This is a thread devoted to the discussion of the AMERICAN CIVIL WAR (people, locations, events, books and other publications, battles, historic sites, maps, research information, urls, etc.)

Please feel free to add any and all discussion information related to this topic area in this thread.

Bentley

Here is a free open course at Yale on line regarding:

The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877 with Professor David Blight

This course explores the causes, course, and consequences of the American Civil War, from the 1840s to 1877. The primary goal of the course is to understand the multiple meanings of a transforming event in American history. Those meanings may be defined in many ways: national, sectional, racial, constitutional, individual, social, intellectual, or moral. Four broad themes are closely examined: the crisis of union and disunion in an expanding republic; slavery, race, and emancipation as national problem, personal experience, and social process; the experience of modern, total war for individuals and society; and the political and social challenges of Reconstruction.

http://oyc.yale.edu/history/civil-war-an...

I will have to check it out, thanks. The "teaching company" has an outstanding course on the American Civil War taught by Gary Gallagher. Gary, of course is one of the top CW scholars.

http://www.teach12.com/

Thanks, Bentley and James, for your contributions. We are sifting through so much material right now it's hard to add on more, but these look so worth it! The quality of freely available material on the web is just getting better and better.

Yes, there is so much; as I find some worthwhile history ones..I will add. The Teaching Company is phenomenal, I agree.

I just listened to the first lecture that Professor Bright does with the free Yale Civil War course. He does a credible job.

The lecture was titled:

Introductions: Why does the Civil War Era Have a Hold on American Historical Association

Blight made many cross references even to one of the books we covered early on by the group including some of the following:

a) The Histories by Herodotus





Herodotus

"I, Herodotus of Halicarnassus, am here setting forth my history, that time may not draw the color from what man has brought into being, nor those great and wonderful deeds manifested by both the Greeks and the barbarians, fail of their report, and together, with all of this, the reason why they fought one another."

b) Walt Whitman



Walt Whitman

Drum Taps

This is a pretty good essay on Walt Whitman, Drum Taps and Washington Hospitals at the time of the Civil War:

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~CAP/hospital...

Whitman's poem: Drum Taps

http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/waltw...

c) Drew Faust

Drew Faust



This Republic of Suffering Death and the American Civil War

d) Battle Cry of Freedom

Battle Cry of Freedom The Civil War Era





James M. McPherson

e) Hospital Sketches



Hospital Sketches



Louisa May Alcott

f) Martin Luther King



Martin Luther King Jr.

The I Have a Dream Speech:

http://www.usconstitution.net/dream.html

g) Pulitzer Prize Winning Novel - Killer Angels



The Killer Angels

Michael Shaara

Other Works/Authors that Blight mentions in Lecture One:

a) The March



The March A Novel



E.L. Doctorow

b) Ragtime



Ragtime A Novel



c) Half Slave and Half Free



Half Slave and Half Free The Roots of Civil War

Bruce Levine

d) Why the Civil War Came



Why the Civil War Came

Gabor S. Boritt (editor)

David Blight

f) Apostles of Disunion



Apostles of Disunion Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War

Charles B. Dew

g) Mothers of Invention



Mothers of Invention Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War

Drew Gilpin Faust

h) A Short History of Reconstruction



A Short History of Reconstruction

Eric Foner

i) For You O' Democracy by Walt Whitman

w.quotesandpoem.com/poems/SelectedPoemBy...



Walt Whitman

"Sail, sail thy best ship of Democracy. Of value is thy freight, 'tis not the Present only, the Past is also stored in thee." This America, this thing called America to him is the whole world's new beginning. "Thou holdest not the venture of thyself alone, not the Western continent alone. Earth's résumé entire floats on thy keel! O ship is steadied by thy spars. With thee Time voyages in trust. The antecedent nations sink or swim with thee."

j) Robert Penn Warren



Robert Penn Warren



The Legacy of the Civil War

"The Civil War draws us as an oracle, darkly unriddled and portentous of our personal and our national fate"

More on Blight's Lecture One:

a) Henry James



Henry James

b) Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas



Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass



Frederick Douglass

c) The Confederate War



The Confederate War

Lee and His Army in Confederate History



Gary W. Gallagher

d) Abraham Lincoln, Slavery, and the Civil War



Abraham Lincoln, Slavery, and the Civil War

Michael P. Johnson

e) Abraham Lincoln



Abraham Lincoln

f) Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War



Redemption The Last Battle of the Civil War

Nicholas Lemann

g) Gertrude Stein



Gertrude Stein

"There never will be anything more interesting than that American Civil War"

h) Civil War and Reconstruction



The Civil War and Reconstruction A Documentary Collection

William E. Gienapp

i) Shelby Foote



The Civil War A Narrative

Shelby Foote

j) David Blight

David Blight



Race and Reunion The Civil War in American Memory

k) DuBois



W.E.B. DuBois

Quote: "brief shining light"

Blight's Lecture One:

a) H. L Mencken

H. L. Mencken

"Never underestimate the ignorance of the American people."

b) The Peloponnesian War



Thucydides

History of the Peloponnesian War

"So Thucydides said, The people made their recollections fit in with their sufferings." They began to tell a story that reflected their own suffering. Now the 'they' here might be white southerners. They suffered. They lost. They were truly defeated, conquered. That suffering might be African-Americans. Emancipation wasn't a day of jubilee; it was an agonizing, horrible, terrible, sometimes wonderful, set of experiences into the unknown. And the suffering might be northern Unionists. About 300,000 Yankee soldiers died in the Civil War and about 650 to 700,000 were wounded. People made their memories fit their sufferings."

c) William James



William James



Essays in Pragmatism

"But I always try to remember William James' passage in one of his Pragmatism essays, an essay I think that should be required for U.S. citizenship. If I ruled the world you'd have to read this for U.S. citizenship. In it, James says, "The greatest enemy of any one of my truths is the rest of my truths." It's as though James is saying, "damn, every time I think I really know something--that's the truth--along comes some other possible truth and it screws it up." Why can't history just be settled? Enough already. If it was, it wouldn't be any fun; if it was it wouldn't be interesting; if it was it wouldn't be good for business either."

d) William Dean Howells



William Dean Howells

"What the American people always like is a tragedy as long as they can give it a happy ending."

e) President George Bush Sr.

"My favorite line in George Bush the first's Inaugural Address in 1989--and I'm probably the only one that ever bothers to remember this line or maybe the only one who cares. But Peggy Noonan wrote him a sentence. It's classic inaugural rhetoric and it comes right after the section in Bush One's inaugural where he's saying we must put the war in Vietnam behind us, it is too divisive and so on. And then there's a line where he says, "We must remember, we are the nation that sent 600,000 of its sons to die rather than have slavery." Now, who wouldn't want to live in that country? That's a great line in an inaugural address. Of course it's ignoring the fact that at least half of those people died to preserve slavery. But never mind, I mean--Do we love the Civil War because sometimes there's a lot of guilty pleasure, or not so guilty pleasure, in just loving the details of military history? And if you're one of those, fine, that's great. I had that stage, too. I will confess, if you make me. But what is all that nostalgia about for those battlefields?

f) Peggy Noonan



Peggy Noonan

BLIGHT'S TRANSCRIPT:

http://oyc.yale.edu/history/civil-war-an...

Here is another interesting looking book:



Confederates in the Attic Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War



Tony Horwitz

BTW: I noticed that this book was either loved or not by even our own readership; it does have an interesting angle.

WOW! I can't keep up!
There is a lot of material here.

Thanks for the insight into Blight's Lectures. It's interesting that Blight made comparisons with The Historiesm, and The Peloponnesian War. I have always wanted to learn more about that time period but have yet to find a book I could actually get through.

James wrote: "I will have to check it out, thanks. The "teaching company" has an outstanding course on the American Civil War taught by Gary Gallagher. Gary, of course is one of the top CW scholars.

http://www...."


Gallagher also does about a third of the Teaching Companies History of the US which is quite an interesting course.

Joe wrote: "WOW! I can't keep up!
There is a lot of material here.

Thanks for the insight into Blight's Lectures. It's interesting that Blight made comparisons with The Historiesm, and The Peloponnesian War. ..."

Luckily we are not reading any of the selections now along with everything else on our plate..but Blight covered a lot of ground in the first lecture. As I get through each of the lectures on my own, I will post the authors and the works Blight references. Some of the references are great stuff. And folks if and when they have the time can partake of these lectures free.

Our group got through The Histories; in retrospect it was not that difficult compared to Barzun (which was a great intellectual read) but one which really kept you on your toes.

I love the way Blight seems to weave history together.

Vince..I love the Teaching Company and when I get a chance; I will look at their Civil War and the South offerings. I have never been disappointed by their courses. Although there is a cost associated with it. The Yale course is free which is a real plus and it is quite good so far.

Lecture Two: Yale course

"Southern Society: Slavery, King Cotton, and Antebellum - America's "Peculiar" Region"

This the what Blight was trying to accomplish with this lecture:

Professor Blight offers a number of approaches to the question of southern distinctiveness. The lecture offers a survey of that manner in which commentators--American, foreign, northern, and southern--have sought to make sense of the nature of southern society and southern history. The lecture analyzes the society and culture of the Old South, with special emphasis on the aspects of southern life that made the region distinct from the antebellum North. The most lasting and influential sources of Old South distinctiveness, Blight suggests, were that society's anti-modernism, its emphasis on honor, and the booming slave economy that developed in the South from the 1820s to the 1860s.

http://oyc.yale.edu/history/civil-war-an...

Transcript:

http://oyc.yale.edu/history/civil-war-an...

I am trying to add both the books and the authors, etc. mentioned by Yale's Blight in his Civil War lectures.

These are from Lecture Two:

a)

Dixie Rising How the South Is Shaping American Values, Politics, and Culture

Peter Applebome

"We're going to take up this question initially of--it's an old, old, old American question--how peculiar, or distinctive, or different is the American South? That used to be a question you could ask in quite some comfort. The "Dixie difference," as a recent book title called it, or "Dixie rising" as another recent book title called it."

b) Thomas Jefferson



Thomas Jefferson

"And none other than Thomas Jefferson himself left this famous description of characterizations of Southerners and Northerners. He wrote this in the mid-1780s. He was writing to a foreign--a French--correspondent. And Thomas Jefferson described the people of the North--this was in the 1780s now, this is before the cotton boom and all that--he described the people of the North this way. Jefferson: "Northerners are cool, sober, laborious, persevering, independent, jealous of their own liberties, chicaning, superstitious, and hypocritical in their religion." Take that Yankees. But Southerners, he said, "they are fiery, voluptuous, indolent, unsteady, independent, zealous of their own liberties"--he changed jealous to zealous there. If we're doing close readings we might go into that for twenty minutes, but we're not. He's not over: "zealous of their own liberties but trampling on those of others, generous, candid and without attachment or pretensions to any religion but that of their own heart." Now we can debate what Jefferson got right or wrong there, or what's held up, but do note how he said both sides were either jealous or zealous of their own liberties. That could be an epigraph on this course, if you like, because in the end when this Civil War will finally come both sides will say over and over and over again that they are only fighting for liberty. Everybody in the Civil War will say they're fighting for liberty."

c)

The Mind of the South

W.J. Cash

"In one of the greatest books ever written on the South, by a Southerner, in particular Wilbur Cash's great classic in 1940 called The Mind of the South, he did something similar to Jefferson, although he's focusing only on Southerners here. Cash was a great journalist, intellectual historian in his own right, deeply critical of his beloved South. In fact it was Cash who wrote a book called The Mind of the South in which he argued, in part, that the South had no mind. He didn't really mean it. He said Southerners are "proud, brave, honorable by its"--The South is "proud, brave, honorable by its lights, courteous, personally generous, loyal, swift to act, often too swift, but signally effective, sometimes terrible in its actions. Such was the South at its best," said Cash, "and such at its best it remains today." Then comes a "but." But the South, he says, is also characterized by, quote, "violence, intolerance, aversion, suspicion toward new ideas, an incapability for analysis, an inclination to act from feeling rather than from thought, attachment to fictions and false values, above all too great attachment to racial values and a tendency to justify cruelty and injustice."

This looks like an excellent Civil War site:

The Civil War Preservation Trust

http://www.civilwar.org/

There is a wealth of information here including videos, etc.

Bentley wrote: "This looks like an excellent Civil War site:

The Civil War Preservation Trust

http://www.civilwar.org/

There is a wealth of information here including videos, etc. "

I have belonged to the CWPT for years and am just delighted how they have used private funding (donations) to purchase land on CW battlefields that has come up for sale and would have been lost to industry or other housing projects.

Yes, James..this looks to be a worthwhile and terrific organization.

This is a collection of essays from the archives of the United States Senate which recorded all of the papers during the Civil War and Reconstruction:

Civil War and Reconstruction: 1851-1877

This collection of brief essays describes important events and personalities in Senate history, and highlights recurring themes in the Senate's institutional development during the years of Civil War and Reconstruction, 1851 to 1877


http://www.senate.gov/pagelayout/history...

An excellent account of the Civil War from the Union's best general is The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S Grant.[b:The Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, both volumes

Yes, I just listed the ten best memoirs on the conversation thread. And that one was mentioned. Have you read them...I haven't as yet.



Here is a little bit about it:

http://www.time.com/time/specials/packag...

Yes, I did read Grant's Memoirs. Very readable. I highly recommend it (as did Mark Twain, too).

I just finished Harry Stout's Upon the Altar of the Nation A Moral History of the Civil War

It is the most opinionated history I have recently read. He thinks that everybody, and I mean everybody, during the American Civil War was immoral except for George McClellan. Thus the war was immoral on both sides. He compares the Union actions in the South with the Nazis in the concentration camps, they may have been harsh, but come on. I had a very hard time finishing all 461 pages, but my anger pushed me on to the end.

I'll have many more Civil War reviews on great books.

Thanks John...we look forward to your posts and your reviews on Civil War books.

It sounds like Harry Stout had an ax to grind..why was George McClellan exempt? I think his analogy does go overboard. Is he a Southerner? Some folks still feel harshly about the war and the fact that they lost. It is a shame that the country was pushed to the brink of disaster like that (terrible for both sides).

Harry S. Stout

We try to add the covers of the book (more colorful and exciting and the author's photo (if available)..if not the link to the author's page.

John, sometimes a book just galls you and somehow we have all been taught to finish what we start! I can assure you that Barzun was not that upsetting (smile).

What made you pick up Stout's book in the first place? Did somebody recommend it to you? Always curious how a book is so diametrically opposed to one's point of view. I guess it would be like me picking up an Ann Coulter book again after I had that experience. Not. So I guess you will not be reading Harry Stout again?

Bentley

Note: Drats I had to mention Ann Coulter and I hate giving her any press - but rules are rules - she even has a photo - oh dear
- I know she has her supporters so I will be quiet now.

Actually Stout is a respected religion professor at Yale.

I have read much on the Civil War and so I picked this one because looked like an interesting take on the war. Most of the other stuff I have read has been either military or political and I thought it might be a new viewpoint.

Probably my biggest problem was his continual search for a "just" war in highly absolute terms. He tried to separate the reasons for going to war and the conduct of the war, but I feel that one cannot really separate the two.

I'm learning to use the system and will try to use book covers when available. Keep reading.

Well that is surprising then - you would think his viewpoints would have been vetted by editors.

Your rationale was a great one - you were looking for an interesting slant which might be a different or a new perspective.

Well I might disagree with that point. Someone in leadership can have a noble ideal for going to war (save the Union, free the slaves, protect the country from adversaries, stop terrorism)...but then how the plan gets executed by people very far removed from the decisionmakers can be a different thing. All war is immoral; it just is. But when you have to defend yourself, I guess then you have to decide to do the moral thing and protect the ones you love and your country or not. It really is a dilemma...how do you make a moral decision about an immoral thing. Sometimes the decision is taken out of your hands - the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. But many times it is not that simple. I admire those so much who defend us (our military)...they make these kind of decisions every day and that cannot be easy.

There are no just wars; wars are wars and there is killing on both sides; but the reason for being there and/or involved can be quite noble.

However, if one faces the choice of being killed or protecting oneself and others..that is where a moral decision comes in.

And I have to say though leaders have had to make the moral decision to go to war whether it be to protect the country during the world wars or for other reasons, there seems to always be a moral decision made; so I thing what I am saying is that it is hard for a war to be termed moral; but the decision to go to war can be based on a moral decision. When you have to protect yourself; you have a just cause and a moral perogative at the same time.

It is a tough conflict; no matter how you look at it. I wanted to add a bit more; I personally am not a pacifist but I don't like war and wish there were alternatives. There could be pacifists in the group and I respect that point of view and belief too.

When I visited Verdun just recently...it was just so difficult a place to be..it was hard to find any justification for what those men had to endure..sad, sad, sad.

I tried to make the response clearer...hope I succeeded. If I didn't let me know where you think I went wrong. War is a tough subject to discuss.

Bentley

Thanks for your thoughts Bentley.

Another thing that gets me is that it is so much easier to start wars than to end them. Each side keeps fights it seems so that their soldiers "did not die in vain." When in reality they all may have died in vain.

That's why I always liked the suggestion made to end the war in Vietnam: Just declare that we had won and come home.

I started reading war history in an attempt to find out how people could do what they do to each other. I wasn't thinking of the leaders, but of the soldiers. Wars like the Civil War where the soldiers had to look the enemy in the eye were even more difficult for me to comprehend. I don't think I'll ever find out. I'll keep reading trying to find out.

You are welcome.

I felt that way when I saw Verdun.

I have done the same thing..what was the decision making process - what worked, what didn't, why did things work out the way they did. And of course...the soldiers - how do they do what they do. How do they muster the courage and fortitude to face this day in and day out. Now that is what I call a decision - waking up each day and having that great courage.

It is really hard to say and even if these men were sitting here now...they might not know themselves.

Another great book to look at is This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War
Drew Gilpin Faust

It is an exhustive look at the subject, especially the search for the "good death." The "good death" validated the soldier's existence to both the country, the soldier, and the soldier's family. It allowed for the country, the family, and the war to continue to some conclusion.

Why on earth did he think Little Mac (of all people!) was exempt from a general sea of immorality?