Stephen berry always brings to his research incredible, beautiful writing. With rich insights, and what i think many of us like so much, and that is a good thing because his work is so good, you want to succumb to jealousy but you just cant because he is such a wonderful guy. He is a fantastic teacher as well. Many of us have worked with him over the years, at the university of georgia, he is not only a terrific scholar, he has written or edited six books, my favorite is all the makes of man, love, ambition, and the civil war south, that was his dissertation done sometime ago at the university of north carolina. William varney was his advisor, who is still there, another book that i would highly recommend, that he edited, a fantastic book called, wielding the war stories from the civil wars ragged edge. And, he has many of his students, graduate students working on this project as well. My favorite of all the digital projects, titled, private voices , American Civil War letters, many of the letters and private voices come from soldiers who were either semiliterate or illiterate. And what is best of all about the project, all the letters are transcribed, you dont have to fuss with the handwriting so much, and you get private voices, a fantastic digital progress. Today, he is going to speak to us on the language of the common soldier. Let me welcome, Stephen Berry. Thank you all so much, i am delighted to be here, thank you for that very generous introduction. As pete mentioned, i am Stephen Berry from the university of georgia , i specialize in civil war studies, but i am involved in the running of our center for virtual history which specializes in digital projects. One of our first projects is this one, invasion of america, it animates every native American Land session. As you might guess, all of those sessions were made over the course of a century, the United States seized 1. 5 billion acres, depending on estimate, that is an eighth, so you have to imagine this playing out in pieces and parts as native americans make their land sessions from coast to coast. Between 1776 and 1887. You might guess that this plugged into the contemporary debate about who is an immigrant , or an american anyway. It went viral and crashed our servers. This is another of our early projects, u. S. News maps, this one allows you to search 11 million newspaper pages between 1789 in 1922. And, you can see on the map and through time, you can essentially watch things go viral across the United States map, in 1922. This project was awarded an award from the meh, and from the library of congress. This is my baby lately, csi dixie, it was called a beautifully conceived and profoundly mournful digital site. You dont know me, but beautifully conceived and profoundly mournful is something i would like to see on my tombstone. But, my focus today is on one of our other projects, one that is way more ambitious, it has not gotten enough attention. The website is devoted to the language of the civil wars common soldier, it is private in the sense that most of the men we are looking at our privates. All of the civil war letters on the side, and we are closing in on 10,000 have been painstakingly selected from archives across the country by my partners in crime and i have to give them a shout out, michael ellis, professor at missouri state, and michael montgomery, distinguished professor at university of south carolina. Now, i say, all of these 10,000 letters were painstakingly selected, what i mean is the letter could only be included on our site if it was written by someone who was transactionally literate, these are men and some women who learned their letter sounds but dont know proper spelling syntax, punctuation, etc. For instance, the majority of the men on our site spell family famly because that is the way it sounds, that makes sense, why not spell it that way . If you dont have your nose in the book, you spend most of your life drawing with friends, and most of these men did, so famly is good enough. I understood that abigail was in a family way, and i would be glad to come home but i cant come home, but i cant, or please tell mother that she must not trouble herself about me for i was just the boy for a good soldier, please take care of my dog and dont let my gun rest. Best respects to the family, and all requiring friends. 174th, pennsylvania, and you know that kid was drafted. Or, our people just absolutely hate the idea of the silent e , they are stupid, why bother with them . So they are married to their wif which is good enough for them. It is with the greatest of love and pressure pleasure that i drop you a few lines and answer to your letter that you sent, or, dear wife, you never said in your letter how much money you have received from me, i would like to know how much you have received from me, i want you to let me know in your next letter. Dear wife, i have more money to send, if i could get a chance to send it to you, i could send it. Or, my dear wife, i sorrow that you sorrow, i sorrow to hear that mother has been sick but i hope that god will restore her to Perfect Health again. I can say to you that i do want to see you and your dear little children, the worst i ever did in my life, may god bless you and them with the best of health, until i come home again, it is my prayer or prar. This is a little shout out to my young man at home, dear son, i take my pen in my hand to write you a few lines that will inform you that i am well, hoping that those few lines may reach and find you enjoy and the same good blessings. Or, i want to send you something good to eat, if you can get the chance, for our rations are very scanty. That is something will would write down in a text, while playing video games. I must come to a close tonight, my hand is so numb, i cannot write anymore. I want to see you so bad, sometime or another, i could say much more but it is so cold. Signed, george. One last want to complete our family, daughter, i find the gh so stupid, i love the english language but it is not logical, dauter makes so much more sense. Why not just pepper the place with silent es, and my little daughter, nora, if i was there, it would be some enjoyment, but as it is, i can only study about the loss of a daughter, and the absence of a loving and kind wife, i hope god will spare us and let us live together on earth and live in a way that we should live. So, in all of these cases, what you see is men who are using what they know, of individual letter sounds to approximate the way things should be spelled , if english made any actual sense. Okay. And this is back to my point, i hope i dont need to point out what an effort it was to assemble and transcribe 10,000 renters letters by soldiers who cant spell. You cant use a spellchecker, you cant use autocorrect, you have to get every letter right, there is erroneous punctuation marks everywhere that arent being properly used, you have to get those exactly right, too. And you can imagine, they dont have the greatest handwriting in the world, this is a great example. This is a classic of the genre. Men who are illiterate dont always have the greatest hand, not the greatest penmanship. But, for some of the men in the collection, these are the only letters they ever wrote, many have never been out of their home counties, never have been so far from home, never had the need to write. The point is, these things are scarce. I like to put it this way, in a tiny fraction of archives, there are a tiny fraction of letters like this one, this letter is like a needle in a haystack. I know michael spent a decade and a half assembling a haystack of needles. To what end . What is my point . What can we do with a haystack of needles . That is what i came here to talk about port. First, you can hear what a Civil War Soldier sounded like, essentially these men are fanatic writers, and in this case, the brother tenant is not thing ought to, he says order, we order go. That is what he writes. We saw the same thing, i mentioned jordans letter in the prior side, he spelled letter litter because that is how he says it. Same thing with the word chair, they spelled it cheer, or take this example of isaac holton, they keep a heavy guard around the night, nobody goes out nor comes in, dont know when we will draw but i hope it will be soon, but i hant got little money, nor tobacco. Now, maybe this is a truly useful but i find it interesting, and we can imagine reenactors or hollywood script writers, or maybe actors using our site to try to improve the pronunciation of the characters, how they might actually have talked. Other linguistic values, he wasnt the only man in the army that said order, instead of ought to. There are tons of other orders and litters in our archives. There is no national job market for them, they dont take a job in san francisco, that doesnt happen for them, it is absolutely true that movement west was a seminal aspect of life in that time, but these are the boys whose families mostly stayed put. That means, that is not just that they come from their home counties, their language comes from their home counties. And, that means we can map it. So in this case, what we are looking at is what is called a prefix, so im agoing , im a hurrying, these are the kinds of origins that individual authors tended to use a prefixing. So everybody does it, at least the illiterate man, they are all agoing, acoming, and it is not distinct to either the north or the south. This one is writing to me, howdy , that is something that is more often said in the south, they didnt say howdy partner, like hello, it is a contraction of how do you, so i hope we will get together again, so i give howdy to all of the blacks and whites. This one surprised me. I didnt realize pronouncing creek into crick was so northern at the time. That is what our data reveals. This one is something many of you may be familiar with, dixie is what the north called it, so all of our letter writers that used the word dixie are from the north. Do you use this . Is this a word up here . It means late morning, essentially, but it is truly a northern phenomenon, even a pennsylvania phenomenon. This is a northern one, too. Gain, for us, if we are gaining weight, that is not a good thing, the average weight was 143 pounds, i dont know about you boys, but i left 143 a while ago, the average weight of the american male is now 200, but they are pretty lean, and when somebody is gaining weight, that is a good thing, but again, it was a northern one. These are ones that i cant figure out, maybe you can help me. So, when using the word fairly, it tends to be in the north only the word middling. For example, our grub is middling, that is what they used in the north, especially here in pennsylvania. They dont use it in the south. They have a comparable term, which is tolerable, meaning rather somewhat or fairly. The south uses the word connection for kinship network, and the north doesnt use it at all. They dont use the word connection. Give me respect to all of the connection, or the right to meet where all of our connection is. It is something that southerners tended to use only. Since it is fathers day, i thought i could finish with a section on regionalism by looking at what people called their fathers back in the day. Honestly i would have thought that there was no southern word then daddy, i hear that a lot in georgia, and it is more so then we see from this, but it doesnt hold a candle to the use of the word pap. That word has ruled the age of the 19th century, this is confirmed by google, if you look at the word, it is running stronger through the 1900s, and it is only relatively late that daddy comes on as a term. Again, because it is fathers day, i will give you one more, that is the word father running at the top, that is a very formal word, and ingram is a very formal body of literature, so i would discount that altogether. But what you are seeing here is that poppa was running much, much stronger until relatively recently. And dad only had quick gains in the lower line only in the last few years. So there is a shout out to mine. Other linguistic values, looking at the emojis, everything that we have talked about so far, you might say, okay, it is interesting but, who cares . I spent a lot of time thinking about Civil War Soldiers, i like the idea that we might get to hear from them, i like thinking about how they talked but some of you might say, you know, i dont think the battles of gettysburg has to do with what these boys called their daddy. Fair enough. This is a way of looking at a way to measure the impact of the war, it is the impact they leave on a language, and novel circumstances and experiences, all of them demand elasticity and expression. So, why not ask what impact it had on the language . Okay, one of the classic examples is the word skedaddle which basically didnt exist anywhere on the earth, and by 1862, it was in every americans mouth. For all the years, i have never seen a curve that steep to be looking at lower left, it is just overnight, everybody has been talking about skedaddle. Lets ask why. Why wasnt the word invented before . It is not like 1861 was the first time an American Army got routed, George Washington ran away a lot, one of the soldiers described the battle in this way, i cant describe the confusion and horror of the scene, men running in every direction, and everywhere we turn, we meet the british, men up to their knees in mud, screaming for help, everybody else running to save their own skin. I would skedaddle. Everyone knows exactly that is what a skedaddle looks like. But, he didnt know the word then when he recorded that, and nobody invented anything like it until 1861. I can think, maybe the bull run , perhaps, that is one heck of a skedaddle, and the scale of the American Army, it makes retreat seem less personal, more like a pandemonium, like an entire city evacuating at once. But my larger point is what the soldiers did with this neologism. In the first two examples, the rebels have possession of this town, and because we have skedaddled essentially come in the second example, we have been skeddaddling for days. This is what the common soldier would do with that word, dan morehead had skedaddled. If we would stay, we would have a full battery, but after they get their bounty, most of them will skedaddle as many have done. So, what you are seeing them doing is essentially appropriating a military term to create a synonym for desertion. They do this a lot. Civil war soldiers had a love for taking the terry terms and making them ridiculous. So the synonyms were desertion and there are many, half of them are repurposed military terms, so all of this means is desertion, i am going to take a brocade, i am going to break the guard, this is their argot, remember, these men are transitional illiterate, many of them cant write pretty well, that doesnt mean they arent creative in the way that they use which, they are facing a dire reality and they need an argot to match, that is what you see them doing. It is a lot of work. And, they are making a demand on us in some ways, in the way that they write. They did this with other military terms, the idea of being a high private, there is no high private but for a man who sorta wants to comically claim that he has dignity, he is a high private, and he is proud of it. For him, that is as good as it gets, that is the highest thing in the army. Or the kentucky quickstep, that is the synonym for the trot, or bodyguard. They are taking this military terms and they are applying them to an experience that is really about desertion and pain and indignity and trying to make some kind of meaning, trying to reclaim some kind of dignity from that. Actually, they did this not just with military terms, anything they wanted to take the air out of, and they wanted to take the air out of everything, and they would do it. We all talk about the elephant, we dont really examine it that much, the dominant metaphor of getting a taste of battle, doesnt it mary this sort of weird error with your serving idea that the whole word is an obscene circus . Or lesserknown terms, i have seen the monkey show. And i did not enjoy 6 april as i have enjoyed some sundays. Hes talking about shiloh, the great bloodbath, i didnt enjoy it as much as i have enjoyed some sundays. I saw the monkey dance. I have seen this before. This kind of ironic minimizing and misdirection. I call it surrendering to the fatal absurd, and attitude that amounts to, i am dead anyway, so bring it. As for me, i made up my mind to die, it made things seem easier, in the circumstance, there didnt seem to be anything else to do. As soon as he got past that point, the rest is gravy. His time went a lot easier. But, you see that in the civil war, too. I had been living in hopes that they would do something, but they have been talking about it for so long, and i cant see that they have done anything, so we have given up to the idea that we have to fight until we are killed. Same idea. Same notion. Same conclusion. If i hadnt been a student of the civil war, i would have been a student of world war i, there is an old argument about world war i, which i accept, the inexplicable definition of eight many people actually has a cultural effect. So, the argument that paul makes in great war and modern memory is that world war i was the midwest of the moderns, it destroyed the victorian time and gave birth to irony, a new age that was more wistful, less trusting, more sad. He pointed out in literature, if you go back to the greeks, all of literature is about characters that have more power than most men usually have, whether it is hercules or achilles, even into the medieval age, you are writing about heroes, men who have more power. You get to dickens, and you get to an orphan that wants a little bit more in his bowl, and the best thing that happens, he gets another bowl. And after world war i, we tell stories of men who wake up as cockroaches and worry about most just getting to work. You see it everywhere across european high culture after world war i. In art, there is cubism coming in before world war i, it becomes Salvador Dali and these nightmare dreamscapes of surrealism. You see it even in science, science will bend to culture, yes, eight many people are killed, it will. Before you have newtonian physics, the newtonian fist physics are destroyed, it becomes popularized in the notion that things are relative or sigmund freud, that we are driven by irrational urges that go back to childhood. All of that is an attempt to explain what they just did to themselves, it marks their culture, 8 million dead, that makes a difference. So, my question has always been, did Something Like this happen after the civil war . Most historians have said no. Outside of a few outsiders, men who work directly damaged by the war like mark twain, the dominant culture managed to absorb the 700,000 dead and to see their sacrifice as pure good. The lost cause, and later, emancipation as an almost