Transcripts For CSPAN3 The Civil War Teaching Abraham Lincol

CSPAN3 The Civil War Teaching Abraham Lincoln And The Civil War March 11, 2021



now as they turn on their cameras and unmute. and the way i wanted to start this off is actually to have each of our panelists introduce themselves to you, rather than have me read along introduction for each person. and i want to have them talk about how they became interested in the american civil war, where they teach, what sort of classes they teach and how they think about teaching a lincoln and the civil war. we have jack davies coming in here and will have jackal first and then will have kerry go second and then tamika and then craig and then i will bring up the rear. so let's see, jack, if you can unmute yourself and turn on your camera. go right ahead. >> i was born in independence, missouri which is pretty much on the fringes of the civilization, prior to the civil war and of course it's the center of what was a very different sort of war. as a result of which, my grandparents, it was still a fairly lively topic of my conversation. my grandmother's grandfather -- and my grandfathers grandfather had been a confederate soldier in virginia, who died in the war. so they were kind of still at it a little bit but that's all marriages. from that to some sort of self definitions that they were throwing out, who are the people out in that region at the time we referred to has jayhawkers and red legs, border trash, that sort of thing. so gary gallagher -- i am border trash and i am proud of it. around the age of 12, my grandfather had a copy of a book, this is a hollow ground. i don't know why, i happen to read it. i think i got fascinated by the maps first. and that kind of sucked me in. and of course, this is just about the time that the civil war sentinels taking place, by which time i was living in california, which is kind of a long way from anywhere related to the civil war. i got interested in genealogy, i didn't wait until i was 80, i started it as i was a teenager. i found out to the had a number ancestors involved in the war. it gave me an interest in finding out what the experiences were and that they had gone through in their lives. and then they serve a eureka moment for me. we always knew that there was an ancestral piece of equipment from a yankee grandfather who was my great great grandfather who was a cattle heard there. but i had never seen it. and one day in california, opening a box that i had never been through, i came across this. this is the great great grandfather's cavalryman's pistol pouch, his pencil from marking his belongings and a photograph of him. you can tell from the photo, but he was a corporal. people in my family are always destined for high office. and somehow, that piece of physical make trickery culture really grabbed me. and the interest really kind of began to explode from that. i never waited in the academic world, in lists at least until -- lockers primarily and publishing, for about 21 years. the magazine called civil times. which gave me a wonderful opportunity to study for everybody, not just one professor. until i got to know the wily, but robertson, mary elizabeth massie, jean oak franklin, and i just spent time with all these wonderful people, all through my publishing days. and also, i enjoyed the popular historians, who were not academics. alex haley, tucker. which i think helped get me some insight into what the popular mind and the popular imagination was interested in and wanted to see and understand. so i had an extraordinary sort of path to reach the civil war and one problem, may even be unique, i don't know. but at every point, it really helped to get me a deep sense of fascination of the people of those times, the crises they went through and the means by which they try to continue. >> great, thank you. carey, how about you? >> hi, thanks don for inviting me to be part of this wonderful panel with so many people that i am fond of. so, like jack, in some ways, i think it was where i was from. i grew up in the shadow valley, and surrounded by civil war battlefields, civil war fights, less than two miles from my home where my parents still live. there was a bridge that jackson had burned, so i was everywhere in the valley and my grandfather, he was a world war ii veteran, a marine in the fourth division, took me to battlefields, took me to gettysburg and he was a curry -- gracious reader of anything civil war. my parents likewise took us to harpers ferry and other historic sides, like williamsburg, that's what we did as a family. so i always had his interest in history. certainly never thought i would end up teaching history. i was going to law school, that was my path until my fourth year, i took a pass failed class by this guy named ed air and everything changed at that moment when i realized that i could do this and not just be a lawyer. so that was my path to the civil war. >> that's great. and you teach at the university of virginia. the director at the civil war history museum. and you did your undergrad and graduate work at uva. i return >> a return to uva, spent 12 years at purdue, then i'm back uva and teaching courses on both the civil war and civil war memory among many other courses. >> great, thanks. to me commonly. >> john, thank you so much for having me. i am very excited to be a part of this panel. so, my interest in the history of the civil war also started with family tradition. my family is has fought in every war since the civil war and i just comes from a military family. my father was it in the military and was in charge of the african american cultural club when we lived in england and so we read a lot of history books, and a lot of biographies and so that's how i became very interested in history. so when i went to uva and i always warned my students when they are applying to graduate schools and if they are applying to uv in particular, you think you're going to study one thing and i came there with the intention of stunning 20th century hunched three and of course, now i'm a 19th century specialist and i think that, you know, when you go to a place like uva and you get this study like with people like gary gallagher in carolyn cheney, you can't help but be sort of pulled into this world. that's where all the cool kids are. and so, i ended up having a lot of questions and kind of our general american survey about where were black women during the war. i assume that many of them were not necessarily soldiers but how are they responding to the developments of war? and it's the through that sort of line of questioning that i became very deeply interested and very experiences as refugees and freed women during the war. >> great. and you are at oberlin college now. >> i am, yes. >> and you made a very important point, to make a, about the civil wars where the cool kids are because that's a great leeway to craig simons, who has moved more world war ii but we're gonna bring you back to the civil war today. can you tell us a little bit more craig about what you've taught over the years? >> that's my i was -- but tamika, you and i had a reverse circumstance as john mentioned, i have been in the civil war for 40 years and i kind of beat me up a little bit and i'm doing a lot of world war ii stuff now. but i have been interested in history since i can remember having a conscious thought. and to a certain extent i, think my focus on the civil war in particular like jack, it's all bruce captain's fault. and here's a guy who could take everybody to just bring it alive. i try to do that as much as i can with my students and also in my riding whenever i can. so i began thinking and reading as much as i could about the civil war but grew up in california, about as far away from a civil war battlefield as you can get, if you're not in hawaii. but also to tie in with what caroline had to say a few minutes ago that when i finally got east and we had our own son, that's how we spent our vacations, going to civil war by katie battlefields. far from convincing him that he should be a civil war historian. i think he decided he could get as far away as he wanted from that. he does teach in california but he teaches literature, so he's not into that at all. but i think bruce is probably the short two word answer to what first promoted my answer into the civil war. and i ended up teaching it for 30 years of the united states naval academy which i will argue is the best job in america. >> that's great. i was thinking about this last night, the first civil war book i ever read was jack davies is -- and what i read that when i was in middle school. and i had him sign it for me a few years ago. when i started college at ten state, it was gary gallagher's last year there and he was teaching a number level courses that i wasn't able to take but i would go into his office and try to talk to him about the civil war. and i remember, as i began to make the transition from being a business major to waste three major, i want to take gary's office and i told him i wanted to be coming history professor. and he said, let me give you some advice. get a real job and do history on the weekends. i don't know if he gave that advice to anyone else. it was very good advice, but i'm very glad i didn't take it. i teach american studies at christopher newport university, and so i don't actually teach the civil work last year, but i do teach a lot of lincoln speeches in the different classes that i teach. so, craig i want to start with you and i -- you've had a long career teaching in the annapolis and now in rhode island, can you talk a little bit about the changes you've seen over the course of your career in terms of anything that jumps out at you. your students recourse content? >> that's an interesting question. first of all, i do teach at a rather unique institution, keep in mind that the u.s. naval academy is not virginia, high state or princeton or perdue. my students all wear uniforms. everybody comes through every class, nobody is late. when i walk in the room, they come to attention. so that probably doesn't happen a lot in some of your classrooms. and they're almost universally really bright. that doesn't change. they were bright when i began teaching there in 1976, they were bright when i left there 30 years ago. to do other things. one of the things i did note though is increasingly, i think they are burnt -- without a great depth of factual knowledge. and i suspect, without any specific proof of it, that some of it comes from the fact that most of them took advanced placement, high level courses in which he resume, i don't need to teach you things, you could always look up things. let's think deep thoughts and consider them, which is a great thing to do. but often leaves vast look who none of emptiness, particular of sequence, of chronology and particularly of geography. i remember being shocked fairly early on when i was teaching at the naval academy, handing out a blank map of the united states and asking them to find places -- some of them confront the state of south carolina. which began to giving me a geography quizzes in our history class, to which one of my colleagues responded, geographies about maps. histories about chaps. but i kept doing it anyway because i help them picture things. in fact, when i got into this section of the course where i did military maneuvers, i put a map up on a white board by projection, and then used colored markers to follow the movements around and they seemed to find that quite enlightening. so that's one way, and here is one other way i think things change over the 30 years that i thought there. thinking about what i would say today in our conversation, i went down to my basement and pulled out some cold great books and shocked myself to discover that the late 1970s, my course average, this is for an upper level course, an elective course that history majors took. my average grade was 2.3. 25 years later, it was 3.5. now, i don't think they caught much that much smarter. maybe i got that much easier. i just think that's the way our whole curriculum has moved in the time between the mid seventies from the end of the 20th century. so there are a couple of ways that it has changed. >> that's interesting. grade inflation, a perennial topic of discussion and department meetings. carrie and tamika, i want to ask you both. what has been your experience in recent years in terms of your approach to teaching the civil war. has it changed in the last couple of years? or has it changed this semester in the wake of the tumultuous summer of 2020 with the broom of george floyd and protests in the streets? >> i'll start. so, two things. one is in my civil war memory class, because we look at the way in which the war has been remembered, interpreted, celebrated, we couldn't keep adding verbs there. from the war forward in the past, i've been teaching this course now for 15 years and i used to concentrate primarily on the 19th century, looking at the veterans and other aspects. literature, you were talking about -- i always teach the important tint and the mortar,. but overtime, i have increasingly added more about the 20th century. this, year i brought it all the way up to 2020. so our last class focused on what happened this past summer and what is continuing to happen. so that's one way in which that course has changed. but i will say, i was still at purdue when charlottesville happened. or august 11th and 12th, 2017. and i was really narrative to go into my classroom that fall and teach about the civil war. in hindsight, i'm not sure why i was, but i was. and i re-wrote that opening lecture to make it more about why studying the civil war matters more today than it ever has. and i've continued to modify that opening lecture as i teach. i've also done more. i've added more debates, my students really seem to like debates, we added a debate on who freed the slaves. and they get assigned, they don't get the pick. they have to argue he was either african americans, union soldiers, lincoln or congress. and then we talk about why that's the case. and they ask for more debates. they want to debate on reconstruction. so the next time i teach the course, will talk about that. they also want more on impeachment now. thinking about their contemporary times and trying to understand the past. so that's a modification on the next time i teach the course. >> that's great. tamika? >> so i tend to start the civil war class, and i do teach civil war and reconstruction and i also teach an advanced seminar on the civil war era, which is more of a historic goal graphical -- but for my lecture course, i do begin with an article from james mick fearsome on how to think about civil war history and sort of a general public audience and the importance of thinking about it in terms of public history. but then i also have -- why so few blacks study the civil war? and i think that's just a really wonderful way to get a conversation started about people's proximity to this knowledge, right? i grew up loving history but i wasn't a civil war buff, right? as where in my class, i might have someone who's like a serious civil war buff and then i might have some people who love history and i may have some people who may just have no idea as to what this war was about. and so i think these articles are very great in capturing kind of the stakes on how exchanging -- i teach at oberlin and so, many of us on the call know that oberlin has a reputation, right? one that got it started in the 19th century has been very radical and progressive and i think that the students are drawn to oberlin because of that tradition and so, they are very interested in learning about various experiences, particularly the social experience, social history of the civil war and so, i think that's kind of what i bring to how i designed the course is thinking about that bottom of history. and what i like about that bottom history is that, and accounts for the lives of african americans, have people from the west, of soldiers, of women, of immigrants in ways that, really wet their appetites and sort of what their interests are in. so i think oberlin brings a unique context in itself and teaching at oberlin and how we teach anything at oberlin, and it is very interesting. but, i'm always very encouraged by the fact that so many of these students are still interested in the civil war and so, these classes, the enrollments are always high and i don't think it has anything to do with me, but i think it has something to do with his generation being very invested in its topic and just understanding the nuts and bolts of that history. and yeah, it's a fun course to teach. now, have to make adjustments for this audience because most of my students are either from the west coast or from the east coast. many of them are not from the midwest. many of them are not from the south. i even asked them to raise their hands to tell me wet if -- they've even been to the south. and i'm always just shocked at how few hands are raised. i'm, like you haven't been to the south? and so i think, just having those cultural concepts and social distinctions to come of treason and our conversations have been very useful and however approached the course. >> yeah, that's very interesting and i imagine that's true for most of you, that you have a lot of students from throughout the nation. most of my students and -- craig go ahead >> i'm just going to follow up on that because one of the things i often did when i begin a class was asked my students who are now national audience, so it brings students remarry because it's a naval academy. how many of you are from states that were part of the confederacy? many hands go straight up. thank you. how many of you are from states that were part of the union but in the north at the time of the civil war? and i get this. >> that's funny. jack, so you spent a lot of your career in publishing, but you spent ten years teaching at virginia tech. can you tell us a little bit about your experience at tech and then, you know, we just talked a little bit about the massive social changes we've seen in, social movements, we've seen in the last few months. what sort of changes have you seen over the course of your career in terms of public thinking about race or the civil war and how have you seen that affect the field of civil war studies? >> first, your question about teaching at tech. i actually spent 13 years there, but i was brought in primarily to teach research and writing seminars for graduate students. and so, i didn't actually teach the survey or the basics, which i tech was two semesters. i think it may have been the only school in the whole country. it's gone back to one semester now. now i taught that once. so i don't really have a basis for much comparison and the teaching. i can't say that the students that i had in the one year i thought that course had a very -- background. a lot of them are simply taking it because their parents or grandparents had gone to tech and had say taken the civil war corps, whether it's being taught by -- sometimes that have 300 students. and the grandfather warned that her mom said when you're there, you have to take a civil war class. then, a lot of them were disappointed because they found out that course was teaching by me. because it can be a very entertaining subject. they came with very little background. and not that many history majors. tech has a corps of cadets, rotc. over 1000. and there be a fair number of members of the core cadets taking the classes, because they might have an interest in military history. but i don't really have a basis beyond that to judge how prepared they were when i last talked, compared to 20 years before. or compared to how prepared they were today when they take that class. much of this has to do with the nature of virginia tech itself. it's not primarily a liberal arts college. all those years of publishing, a

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