To have actual images of when i give a talk. This is something of a departure for me. Heres how the structure is going to work. Im going to give very brief introductions for the four people who are sitting here at the table with me and ill do all of them at once. And then im going to go in the order in which these images are going to appear and have each of our Panel Members talk about why they decided to be part of this project. And why they selected the image that they selected. Theyll talk for a little while about the image and then well see where the conversation goes after that. Youll be able to have questions. Let me introduce everybody up here. Ill start with carol riordan, the professor of American History at penn state university. Carol and i taught together there for a long time. Shes the author of a very important book on civil war memory, the military side of it. With a sword in one hand, the problem of military thought in the civil war north. And shes a coauthor with tom vossler of two books to the battlefields of gettysburg. Next down the line is edward airs, the tucker boat right professor of humanities at the university of richmond. Ed and i were long time colleagues at uva. He was there when i went. A delight to be there with ed. His most recent publication as you know is the thin light of freedom, the civil war and emancipation in the heart of america, which won the 2018 lincoln prize. Want to make sure i have the order here. Next in line is fred see professor of southern studies, Louisiana State university and the author again as you know from todays program most recently of the calculus of violence, how americans fought the civil war. The author or editor of six books. Among them, house of abraham. Lincoln and the todds, a family divided by war and a book of essays that had a Significant Impact on what goes in our world. Weirding the war, stories from the civil wars ragged edges. Now im supposed to deal with this. There is the dust jacket of the book. And im going to say right now because i am proud to do so that the all of the images in this book were taken by my son, will gallagher who is a photographer in austin, texas. It was a wonderful opportunity for will and me to spend a good deal of time together. It was great joy to work on this book with him. I got that out of the way. Here were going to start. Ill start with steve berry. His essay leads off the book. And this is an image of the inside of the Shiloh Church on the battlefield of shiloh. So steve, ill ask you the two questions that i said i was going to ask. Why you agree to be part of the project. Why did you select this place . Before you do that, i really almost forgot to tell you where this book came from. I need to do this and particularly because i want to give credit to jay matthew who is the coeditor of the book with me. Matt and i coedited a book called lens of war, to which a number of senior historians contributed essays on one image taken during the war that really spoke to them for whatever reason. And carol contributed to that book. Ed couldnt. We asked him to. He had too many obligations. Erin did and steve did and i did. Matt and i talked about something we might do as a followup. Matt asked a group of our friends and other senior scholars if they think about one Place Associated with the civil think about one Place Associated with the civil war, very distinctive place not a great battlefield not all of gettysburg, not a city enduring the war. But a particular place that they believed would allow them to talk about their relationship with the war, how we might look at the war. They could go wherever they wanted with it. We wanted the essays which would run about ten pages to be as personal and they wanted them to be. You can come at it as a scholar or on a much more personal level than that. But the idea was to find people mo had a place that would make them want to take the time from very busy leaves these are senior people with a great many things on their plates. Were asking them to do something thats not going to make the Bank Accounts any better whatsoever. So they are doing it as a favor or because they think there is something really useful in this. Im happy to say that when matt and i put together our list of potential contributors not one person turned us down among our roster. This is really matts idea. He was the one who said we talked about various things we could do. But matt said how about getting people to focus on one place. And thats what we did. And now thats what well talk about. And steve, ill apologize for being cumbersome in my getting to you. Not at all. I was delighted to get the invitation. I think the point gary makes was the one that came home to me quite quickly is how personal this would be. If youre an academic often times, too often youre in the ivory tower or flying saying why something is person or needs to be important to everybody. And you dont get to confess why something is important to you. You dont get to return sort of to your head waters of made you want to be a historian in the first place, the dramas that stirred you we you were a kid or things like that. This was an opportunity to do that, to return what you care about personally. To write about it in the i voice sfwlppy thought about the fact that wars are fought outside but made inside. Theyre made in the u. S. Congress. Theyre made in kitchen tables and parcelers. Theyre made in state legislatures. Thats where wars get made. They get fought outside. I thought how weird would it be to be an interior . And almost immediately i thought Shiloh Church. Shiloh has been a touch stone for me. It was an early battlefield i went to. It has a story that all of the battles of the civil war have their own story. I sometimes think they are like like the founding fathers, the men of ruffles, yankee injeent. And the civil war battles had the personalities the way they get enshrined in our story. And gettysburg is the great test. But shiloh is in loss of innocence and the thing about Shiloh Church you have to know is it was formed by a separate methodist congregation after the 1844 skichl. It starts in 1851 they left a church named union to form this little pro slavery church. Then that church is in the middle of every aspect of the battle. Ability sydney johnsons body is there. They use it as a hospital and morgue and its the headquarters of both armies. And then destroyed. Mostly to take relics people traveling to shiloh battlefield that they want a piece of it. And so the church was all but destroyed into tooth picks. They rebuilt it. Its a good sack simile and erected intown 2001. My favorite part of this was working with will and asking him this is whats in my head. And i want this church to be prays where you dont know if everybody is left or everybody about to come in sup up or sundown. You light is coming in the window because the sun is setting or not. It would look like a place of possibility where maybe we wouldnt make a war, or maybe we would. And that kind of veilens to the minimal i just got it. Its a beautiful picture. Its a fantastic process. It says 4 to 6. I am 4 to 6 inches from this thing. It was a fantastic process one of the processor rewarding things ive done as an academic and it was a treat to be involved. Im next. Aaron you are next up. Im next. Okay. I said yes because this sounded like a lot of fun to be honest. And not everything we do is just fun. Although generally its like 99 fun. I had made a an atlas many years ago. I worked on the valley of the shadow that ed talked about. And so thought i knew enough about g. I. S. And blundered into saying i can make the maps for the atlas that oxford published. And that took a lot more energy than i anticipated. Turns out im not a cartographer. But in the process of that i spent a lot of time thinking about how it is we might tell stories or make arguments with things other than words. We are trained as historians to the write. Thats what we do, we read, write and we know how words work and we understand sentences and pragmatists are paragraphs and chapters and the constituent parts and vigil imagery has a different grammer and structure to it. It took me a long time to figure it out. Although im proud of the atlas most of the images are not frame. And put on the wall beautiful unlike this which every photograph is extraordinary. But ive been thinking about geography. But place. And not only the photographs from bradder and gardner. And others. But something that was new and required that we think seriously about what things look like which we dont get movie at least in graduate school dont get training in visual material. We in the great panel on material culture, anthropologists and other people get trained to do this. And some of us learn our way into it and eabout thinking about what a picture does and how a picture works to convey information. And itself interprets the thing it is representing. We are much more natural with text. So i sort of took it as an interesting challenge. And so the picture and the essay i wrote this is a picture of vicksburg looking back mostly of looking south down towards the city but roughly where a lot of the installations were. And the title asks i dont know if the title is on there seeding in the ground of hindsight. I wanted to convey or get the reader into the arguments about hind the sight and confederate defeat and inevitability and to try to challenge those. I think ed alluded to this in his comments with when he was talking about the likelihood of slavery going away in 1860. But there was a period when historians presented a picture of a teetering south or a south driven to anxiety at fear about the collapse of slavery. And i think most people, at least up here would suggest thats not a reasonable interpretation of a people who in fact felt quite confident of what they were doing and of the way they constructed their society and what their future looked like. And vicksburg is typically presented as the place of defeat, right as the liynch pin the twin victories of the vicksburg and gettysburg. Arguably vicksburg is the more important one for opening up the mississippi and cutting off the transmississippi confederacy to the rest of the confederacy. But i wanted to pull us back and stand where confederates stood and see what looks to them like an impregnable position, the preposterrousness of the union mounting an offense every that could conquer this place called the gibraltar of confederacy. The picture at least right now if you imagine in as a picture taken before july 4th, 1863 might help us get into the mind of of those people leading the defendercy, led the Southern States out of the union and into a new nation that they anticipated would survive and thrive and flourish. When we know the end which is in place is going to fall. But thats not what they knew. And i think thats one of the great the difficulties, right, hindsight is a very useful tool for us to understand things. But its also a superpowerful drug. And i tell my students you have to dose yourself carefully with that. The more you take, the more its impossible to think your way out of the possibilities and the potentialities of what history shows. And so i hope this picture pulse us back from that a little bit. You can see that there is a real variety of the pictures from the intimate interior of steves, which will use different cameras and different kinds of lenses. And we asked him to offer his thoughts on this project at the end of the book, which he did. He talked about some of the images and challenges, what he enjoyed and what was difficult. But he use add drone, as you can tell to get this one, to get the perspective that aaron wanted here. Theres is a very great range of kinds of images in this book as well as a great diversity of places. And we will move onto carols image here which is the third one. And ill hand you when i was asked to be a part of this it was a very easy thing to say yes because gary didnt give me opportunity to say no. But thats perfectly fine is what it comes down to. But as i began to think about it as soon as i came to penn state back in 1991 i started doing programs down here at gettysburg. I started doing staff writes down here at gettysburg. I built my retirement home here in gettysburg. This should be really easy to pick my bark yard as my favorite place and go from there except i he gave me one requirement i couldnt pick gettysburg. So. Did i really say that. Yes, you did. You really did. But of course that presents a new challenge. If not my backyard, where . Steve alauded earlier to what got us started. Whats the foundational moment . And since we were allowed to pick not just a place connected with the civil war itself but also civil war memory, it was just that flash of inspiration that you get. How many of you in the audience are from the pittsburgh area show of hands. I saw a steeler shirt i know there were a few. Okay. So some of you have been to place called the soldiers sailors memorial hall, in the oakland section of pittsburgh on the outskirts of. Burg. Carnegiemellon. Very busy area, lots of traffic. Except for a larnl block with a lot of open grown space, an awful lot of openness, pennsylvania Little Island of silence in an otherwise busy very busy place. How did i discover it . The most fundamental, easiest way to describe it is baseball. My grandmother was a Pittsburgh Pirate fan and the bus taking us back home from pirate games, the bus stop was in front of soldiers and sailors memorial hall. That was it. You stand there waiting for the bus and you look up at the large lawn, a couple of large canon right on the front lawn. And the large the statues just beckoning you to come forward, i already had that little bit of historical itch i needed to scratch anyway. And i began to a pester my grandmother to let me dow in. One day she finally it. Thats why im sitting here today. There is my foundational story. She took me into soldiers and sailors memorial hall. What kinds of things were in there . All of things that can get your mind moving in all kinds of different directions. There is the display of relics. And they arent big fancy relics, piece of wood from shiloh. Piece of wood from kulps hill. Piece of wood with a bullet from chancellor hill. Like a lot of places a battle log chick a mauga with canon balls but you could touch it. And that was cool. Those are 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 now my bachelors degree is in biology. My the course i took to end up where i am today goes a lot of different ways. But one of the things that really intrigued me was the walls around the exterior of the build, north hall, east hall, west wall. But they would not name a south hall because this was after a all a testament to the northern veterans of the pittsburgh area. Around knows walls were large plaques that are reminiscent of plaques on the pennsylvania memorial here. It listed by reg mts the Allegheny County recruits in various pennsylvania reg mts. You knew i had an ancestor. And my grandmother helped me find out that he was in the 14th pennsylvania cavalry. And i could not wait to get back there and find my personal connection to the civil war. My great great grandfather. I had to find it. I went and saw the 14th pennsylvania cavalry. Looked at the plaque. I looked at every name on it. And i found a name that had the right last name but the wrong first name. Talk about devastation. His name is there but they got it wrong. That almost turned me off of history, to be perfectly honest. Only years later once i ended up finding the thing called the official record of the civil war and then the bates history of the pennsylvania volunteers, i began to learn about this thing called research. I was hooked. That little visit to a place in pittsburgh that was the money for which was raised because the people of Allegheny County voted to tax themselves to raise the funds to do it would we do Something Like that today . I wonder . But they did. A visit there is what started all of this and brought me here today. 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. Its as simple as that. I think i mentioned the other night that that the most obvious problem with oral histories is that people remember things differently. I have absolutely no memory of telling carol she could not write about gettysburg. And i find it very difficult to imagine that i would tell carol that she couldnt write about gettysburg, because i know there are many places here that resonate powerfully with you but ill defer to you since i have good manners. And pretend that i did tell you that. Im going to skip an image because i think that that ed should go next and we are now in richmond with ed ass image from tretigar. Thanks i incident didnt have to think twice nor were promising given nor extracted when i took as gary mentioned i missed out on lens of war, so i felt especially eager to be a part of in book. Also anything that gary does he does right. And matt gal many. I knew it would be first rate. I thought id try to live up to that standard. I think its kind of a strange image to have chosen. Everybody else has the ee voktive stories. But i was surprised myself by choosing this. I was trying to figure out why are why. I realized that everything i thought about the past is the gap between old and the new. As aaron was saying that the image we had before the south as an agrarian society. And trapped. But it was the fourth richest economy in the world by itself and very tp aaron says confident. Ill say arrogant. Thinking they could go it on their own. One reason they thought they could go it on their own was the industrial emergence of richmond. This is the water wheel at the iron works which began all the way back in the 1830s as an image of coming off a canal that was imagined by george washington. Dug by enslaved people in the 18th century. The idea that virginia was going to make a canal all the way to the ohio river. Those darn mountains, might have made it otherwise. But it suggests that the virginia and the south were not born old. They were not born backward looking but they thought they were going to be able to adapt to the modern world. This iron works runs off from the water from the james that john smith had discovered in 1607 on his way to china two weeks after arriving in the chesapeake bay. Made it up to the richmond said well come back in 100 years process. We have plantations to establish down near the chesapeake. And it sat there because the water falls were an impediment. They could see at the time that the Falling Water would be an advantage for building mills. But it took a long time to make their way up back the james to t