An excellent book i read in grad school many years ago. Most recently, he is the author of the thin light of freedom, the civil war and emancipation in the heart of america, published in 2017. And the 2018 lincoln prizewinner. One of the things he has done throughout his career, he has made a point to speak to public audiences. He is hard evidence that this supposedly gap between academics and public historians there is maybe a gap, but it is ever so slight. It is close in large part because of academics like professor ayres who also does a Popular Program entitled back story, which you can get on a podcast. Please welcome professor edward ayres. [applause] hello, everybody. Did you have a good lunch . I had five carrot pieces and a bag of m ms. I am fired up. I had the peanut m ms. There is little protein in there. I know you folks have been thinking and working hard about this issue. I wanted to be honest. I wanted to come here and be sincere. I owe you an explanation. I had an idea almost 30 years ago. Im still out here talking about it. It has to be some kind of record. How can it be legitimate . Peter was talking about academics. That does not really challenge anybodys idea of what our lives are like. How can someone think about the same thing for that long . If you do think about something that long, do you learn from it . That is what i want to talk to you about today. It took a long time to get to that. The thing i am talking about is the value of the shadow project. Which i mentioned as a book. A very traditional book. To get away from the computers i have used for my scholarship in the 1980s. It seemed for a brief moment it was a good idea to count stuff and fear of patterns. I have done that in the 1980s. In the 1990s, computers were. Behind us i had an idea for a modest book. I wanted to study just two counties before and after the civil war. One in virginia and one in pennsylvania. Those places had seen a lot of the war. I chose them carefully. They were nothing special. It is agusta county, virginia and Franklin County, pennsylvania right next to adams county. It was supposed to be a short book. The idea was to put the story of the civil war at a human scale in a way that students can read it. The idea was to include all of the people in the counties, soldier, civilian, women, men, and to integrate all the history and all of its different parts that engulf them. Military history, political history, social history. It was intended to tell the full story of the war for before its outbreak. The fighting, the consequences, all the way to the 15th amendment. I do not think that stacking up different chapters heres a chapter about women, heres a chapter about black people, here is a chapter about politics actually explains all the way those things work together. I chose the great valley because that is a Natural Channel for the war. It meant the people who had so much in common to their great surprise found themselves killing each other within six months after an election. How could that happen . I could imagine i could do all that in one book for two reasons. I really did not know much about the American Civil War. I had no idea how much evidence, how many stories could there possibly be for just two counties . I thought it would be a relatively i had written this other book that ended up being 600 pages long, i was tired. I thought i could knock off the civil war thing efficiently. The main thing was that it was going to be a book. That is what historians do. I figured i could do it again. Through a series of accidents, came to imagine the book as a digital database i would share with schools who were interested in showing what history looks like raw. It does not come to you as a story all shrinkwrapped. It is always millions of pieces of evidence you have to find a pattern. Then i imagined it as something new yet again. A site on something emerged after i started a project called the world wide web. I noticed how peter happened to mention that he wrote a book i read in graduate school. That will come back at some point in the future. This site on the world wide web. Within six months of the web, we had the site. The valley of the shadow then i saw the future. I knew i needed to make a cd rom because that was clearly the future. We spent years making a beautiful cdrom that came out just when nobody wanted to buy a cdrom except for maybe a coaster. We were building this. Raising money to pay graduate students. It was being used by millions of people. Years go by. The one thing ive not done is write a book. I finally started writing it. Keeping with the 23rd psalm theme, i called it in the presence of my enemies. I lucked out when i sat down to write the book. These counties were filled with great characters who had left wonderful records. There was the only parallel diaries by husband and wife throughout the entire war. In chambersburg. Him with the cavalry with United States army all over virginia. Writing down in the middle of appomattox. Gettysburgle of writing down what it was like. Then i found the largest collection of letters anywhere by a group of brothers and inlaws for the u. S. Ct. Theres an article about the valley of the shadows in the new york times. They said you wont find them, because they are filed in the next county, because the widow of one of these guys died when she applied for her pension. She filed from the county that there were hundreds of letters. They are very hard to read. I said i know there are some 22yearold eyes that will be good at reading it. The honest diary of a loyal but skeptical and honest former newspaper editor and a stanton. The only letter we have from an enslaved woman writing to her husband. Even as shes getting ready to be sold. The letters of jedediah hotchkiss. Yorkere of the new schoolteacher turned wife of a mapmaker. These letters were never transcribed. Hundreds of other letters and diaries on both sides that we found in peoples attics. They knew they were in their attics and brought them to scan and contribute. Two newspapers in both places arguing with each other everyday. As we go back to the civil war era, people argued about politics a lot and said really hard things about each other. I do not want anybody to be shocked when they understand that this is what politics in america used to be like. It is millions of pieces of evidence. I can see that a story was not merely a convenient and compelling way to explain things, but a story explains things that analysis cannot. Stories embody the historical understanding. Change, conflict, complexity. Ways of saying, that is complicated that does not do it. If you can tell a story, you can show those things happening. In a story, we can see a people of civil war america, some of them never seeing each other, some of them i to i, made each others history. Battles both sides in a constantly changes each others actions. Even before the battle begins. Prided the confederacy the u. S. In ways it cannot anticipate. Did the democrats move the republicans, so did the enslaved people push white people in the u. S. And confederacy to do things they had not planned on doing. Because we so often separate our stories into north and south, one battle to another, we cannot think that because we are looking only at one part of the story. It took a lot of trial and effort, otherwise known as the runaway hundreds of pages i had written, to come up with somebody laughed. It was painful. As they confront moments like lincolns election or john browns raid. What it meant was i had two men i had to master the historiography of the civil war. I had a lot to learn. My earlier books were on crime and punishment in the south after reconstruction. Did nothing to prepare me for the density and complexity of the historiography of the civil war. One book a week since the civil war has been written about the civil war. 55,000. I didnt read all of them. I read a lot of them it felt like. Not only did i have to read about northern politics but also the complexities of secession, but also the formation and mobilization of armies. The logistics of movement and supplies. Leadership strategy and tactics. All the things you folks already know because i started at the other end of the story. As a social historian, i had to learn all of that. If you have observed it from the time you are young, that is one thing. Trying suddenly to wrap your mind around that. The men of my two counties fought in every major battle of the eastern theater. I had to learn enough about each of those things. If i could see as a word my the way through, everyone in the civil war acted in ways they thought was logical. There is no one yelling and screaming and acting on the spur of the moment. They knew what they were doing they think. Everybody did things for a reason. We can reconstruct if we go into the moment. What was i thinking, a familiar phrase in my own head. I was thinking Something Different a year ago. The civil war was a different thing in 1861, 1862, 1863 it is a different thing because people are seeing it from different angles. A lot of the surprise game because people did very logical things they knew was going to have a result they predicted. The war itself is a miscalculation. No one said, i vote award to go to four years to kill 750,000 people. No one ever did that. Instead, they are making these decisions one day at a time. We can actually know more if we forget what we know. You have to forget how it turned out and yourself in the moment at the time. No one saw the battles the way we present them in our big books. No one saw the battle of gettysburg. That had to be reconstructed. You could not see it. What do we do then . Lets pretend we were with them and what they could see was on the other side of this wall. Even if you are a general, what they could see is what is on the other side of this ridge. Following this demanding technique, i only made it up to the Confederate Movement in the summer of 1863 when i became dean of arts and sciences at the university of virginia. I had written a bunch of pages. I got us from the summer of 1859 to the battle of gettysburg. I have done the election of 1860, the mobilization of both sides of the war, dissolution of slavery, the battle for manassas and fredericksburg and chancellor bill and the marches on pennsylvania. My publisher said, lets call what you have now a book. You give me the rest later when you have a chance. I am just guessing that if you are the dean of all these people, you are not going to have the time. We did that. I said, lets go ahead and do that. I will do this thing a few years and knock it out. We will have it pretty soon do another series of unforeseen events, i became president of the university of richmond not long before the says to neil i said, being a president sounds interesting, but being in richmond during the anniversary sounds interesting. I helped establish the American Civil War museum. Who has been to it yet . Thank all of you, which is just enough for me to be impressed. And yet to admonish everybody else. If you have not been there, six years i was chairman of the board. Consolidating the museum of the confederacy. It is remarkably powerful. The largest collection of civil war artifacts in private hands in the world in building like a glass box and a story told the way you have not seen it before. I was hoping for some civil war points for that. I cannot write the book. Every summer i would say, three weeks. Im going to make some progress on this book. That was long enough to have the bandages off and get the wound throbbing again. Then it was time for orientation and welcoming kids. I joked about, i became in hors doeuvre avore. I basically lived at cocktail parties. Its hard to write a book doing that. I did that for eight years. I have no regrets. I did the meantime, i knew that if i got hit by a bus, one of my last thought be, i never finish the valley of shadows. It was not as at the world was waiting. I wanted to honor it is not that funny. They might have been. [laughter] my wife was waiting. People had worked so hard to build the valley of the shadow. It was finished in 2009. The university of virginia nailed down every link and file. It hasnt been touched in 10 years. It works beautifully. It shows we can make these things in the Digital World that will continue to work. In 2015, i finished up the presidency and went up into the country. I wrote the light of freedom. People have been nice about it. The most generous reviews using euphemisms as longawaited and even a couple, eagerly awaited rather than the inexcusably delayed or ridiculously overdue. A thin light flows unbroken presence. My dream is, i have seen other multivolume works of history in the civil war sections of every barnes noble civil war section in america. You will see these two books beside each other and you will want both of them, because you want to see the full story. Today, rather than traumatize the second volume as i have, including a total of times in gettysburg, i want to talk about what we learn from such a thing over 30 years. How has our understanding of this for changed since first decided to tackle the subject . I do not have to tell you about the revolution in Digital Media that has unfolded since the days we had to make every single tool. There were no pdf files. That didnt exist when we began. No newspapers online. No ancestry. No google. No amazon. There was a howling wilderness. It was a hard sell for a long time with people skeptical of this internet thing. Then a few of my friends in the civil war business were like, be a real historian. Let me tell you a story that will be in the new book edited about civil war graves. They asked me if i would be interested. I said, i would like to look into my own familys history but following up on the only two leads i had, which are two gravesites. One in the mountains high in North Carolina. Another in Oakwood Cemetery in richmond. The first one came from a plastic confederate North Carolina flag that unexpectedly appeared on an ancestors grave one time. I memorized the graveyard as a kid. I was that kind of a kid. I went there one day and saw this plastic fly. There was a detachable strip at the bottom with a url on it. I followed the url. They wrote back quickly and your are a great great uncle was in the home guard of North Carolina. My first thought was i was going to be one of those guys in cold mountain, those were mean guys. They said you should be very proud. He went from western North Carolina through east tennessee , where i grew up, into southwest virginia to saul saul to fill assault bill to get salt for the community. Miles in at 180 straightline. I cannot imagine what was involved in 1864 when everything was falling apart to do that. I thought that was interesting. I learned all about the county in North Carolina. I asked my grandfather why we never talked about the civil war growing up. He said son, we shot each other. That turned out to be the case. The two ancestors i had were on the confederate side. From the same mound community, he enlisted early in the war the same mountain community, he enlisted early in the war. He died in a richmond hospital er mechanics bill mechanicsville. A great uncle of mine had compiled a genealogical packet including a transcription of a letter that his older brother wrote back home about watching him die in this hospital. I said i would like to conduct exhaustive Archival Research and find out who this anonymous young man was. I want to find out where he was buried and tell the story of the Research Takes to find out such a thing. You wrote me back four minutes later to say he had already found the grave on ancestry and had a picture of it online. Research that would take a long time and would have given me something to have written about took no time at all. That is part of this digital revolution. We can now know more about the civil war than we possibly could when the valley of shadows began crawling out of the primordial ooze of the Digital World of the 1990s. We have a whole new landscape to explore. One reason it took us 14 years, there is so much evidence then we can possibly imagine. People sometimes say, have a new what there is to learn . We have barely begun because of this digital revolution. The valley is still around having survived all the meteors and Climate Change those decades of the Digital World. I have to admit that noncommercial and scholarly innovation, it is not moved as fast as i dreamed. We do not have digital books to take advantage of that. People are doing interesting and useful things. There is the kind of promise we see. I am still involved. I want you to check out a couple things. Peter mentioned back story, which is a podcast. The other thing is american panorama, which is a digital atlas of American History. It is really beautiful. The other is called bunk, i am from buncombe county, thats where the phrase bunk came from. It became known as bunk. My title is from henry ford who says history is more or less bunk. The whole point, no it is not. It is a realtime cure ration of everything written about the United States every day in all media. Check it out. Bunk history. Org. After 30 years, we are still at the beginning of that digital revolution. It is going to be fascinating to see where it takes us. The civil war is undergoing its own changes. I was disappointed and a little surprised actually to see i did not settle every issue associated with the coming of the civil war in my first book. People are still writing about that even though i figured it all out in 2003. People keep having their own ideas and arguing about them. One of the goals was to explains explain a secession and immobilization of the u. S. Against it in a way i had not seen it, showing how the crisis of the union proceeded on both sides from one step to the next, leading to an outcome no one predicted or desired. It is not that a conflict over slavery was unavoidable, but the conflict did not have to follow the course it did. I say the American Civil War was impossible, it just happened to have happened. We are in such a rush to explain it with one quick answer to put it on Railroad Tracks to put it on affymetrix that we lose the moment. This may be because of living in virginia. It took virginia longtime to decide to secede. After Sout