the body is not loaded, it looks alive. We dont have that going on here, i think he did a little of this. Look at the muskets. How many muskets seem to be neatly laid across that ditch or leaning gracefully against the stone wall. It stretches the imagination that you would assume they happen to fall there like that. I think russell is trying to do a little bit of kind of arranging the scene of death for you a little bit. Of course, he is not doing anything with the dead body and there are 4 to 6 of them on their if you take a closer look. Even in doing and, by the way, this is the first time in United States history battlefield death is photographed. Eventually for public distribution. What can we say about this photograph in terms of material culture . Russell was very much aware of material items, very much aware that prompts like rifle muskets can be used to compose an interesting scene and to me it is fascinating that you take one of the most vivid and unmediated approaches to showing death on the battlefield yet at the same time in a victorian way trying to pretty it up a little bit. Make it looks symmetrical. It looks suspiciously symmetrical. Any other comments about that . I would say the battlefield has always yielded a lot of material objects. This is true for the civil war and many wars in the modern era because most weapons have metal parts and those parts are very durable so there are accounts of people during and after the civil war who were looking for battlefield artifacts and digging around and would not only find weapons from the civil war they would find weapons from the revolutionary war. If they were in the parts of the country that were part of the original 13 colonies. Military artifacts are a rich source of material that we can examine as historians. In terms of material limitations as jason mentioned, it is not a material risk culture as it is today. One expression of that is every battlefield became the target of looters. Civilians in the area as soon as the fighting stopped would descend on it to grab what they could. Discarded equipment or clothing or anything they could find to make use of. It is not a widely reported aspect of the Civil War History but you can find lots of evidence and maybe gettysburg is the best illustration of that. A lot more material after july 3, 1863 in gettysburg than any other battle in the civil war. Sometimes local authorities would put up cards around different battlefield. That happened here, but they would put up guards to try to stop the looting and keep people off the battlefield because many times the priority is to locate the wounded and take care of the dead. This also during the war itself there is a market that develops in civil war artifacts before 1865 and those artifacts show up for sale in the newspapers in the north and the south and many of them came to be authentic perhaps some of them were not. There are documented incidences of people digging around in battlefield right after the shooting stops and they want to take those artifacts to self is profit. This photograph calls to my mind some of the accounts you read from soldiers trying to describe what the aftermath of the battle looks like two people were not they are and when you look for they will enumerate everything they see. The discarded canteens and knapsacks and trying to conjure up this kind of an image of a variety of things that are out there and i wonder if it is because they are coming from a background where they are not seen that much stuff and it is really, they are trying to depict the horrors of battle and what is there. It is also a consumer culture that is starting to take off really in the 1830s or 40s although they start to date for the market culture where goods are marketed to people with disposable income and it seems to have spread quickly from the major city to the smaller town all over the United States, objects that make life more comfortable, more enjoyable and are not necessary for human existence. For example, pianos. The piano is a luxury object that cost several hundred dollars and by 1860 it is definitely a status symbol for a lot of people in the north and south. A sign the household has extra income and it as enjoyment that it is not necessary for human survival. You can see market, but quickly in womens fashions. A lot of them copy from pioneer in europe and household furnishings the carpet and it was made in brussels. It is marketed in the United States and it is expensive and it was something that was often found in the homes of affluent people. You wouldnt see it in a workingclass home. It is a status symbol. That consumer culture is taking off right before 1860 and is nothing like the world we live in today. Where as jason has said most households have hundreds of objects and most of them are not necessary for human survival. Most are purchased because they give people survival, comfort and they make life easier and more pleasant. Most of the time. This discussion of the image and the image itself reveals the local context for things that we talked about and i think what is opening up here is the way in which the soldiers yield forces them to interact with a Great Variety of other things in looting guns and we see the International Context of a consumer economy opening up and a circulation of things across national borders. This image shows not only the kinds, but the detritus of war of men having as he says in his essay a 10 cup that mightve been used to give a drink to wounded soldier placed on the stone wall there are bits of cloth and paper all over the ground to give you some sense of a battlefield strewn with things that may not have, there may not have been time for them to come in. That does, i hope that gives you a sense of a variety of contexts in which things moved, local, national and international. They make the points in their essay which again is about focuses on a sample of over 100 stories about the confederate soldiers who were carrying books and have them shot by a variety of projectiles. They are historians of the book and culture and they focus on something that needs to be explained and they do so very well. A piece of shot remains just as it did 150 years ago. Civil war books, findings, is 30 boards provide ample resistance to longrange fire and was near the end of their trajectory. Then material explanation for what actually you see here. I wondered if you all could expound upon your understanding of maybe some other cultural and ideological and helping us what understand first of all, i think it is important to focus on the thing and the material of it is that quotation provides and i also think we have to remember that when men were saved by bibles in their breast pocket they didnt think the quality of the paper or the binding, they thanked god. They understood the relationship between god, the bible and themselves differently perhaps then is expressed in the quotation and probably differently than most of us would today. God was primarily responsible for that projectile landing in the bible rather than in their skull because god directed the course of that bullet and the bible stopped the bullet. Third, in terms of importance is the person who put the bible in their pocket. That is their understanding. We might look at that situation and if we were saved by a bullet like that, the first thought, i will confess, my first thought would be i am so fortunate to have put that bible in my breast pocket, i am primarily responsible for that, not god and not the book. The book was in object that happened, fortunately, to stop the projectile. That is a very different understanding and a different valuation of things and the hierarchy of forces at play than is evident in the quotation or perhaps the way we understand things. You are absolutely right and it is illustrative of the force of believe in god in the civil war era and i find it fascinating in the same essay admit there are many cases of a bullet going completely through the bible and killing the guy. Does thatdoes that leave the family members to condemn god as heartless acts i dont inc. So. That is another testament of the force of religion i guess in the minds of most civil where civil war era americans. And also pointing out both armies are largely protestant in their religious orie