Heres how the structure is going to work. Im going to give very brief introductions for the poor people who are sitting here at the table with me, and i will do all of them at once. And then im going to go in the order in which the 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. And they will talk for a little while about the image and then well see where the conversation goes after that and at the end, youre going to be able to have some questions. Very briefly, let me introduce everybody up. I will start with Carol Reardon was a professor of American History at penn State University. We tossed together for a long time. Shes the author of one of the first important books on civil war memory, especially the military side of it in many ways. Hand, therd in one problem of military thought in the civil war north. And she is a coauthor with tom mosler of two field guidebook to the battlefield gettysburg. Line is everett ayers, a professor of humanities and president emeritus of the university of richmond. He and i were longtime colleagues, he was there when i went, it was a delight to be there with him. His most recent publication, as you know, is the thin line of freedom the civil war and emancipation in the heart of america which won the 2018 lincoln prize. Of southernsor studies, Louisiana State university and the author from todays program, most recently of the calculus of violence, how americans fought the civil war. And to my far right is steve barry, professor at the university of georgia, author or editor of six books, among them house of Abraham Lincoln and the tots, a family divided by war. And the book of essays that has had a Significant Impact on what goes on in our world. Now im supposed to deal with this. There is the dust jacket of the book. Im going to say right now because i am proud to do so, that all of the images in this book were taken by my son who is a photographer in austin, texas. A wonderful opportunity for will and need to spend a good deal of time together exploring this place, it was a great joy to work on this book with him. Now that i have gotten that out of the way, we are going to start. I will start with steve. His essay leads off the book. Inside an image of the of the church on the battlefield. Steve, i will ask you the two questions i said i was going to ask, why did you agree to be part of the project, and why you selected this place . But before you do that, i really almost forgot to tell you where this book came from. I need to do this particularly because i want to give credit to the coeditor of the book with me. We did an earlier book called lands 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 couldnt, he had too many obligations. Matt and i edited that book, it did very well. The university of Georgia Press did a beautiful job with it. In subsequent conversations, matt and i talked about something that we might do as a followup, and matt had the idea of asking a of our friends and other senior scholars if they would think about one Place Associated with the civil war, a very distinct place, not a great battlefield, not all of gettysburg, not a city. 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 want to these essays which would run to about 10 pages to be as personal as they wanted them to be. You could come added as a scholar or you could come at it on a much more personal level than that. But the idea was to find people who had a place that would make them want to take the time from their very busy lives. These are mostly many senior people with a great many things on their plates. We are asking that the do something that is not going to make their Bank Accounts any better whatsoever, so they are doing it as a favor because they think there is something really useful in this. When wey to say that put together our list of potential contributors, not one person turned us down. Idea. S really matts we talked about various things we could do, but he said how about getting people to focus on one place, and that is what we did, and now that is what will talk about. I apologized for being cumbersome. Not at all, i was delighted to get the invitation. The point that kerry makes was the one that came home to me quite quickly, how personal this is. If you are an academic, often times too often, you are in an ivory tower, saying why something is important or needs to be important to everybody, and you dont get to confess what something is important to you. You dont get to return to your headwaters of what made you want to be a historian in the first place. Things like that, this was an opportunity to do that, to return to what you care about personally, to write about it in the i voice. I love that idea. When i thought about what i choose, for some reason i thought about the fact that w ars are fought outside but made inside. They are made in the u. S. Congress, kitchen tables. They are made in state legislatures. That is where work is made. They get fought outside. I thought about how we could do an interior and almost immediately i thought of 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 that the civil war of the civil war have their own stories. Like the Founding Fathers of the xmen of the revolution, each one of them has a different power. Yankee ingenuity. Iny have these personalities the way that they get enshrined in our story, and gettysburg is a great test. But shiloh is this loss of innocence. And the thing about Shiloh Church is that it was formed by a separatist, a separate methodist congregation, so it starts in 1851. They left a church named union to form this proslavery church and then that church is in the middle of every aspect of the battle. Hospital ands a the headquarters of both armies. Then it is destroyed. Mostly to take relics. People traveling to the battlefield want a piece of it, so the church was all but destroyed. And so they rebuilt it. In 2001. My favorite part of this process was actually working with will and asking him, this is what is in my head, and i want this church to be a place where you dont know if everybody left or if everybody is about to come in. The light is coming in the window because the sun is setting or not. It would look like a place of possibility where maybe we would make a war, or maybe we would. And he just got it. It is such a beautiful picture. It is really a fantastic process. I am 46 inches from this thing. [laughter] one of the more rewarding things i have done as an academic, and it was just a treat to be involved. Im next. Your next up. I said yes because this sounded like a lot of on, to be honest. To be honest, not everything we do is just fun. I had made annapolis many years ago. I work in the valley of the shadow that he talked about, i thought i knew enough and blundered my way into saying well, i can make the maps for this was that oxford published. That took a lot more energy than i anticipated. Turns out, i am not a cartographer. In the process of doing that, i spent a lot of time thinking about how we might tell stories or even make arguments for things other than words. We are trained as historians to write, we read and we write and we know how words work and we understand evidences and paragraphs and chapters. Imagery has a whole different grammar and structure to it. It took me a long time to figure that out, which is why although im proud of the atlas,. Images are not frame and put on your wall beautiful. Abouthad been thinking geography and about place, so this idea of not just the photograph that we all know from gardner and brady and the other people, but to sort of commission something new that required that we think seriously about what things look like, which we dont get. Most of us in graduate school dont get a lot of training in visual material. We have a great panel here on material culture. Anthropologists and other people get trained to do this, and i think some of us learn our way into it, thinking what a picture does and how it picture works to convey information. It interprets the thing it is representing. Were much more natural with text. I took it as an interesting challenge and so the picture and the essay that i wrote, this is looking back, mostly looking south down toward the city, but roughly where a lot of the installations were. Asks the title, high ground of hindsight i wanted something that would get a reader into the argument about hindsight and confederate defeat and inevitability and to try to challenge those. Alluded to this when he was talking about the likelihood of slavery going away in 1860. There was a time when historians presented a picture of a self driven to a south driven to anxiety, that fear of the collapse of slavery. I think most people appear would suggest that is not a very reasonable interpretation of people who felt quite confident in what they were doing, and of the way they constructed their society and what your future looks like. Presented as a place of defeat, the linchpin in the gettysburg andin vicksburg and it is that religious, but arguably vicksburg is the more important one. 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 to them what looks like an impregnable position, a preposterous this of imagining a union that would mount an offensive records somehow conquer this place that they called the gibraltar of the confederacy. And so the picture, at least right now, you imagine the picture taken on july 4, 1863, might help us get into the mind of those people who let the confederacy, who led the Southern States out of the union and into a new nation, that they anticipated would survive and thrive and flourish. End, but thathe is not what they knew. Difficult f the hindsight is a very useful tool for us to understand things but it is also a super powerful drug and i tell my students you have to dose yourself very carefully with that because the more you take, the more it is impossible to think your way out of the possibilities and the potentialities of what history shows. And so i hope this pulls us back from that a little bit. You can see that there is a real variety of pictures from the animate interior of steves which has different kinds of cameras and lenses, and we asked thoughts on his this project at the end of the book, which he did. And he talked about some of the images and some of the challenges and what he enjoyed and what was difficult, but he used a drone, as you can tell, to get this one, the kind of perspective. Range ofa very great book,of images in this and we will move on to the third one, and i will and you. Parten i was asked to be of this, it was very easy to say yes because gary did not give me the opportunity to say no. [laughter] but that is perfectly fine when it comes down to it. But as i began to think about it, as soon as i came to penn state back in 1991, i started doing programs on your gettysburg. I started doing staff rides down your gettysburg. I built my retirement home here in gettysburg. It should be the easy for me to pick my backyard is my favorite place and go from there, except he gave me one requirement, i couldnt take gettysburg. Yes you did. You really did. But of course, that presents a new challenge. If not my backyard, where . Steve alluded earlier to what got us started, that foundational moment. If we were allowed to pick not just a place connected with the civil war, but also civil war it is just that flash of inspiration that you get. How many of you in the audience are from the pittsburgh area . I saw a steelers churn around here. Some of you have been to a place called soldiers and sailors memorial hall. It is in the oakland section of pittsburgh, on the outskirts of the university of pittsburgh. A very busy area, lots of traffic, except one large block where there is a lot of open, green space and a lot of openness. The Little Island of silence in an otherwise very busy place. How did i discover it . The easiest way to describe it is baseball. My grandmother was a pittsburgh thates fan and the bus would take us back home from pirates games, the bus stop was in front of soldiers and sailors memorial hall. That was it. You are standing there waiting for the bus and you are looking up at this and there are a couple of large cannons right on the front lawn. And the large statues that are just getting you to come forward. I already had that little bit of a historical itch that i needed to scratch anyway, and i began to pester my grandmother to let me go in. One day she finally did. Thats why im sitting here today. Theres my foundational support. She took me in to soldiers and sailors memorial. What kind of things were in there . All kinds of things to get your mind moving. Piece of wood from shiloh, piece of wood from colts though. Piece of what with a bullet in it. You could go up and touch them, and that was cool. Those are the kinds of things that got me intrigued and got me started. But was also something i walked away from after a time some of you know that my bachelors degrees in biology. 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 on the walls around the exterior of the building, there is a north wall, east wall, westphal, but they would not name the south hall because this was, after all, a testament to the northern veterans of the pittsburgh area. Around those walls were large plaques reminiscent of the plaques on the pennsylvania memorial here. They listened, by regiment, the Allegheny County recruit in the various pennsylvania regiment. And myi had an ancestor grandmother of me find out that he was not working pennsylvania cavalry, and i could not wait to get back and find my personal connection to the civil war. My great great grandfather. I had to find him. I went and saw that working pennsylvania cavalry, i look at the plaque, i looked at every that and i found a name had the right last name, but the wrong first name. Talk about devastation. His name is there, but they got it wrong. Me off oft turned history, to be perfectly honest. Only years later, once i ended up finding this thing called the official record of the civil war, i began to learn something about this thing called research. I was hooked. That little visit to a place in the money for which was raised because the people of Allegheny County voted to tax themselves to raise the funding to do it, would reduce of 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 pop into my mind. It is as simple as that. I think i mentioned the other night, the most obvious problem of oral histories is that people remember things differently. [laughter] i have absolutely no memory of telling carol she could not write about gettysburg, and i find it difficult to imagine that i would tell carol that she couldnt write about gettysburg because i know there are many places here at resonate powerfully with you. But i will defer to you as i have good manners. [laughter] and pretend that i did tell you that. And going to skip an image we are now in richmond. I did not really have to think twice, nor were promises given or expected. I felt especially eager to be a part of this. But also anything that gary does, he does right. I thought i would try to live up to that standard. I think it is a strange image to have chosen when everybody else butthese evocative stories, i surprise myself by choosing this, and i was trying to figure out why. I realize that everything ive ever thought about the past, the gap between the old and the new, the image we had before was trapped in the past, static. South was the fourth richest economy in the world by very arrogant, thinking that they could do it on their own. And one reason they thought they could do it on their own was the industrial emergence of richmond. Waterwheel which began all the way back in the 1830s. Coming off a canal that was imagined a George Washington by enslaved people in the late 18th century, to make a canal all the way to the ohio for. Mountains, he might have made it otherwise. Suggest that virginia and the were were not bold, they not born backward looking, but they were going to be able to adapt to the modern world. The ironworks runs off the water from the james that john smith 07 oniscovered in 607 16 his way to china, made it as far as richmond and said, well, we will come back in 100 years when we have some plantations to establish. It just sat there all the time because these waterfalls were an impediment. They can see at the time that the Falling Water would be an advantage for building mills, but it took a long time for them to make their way back up. And then they imported workers from wales. It is a welsh name. Because there were not enough indigenous workers who knew how to take some of the first coal in america. Iron was also in richmond, we dont think about it being in pittsburgh. Know thathey did not they can create an Industrial Center in virginia. Then, it turns out, can you enslavedemploy or buy people to do this work . Would that be something the south would be able to adapt itself to . It turns out that, yes, you could, but not alongside the immigrants instead wanted to train their sons in the skills of our paddling and iron making. Again, these great ironies, one reason that virginia goes into the confederacy and the suddenly becoming a capital is because of this anomalous piece of that virginia is essential that the confederacy is going to make its own canon and railroads and so forth. And so, virginia goes from being highly impressive to finding itself as a target of the entire war, partly because of this wheel. There is the case where we think of something as being old and we often think of the confederacy, it is an artifact of the past, somehow finds itself trapped in the booming 19th century with all the industrialization in the north. Itike this wheel because disrupts that image. It is hard to imagine that it is all cotton fields in the south and smokestacks in the north. The other reason i do this, that ive been trying to take this whole thing and make