Generations and minority groups. The emerging civil war blog hosted this event. It is about an hour and a half. We have a number of speakers tomorrow to speak about those specific legacies. Tonight its a night for you to ask your questions. What did the war mean . How do we still remember it . How is it still with us . Im going to toss out a couple of questions to our panel, let them answer, and then we will start taking questions from you in the audience to feed off some of the comments. Let me introduce our panelists tonight. Starting on the left of the table, chris white, a former historian with the national battlefield, a licensed battlefield guide at gettysburg. You can probably drop him on any field and he will tell you this regiment was right here and the shoe size of the colonel. [laughter] chris is also the emeritus editor of the emerging civil war book series. Please welcome chris white. To the right of him is a man that needs no introduction because ive introduced him once already tonight, dana shoaf, the editor of civil war times magazine. He has been here 16 years. One of the most fabulous and gracious editors anyone in this business could work with. Thank you for agreeing to be on our panel tonight. [applause] next to dana is matt atkinson. Matt is a little difficult to explain. [laughter] matt joins us from the Gettysburg Park where he is an historical interpreter and ranger. He has worked at pittsburgh and petersburg. He is a native of mississippi. We have asked them to be on the panel tonight because he has the coolest accent of anyone in the room. [laughter] [applause] [indiscernible] all you have to do is speak. [laughter] next is emmanuel dabney. He has an appendix in our latest series where he talks about events at wilsons wharf. He is a talented young man who has spent much time bringing attention to the colored troops, the freedmens bureau, and most importantly the energy that attracts people to a story that is 150 years old. [applause] rob is the Historic Site supervisor for Prince William county. He is in charge of a number of their various Historic Sites. He serves on the board of directors for the Virginia Association of museums, the board of director for the civil war trails, and newly elected to the board of the Mosby Heritage area, a place where as a young man he fell in love with the civil war many years ago. [applause] and finally, the foremost authority on cavalry in the civil war. He joins us tonight from columbus, ohio. He has a list of publications as long as your lanyards. Many of them are upstairs. Please feel free to take a look at erics books. One of the things that is most impressive about erics last year he served as our keynote speaker, and he said he is at a point in his career where he wants to work with younger historians to help mentor them and provide them the same guidance so many people provided him as he has been growing up in his career. We are very pleased to have eric joining us tonight. [applause] im going to start us off with a slow, underhanded softball pitch. I will ask chris to stand at the plate to start. The sesquicentennial is behind us, but the civil war is still very much with us as indicated over the last few months. With the sesquicentennial fresh in our minds, what is the takeaway for us . Chris thanks for having me. That is an interesting question posed to a Panel Last Week in new york. We were there for the 154th new york regiment Family Reunion where they have come together, descendents have come together, for the last 30 years to meet. It was an interesting mixture of people. It reminded me of the postwar coming together of the soldiers on the battlefield. It was an eyeopening experience. As we sat up there last week and i answered the same question, what came to mind to me, and i would be very interested to hear what they say to this. I would not have said this a few months ago. I thought the sesquicentennial turned out to be more of a failure than it could have been with the shootings in charleston illuminated we failed to reach a certain point of an audience maybe it is because of the Confederate Flag issue and other underlying issues that people had not tackled the sesquicentennial to the extent i thought they would have. I volunteered at many events. We would see a lot of enthusiastic folks like yourself. We would go to the next battlefield, the next anniversary, and see the same 400 people that came to the last event. We would see a sprinkling of new faces. It was interesting to see how there was a core group that kept coming out. Our blog has reached a new audience. We do see a younger audience coming in. We also see older folks come in and engage with us. I thought that was one takeaway. In may, i would have had a different answer. I was shocked to see the reactions on social media. Maybe we failed to reach a portion of the audience. It could be because of lack of funding. It could be the recession. It could be that people are arguing world war ii has become more of a hot button issue to talk about. That is something i took away from it. Maybe we failed to engage a certain part of the community to bring them in and get new blood into it. It was interesting to hear what dana had to say about that. Dana i let some other folks talk and can gladly talk later. Matt . Matt it is called the hot potato. [laughter] i dont know how to compare the 150th because i was not hear from the left for the 100th or 125th. I can tell you now that we were having a discussion today about lower visitations at the various battlefield parks. I dont know if the country will suffer from a hangover from too much civil war. I hope to see the younger crowd getting into it. Social media is going for us. Does this translate to people coming into the parks and continued interest Going Forward . That is what concerns me. In larger civil war parks that you would think would be full, i am not saying they are ghost towns but there has been a dramatic drop off in visitations. The 150th . I dont know. If you think about trying to plan an event for each park or to make everything special and differentiate between each park, how would you do that . How do you make your own site unique . I think if you judge youre going to make me say it the sesquicentennial by its merits, i think you would have to go park by park. It was a chance, to me, being in a larger civil war park, it was a chance for me to see the smaller civil war parks shine, such as petersburg which does not have the visitation i have. The spotlight in 2014 was upon them or appomattox in 2015. I thought that was the great thing that came out from the sesquicentennial Going Forward. Emmanuel i hate that the 150th was a failure. [laughter] how can we possibly take offense . We have pistols. Emmanuel i say that only because i missed the 100th because i wasnt even thought about. 125th, i was around but a little kid more interested in superheroes than being a civil war curator at a National Park. But my mom was a young adult, almost i guess, she was graduating from high school in 1965, a segregated high school in a Little County south of petersburg. She had no engagement whatsoever with the civil war, zero. She missed part of the 150th. Growing up, i realized i would not become a superhero, so i guess i needed a real job. I ended up at the civil war battlefield. It was my interest that sparked her to read and study and go with me, carry me, no child can drive. With the 150th, it brought the civil war to a Little Community in vermont who had a series of articles in their local newspaper. In virginia, many of you are familiar with the history mobile that crossed the state, went out of the state for antietam, gettysburg, North Carolina for some little event down there. It went to peanut festivals and barbecue events and political events. Where the civil war may not have happened in the sense of gettysburg with its thousands of people every day of the week, people engaged with the civil war in different ways. Maybe they did not come to the battlefield, but they read about it in the newspaper. So i think because we did not have half a Million People at each event is not the way to judge whether it was successful or not. Rob you have to figure out how you will quantify success. I say to look at how strong the Civil War Trust has gotten in the last five years. I see it as a success because of the fact so much land has been preserved. Maybe if some people today do not find interest in it, that land is there so the stories can be told. I see it as a Land Preservation success, which i think public historians are using as a goal for their research and telling stories. I have a different perspective because i spent five years as a member of the governors Sesquicentennial Commission. We were sent into a fight with both hands tied behind our backs. The museum of ohio appropriated us a grand total of 50,000 for five years. We had 10,000 a year to spend. Obviously, we did not get much done. It was frustrating. It eventually reached the point where i stopped going to the meetings because it was a waste of time. We couldnt do anything. It was not a valuable use of my time. I went off and did my own thing, as i often do. I ended up attending a bunch of different sesquicentennial events. It ran the gamut from about 40 , the day of the commemoration at five forks, of course it snowed that day, that may have had something to do with it, to 30,000 at bentonville this past march. It shocked me how many people were there. I had no expectation of anything close to that big of a crowd at a state park battlefield. They had 30,000 people on one saturday. Another 25,000 on sunday. It was spectacular. I ran out of books to sell midafternoon on saturday. I ended up volunteering at the reenactment to have something to do. It was remarkable to see the size of the crowd that went to watch this reenactment. I think it is hard to say it has been a failure. It is also hard to say it has been a complete success. I think you have to look at things on a casebycase basis. In ohio, it was a spectacular failure because we got no support from anybody. In other places like bentonville, it was a spectacular success. How do you quantify that . Lots of Different Levels or lack of support. If we are looking at different metrics of success, eric talked about selling out of books, readership, you are plugged into the Publishing Industry. What do you see as far as readership trends . Dana im sorry to say we did not see a massive uptick in subscriptions. I almost want to divorce that from the sesquicentennial because the Publishing Industry is facing a lot of challenges. I have had to take the philosophical approach. Look at the increase in the number of blogs over the past five years, and highquality blogs getting traffic. I look at them and see comments on them as well. Although we did not experience this massive uptick i was hoping for, we stayed stable which is good. Beyond that, i was with the magazine at two outreach events, the 150th commemoration at gettysburg and appomattox. At those events, i was thrilled with the outpouring of the public that came to them. I was at bentonville as well. It was also, as eric said, very well attended. There were some events really well attended. I think for some of us, the feeling of disappointment, i was born during the centennial. I kind of grew up in the afterglow of it. I was not part of that, but i remember reading about it, finding stuff in life magazines and things of that nature and looking at these massive crowds. The allowed reenactments on the National Parks at the time. I felt this was not as big as the centennial, but it is a different era. When you parse it down further, the centennial was very simplistic. Blue versus gray, lets fight the battle. I thought the sesquicentennial i said that pretty well was pretty sophisticated in the programming offered. I found it impressive the depth of presentation offered at state park sites drilling down into the social experience, the United States colored troops experience. There was a breadth to it that did not exist during the centennial. Maybe if you look at quality over quantity, we can gauge it as a success. Purely in dollars and cents terms, there is a lot more pull for the entertainment dollar now than there was in the 1960s. People have a lot more options to amuse themselves. We could go down the rabbit hole and say, how is High School History treating them people and is a capturing their emotions and making them want to study history and go to things like this . But i am afraid you would have to have an entire symposium devoted to that. I know we dont want to do that, so i will pass it back over to chris. If we agree there are many different ways to look at the success or lack of success with the sesquicentennial, that was still a good excuse to focus on the civil war. Now we dont have that excuse. Why should we keep looking at the civil war . What has happened recently in the United States, it is an unhealed country. Reconstruction was clearly a failure. A lot of us can agree with that. These are deepseated issues. It is not just the Confederate Flag. There are a lot of deepseated issues they go beyond a flag on a flagpole. There are a lot of people that still feel disenfranchised going back to the roots of the civil war and reconstruction. I think it is very interesting. Looking even in the state of pennsylvania a few years ago, we were having problems with what was being perceived as a poll tax or voters being bullied because voters had to get an i. D. Card of some sort to be registered to vote. You have this show some sort of photographic i. D. A large part of the population in pittsburgh and pennsylvania did not have those identification cards. It was like a form of voter intimidation you would see in the days following the civil war. We definitely still have those issues floating out there. That is one way of looking at it. We can go beyond the battlefield and tackle some of those issues. There is definitely Fertile Ground that needs to be tilled there in academia and public history. Eric when i am not writing history, i am a lawyer. That is how adults get paid. Unfortunately, history does not pay the bills. But i digress. One of the things that fascinates me is we are revisiting legal issues that occurred in the century prior to a half century prior to the civil war. They are rearing their ugly heads again. Nullification. How much discussion do you hear of people who are disgruntled with the fact there is someone in office who does not share their philosophy . They say we dont like that so we will nullify the laws. How did that work out the last time . Not real well. Yet here we are 150 years later having the same conversations. George was right when he said those who do not learn the lessons of history are destined to repeat them. Emmanuel i wanted to piggyback on the law end of that, we get some amendments in the aftermath of the civil war. That is the legacy that continues to pop up in legal cases. Some of them dealt with in the last cycle in the Supreme Court where you cannot ignore the constitution is dramatically different by 1875 than it had been in 1855, when all of these wonderful changes are happening in how we kill each other. There had been no change in how we treated some people. If we are going to continue, and i do think we are, someone asked me at work one day, you are young, do you think we will ever be done with race in america . No, i just dont. On one level, that is ok. On another level, it is not ok because we seem to continue to kill each other instead of talking about what is exciting about being diverse. These things are going to continue to pop up and swirl around in large part because a lot of people in certain classes of the Economic System live a much more diverse world than a lot of other people in this country. We think i know someone who is asian, poor, rich, or better off than i am. I am middleclass. I have a car, a job. I have people down the street who have adopted kids of different cultures and ethnic groups. That is not how most people are living in large pockets of this country. For them, that sort of world that this chris was mentioning is not so foreign. It is every day since 150 years ago and in the 100 years maybe before that. That is pretty heavy to follow. [laughter] rob when you look at the visitors who come to our site and battlefields, one thing we all have in common is storytelling. If you have an interpreter or guide who tells a good story, you are going to pull in someone who does not fight an interest in the civil war. I will pick on my wife because she is not here. When we go places, she can pick up a good storyteller. If a person on the civil war tour can capture her, that is a good interpreter. I think americans in general love to hear good stories. It is entertainment. A graduate professor the first day of school said, why do we study history . He said we study history to entertain people and tell good stories of what happened. The other deeper meanings come from that. I think the interest in the civil war will always be there because it is here. You can visit these places. World war ii is interesting and important, but it can be hard for us to pay for the plane ticket to fly to france or germany. You can see the stories and where they happened here. Dana is right about education. We could take a couple of days to talk about why high schools do not teach American History. That is something good teachers are working on. If the sites tell good stories, people will come because they will want to hear the stories. Matt . Matt i get the final word, fantastic. I dont know why the civil war still has meaning. Coming from mississippi, i think i can say with certainty there never been a republican elected locally since reconstructed. They are elected nationally but not locally. Youre wasting your time to run republican. In pennsylvania, you might as well not run democratic because youre wasting your time doing that. That is the legacy of the civil war that directly comes out of