Randall Stephens

In 2013 the University of North Carolina Press published David T. Gleeson's The Green and the Gray: The Irish in the Confederate States of America.  It is  a sprawling study that is already receiving high praise from historians and journalists.  In the Boston Globe Michael Kenney writes "As his analysis unfolds, there is much that will surprise, perhaps even unsettle, Boston readers familiar with the abolitionists, the Massachusetts 54th, and the summertime encampments of reenactors. Gleeson looks at the role of Irish-Americans in the Southern debate over slavery, in the Confederate Army, on the homefront, and in the aftermath of the defeat." Over at the Irish Times Myles Dungan seems to agree. "Gleeson goes well beyond the merely anecdotal," says Dungan.   Gleeson conveys "a sense of what it was to be an Irish immigrant in the southern states that formed the Confederacy between 1861 and 1865."

David Gleeson is no stranger to the subject.  He has been writing and teaching on 19th century history, the South, and the Civil War for many years now.  A reader in history at Northumbria University he is the editor of The Irish in the Atlantic World (University of South Carolina Press, 2010) and the author of The Irish in the South, 1815-1877 (University of North Carolina Press, 2001).

In the interview embedded below, I speak with David about researching and writing The Green and the Grey.  David also talks about the role of memory in the post Civil War South and discusses the ways that his work fits into the wider field of southern and Civil War history.

Randall Stephens

Michael Kammen

It is with heavy hearts that historians, former students, and others are reporting on the death of the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Michael Kammen.  He leaves an enormous legacy as an inspiring teacher, mentor, and scholar.

H. Roger Segelken of the Cornell Chronicle writes that Kammen focused "his scholarship at first on the colonial period of American history."  He then "broadened his scope to include legal, cultural and social issues of American history in the 19th and 20th centuries." Kammen's Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (1991), says Segelken, "helped to create the field of memory studies."  (See a short biography of Kammen here.)

Indeed, Kammen won high praise as a writer. In a New York Times review of Mystic Chords of Memory Thomas Fleming conceded that "not everyone will agree with all his conclusions, but they are presented with superlative style laced with refreshing wit and a refusal to tolerate the occasional fools and scoundrels who populate this patriot's game." (Thomas Fleming, "The Past Is What Catches Up With Us," New York Times, January 12, 1992, BR11.)

To mark Kammen's passing, I post here a 2010 essay that he wrote for a Historically Speaking roundtable on teaching the art of writing. Here Kammen considers the examples set by historians Samuel Eliot Morison, Carl Becker, Barbara Tuchman, C. Vann Woodward, and others.

Michael Kammen, "Historians on Writing," Historically Speaking (January 2010)

Historians distinguish themselves in diverse ways, yet relatively few are remembered as gifted prose stylists, and fewer still have left us non-didactic missives with tips about the finer points of writing well. Following his retirement from Cornell in 1941, Carl Becker accepted a spring term appointment as Neilson Research Professor at Smith College. Early in 1942 he delivered a charming address in Northampton titled “The Art of Writing.” Although admired as one of the most enjoyable writers among historians in the United States, Becker’s witty homily for the young women that day concerned good writing in general, and his exemplars ranged widely. He cited Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, for example, because “the author’s intention was to achieve a humorous obscurity by writing nonsense. He had a genius for that sort of thing, so that, as one may say, he achieved obscurity with a clarity rarely if ever equaled before or since.”1

Carl Becker

Other notable historians have shared Becker’s belief that writing about the past is a form of art—or ideally, at least, ought to be. Theodore Roosevelt’s presidential address to the American Historical Association in 1912 capped the generations that so admired Francis Parkman and Henry Adams by designating his subject “History as Literature.” All too soon, however, TR’s highly idealized perspective seemed unattainable by the new professionals in academe. Even Becker swiftly became pessimistic about the prospects for historical “literature,” especially as he observed his guild developing in its formative years. He wrote candidly to a friend in 1915:

Nevertheless, he went on to add: “Yet it is possible, and in my opinion highly desirable to come as near doing just that thing as possible. With all our busy activity history has less influence on the thought of our time than it had in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, and one principal reason is that it isn’t read.”2

A generation later Samuel Eliot Morison, who took Parkman as his model, lamented that American historians “have forgotten that there is an art of writing history,” and titled his homily “History as a Literary Art.” Subsequently Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., George Kennan, and C. Vann Woodward also provided instructive essays explaining how and why historical writing might flow in a creative manner that can engage the general reader.3

In the mid-1980s, when the Library of America produced stout volumes of works by Parkman and Adams, Woodward seized upon those occasions as opportunities to explain why these authors once enjoyed popular appeal and remained eminently worthy of visitation: narrative power, irony, subtlety, and [End Page 17] ambiguity in Parkman, wit, irony, humor, and a love of paradox in the case of Adams, whom Woodward called a “master of English prose.”4

J.H. Hexter devoted at least half a dozen droll essays to the challenges of Doing History, and the particular problems faced by academic historians. After describing just how arduous historical research can be, he turned with characteristic whimsy to the equally demanding challenge of first-rate prose.


In a different essay honoring Garrett Mattingly, the historian most admired by Hexter, he addressed what he considered the false dichotomy between narrative and analytical history. Many in the academy regard the former as inferior because it only tells what but not how and why. Citing Renaissance Diplomacy (1955) by Mattingly as a prime example of ways to marry the two, Hexter declared that,

Carl Becker concurred eloquently in his famous essay about Frederick Jackson Turner. He noted the need to interweave individuals and the interplay of social forces that are time-specific with “general notions” and conceptualizations that can provide explanatory power:

In Becker’s correspondence he often reflected upon the challenges of writing history well, especially in letters to Turner, his esteemed mentor, to Wallace Notestein, his sometime colleague at Cornell, and to Leo Gershoy, perhaps his favorite Ph.D. student. In one letter he even listed historians whose prose he especially admired.8 (My own favorites include Bernard DeVoto, Wallace Stegner, Barbara Tuchman, and Taylor Branch among nonacademics, and then Woodward, Hexter, Richard Hofstadter, and David Potter from the guild.)

Becker has a special place in my heart, and not just because he taught at Cornell. His clarity, pace, and subtle wit are especially appealing, but above all, perhaps, it is his gift for finding aphorisms that memorably epitomize the essence of a book. Best remembered, perhaps, is the end of the first chapter of his published dissertation on political parties in revolutionary New York, namely, that two questions determined party history from 1765 until 1776: “The first was the question of home rule; the second was the question, if we may so put it, of who should rule at home.” He achieved that effect again, even more pithily, in his most famous book, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers. Referring to the scientific orientation of the philosophes, Becker quipped that “having denatured God, they deified nature.”9

In the same book, published in 1932, Becker anticipated Raymond Williams’s and Daniel T. Rodgers’s influential works devoted to the importance of keywords in culture, society, and politics (1976 and 1987 respectively). Here is Becker’s essential passage from a fascinating study that acknowledges diachronic change even while insisting upon overlooked patterns of persistence and continuity.
Like Woodward, Becker had a particular fondness for irony in historical writing. Close friends in the profession who misunderstood what he was up to in his memorable 1931 presidential address to the American Historical Association, “Everyman His Own Historian,” chastened him for “advocating the futility of historical research under a thin guise of irony.” Nonplussed and bemused, Becker defended himself by observing that “a writer has to be something of an exhibitionist if he expects to develop a method of expression which people can recognize as definitely & individually his.” Today we customarily refer to that as finding one’s own voice, as Stephen Pyne has mentioned.11

Four months before he died, Becker (an unpedantic pedagogue) provided a former Ph.D. student with a close reading of her new book manuscript. He urged particular attention to the transitions between chapters. “The great thing is,” he wrote, “never leave a reader wondering where he has been and is at the end of a chapter, or where he is or where he is going at the beginning of the next one. But of course in order to do this you must be yourself very sure where you are at all times, and why you are there and how you got there.” Although Becker is principally remembered as a brilliant writer, he was also a skilled and conscientious graduate teacher, and remained so long after his fledglings had left their nest in Ithaca.12

_______________________

1.  First published in Phil L. Snyder, ed., Detachment and the Writing of History: Essays and Letters of Carl L. Becker (Cornell University Press, 1958), 125–26.

2.  Carl Becker to William B. Munro, July 23, 1915, in Michael Kammen, ed., What Is the Good of History? Selected Letters of Carl L. Becker, 1900–1945 (Cornell University Press, 1973), 33–34.

3.  Samuel Eliot Morison, “History as a Literary Art” (1946), reprinted in Morison, By Land and by Sea (Knopf, 1953), 289–298, the quotation at 289; Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., “The Historian as Artist,” Atlantic Monthly 212 (July 1963): 35–40; George Kennan, “The Experience of Writing History,” Virginia Quarterly Review 36 (1960): 205–214; and C. Vann Woodward, The Future of the Past (Oxford University Press, 1989), 337–358.

4.  Woodward, Future of the Past, 340–48.

5.  J.H. Hexter, “The Historian and His Society,” in Hexter, Doing History (Indiana University Press, 1971), 93.

6.  J.H. Hexter, “Garrett Mattingly, Historian,” in ibid., 170.

7.  Carl Becker, “Frederick Jackson Turner” (1927), reprinted in Becker, Everyman His Own Historian (F. S. Crofts, 1935), 229.

8.  Kammen, ed., What Is the Good of History? 34.

9.  Carl Becker, The History of Political Parties in the Province of New York, 1760–1776 (University of Wisconsin Press, 1960), 22; Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (Yale University Press, 1932), 63.

10.  Becker, Heavenly City, 47.

11.  Carl Becker to William E. Dodd, Jan. 27, 1932, and Becker to Gershoy [spring 1932?], in Kammen, ed., What Is the Good of History? 156, 162.

12.  Carl Becker to Mildred J. Headings, Dec. 14, 1944, in ibid., 328–29 (italicized words underlined in the original); and see Burleigh Taylor Wilkins, Carl Becker: A Biographical Study in American Intellectual History (M.I.T. Press, 1961).

13.  For a convenient compilation of what many historians have written over the years, see A.S. Eisenstadt, ed., The Craft of American History: Selected Essays, 2 vols. (Harper & Row, 1966).

Kevin M. Levin*

[Crossposted from the Civil War Memory blog]

Last week's post on the Civil War Memory blog about the unveiling of three plaques honoringVirginia’s post-Civil War black politicians has me thinking about my old buddy, William Mahone. While Mahone is best remembered as the “Hero of the Crater” his role in launching and leading the state’s most successful third-party political movement has largely been forgotten. In Virginia it was intentionally ignored because what came to be known as the Readjuster Party (1879-83) was bi-racial. The arc from Mahone’s role in preventing a Union breakthrough outside Petersburg that left scores of black Union soldiers massacred on the Crater battlefield to creating an opportunity for the largest number of black Virginians to vote, go to school and serve in positions of local and state government just a few short years later could not be more striking. Could anyone in 1865 anticipate that it would be a former Confederate general who would bring Reconstruction to Virginia?

Is it time to recognize William Mahone publicly in some shape or form? I say yes, if for no other reason than it would help to bring into sharper focus a piece of Virginia’s history that places yesterday’s dedication in its proper context. In other words, post-Civil War Virginia makes absolutely no sense without a reference to Mahone and the Readjuster Party.  It matters, not simply because it’s part of Virginia’s history, but because it has something important to teach us as well. The period following the official years of Reconstruction (1865-1877) did not inevitably lead to Jim Crow. Interracial cooperation was not only possible in the South between 1877 and the turn of the twentieth century but a reality for a few short years in Virginia. Virginia’s Reconstruction was not forced on it by “carpetbaggers” and “scalawags” but by legitimate stakeholders, who believed that a brighter future could be forged for both races. Finally, there is something juicy about all of this being introduced by a former Confederate general.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Admittedly, Mahone is not the most likeable person. In fact, in all the years that I researched the man I never caught more than a fleeting glimpse of any emotional life beyond that facial here. (BTW, I still can't picture the man laughing.) We like to be able to empathize with those historical figures we recognize and commemorate. More to the point, I still don’t fully understand why Mahone decided to forge a bi-racial coalition. Was he motivated by lingering bitterness over his railroad going into receivership in the early 1870s – a turn of events that Mahone blamed on Virginia’s Conservative elements. Was Mahone simply thirsty for political power and understood that interracial cooperation offered the best chance of success? Finally, to what extent was he genuinely interested in advancing the cause of the state’s black population? I don’t know, but I suspect that it’s a combination of all three as well as other factors. Mahone was a complicated guy and his motives were not likely pure, but than again, who among our most beloved public servants could make such a claim.

I don’t know what a proper commemoration of Mahone might look like. The city of Petersburg owns Mahone’s postwar home, which now serves as a library and was interestingly enough the scene of a civil rights protest that led to its integration in the 1960s. His boyhood home in Southampton County is owned by the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Perhaps some kind of plaque could be unveiled on the capital grounds in Richmond. The form it takes doesn’t really concern me much.

What matters to me is the act of once again taking ownership of a small piece of history that we no longer have a reason to ignore.

Kevin M. Levin is an Instructor of American history at Gann Academy near Boston. He is the author of Remembering the Battle of the Crater: War as Murder (2012) and is currently writing a book on the history of Confederate camp servants and the myth of the black Confederate soldier. Levin’s essays have appeared online in The New York Times and the Atlantic as well as popular magazines and academic journals. Levin has been blogging at Civil War Memory since November 2005.

Randall Stephens

The Response by Sir William Goscombe John. Unveiled by the Prince of Wales in 1923.

Ernest Hemingway didn't mince words.  The author of A Farewell to Arms claimed that World War I "was the most colossal, murderous, mismanaged butchery that has ever taken place on earth. Any writer who said otherwise lied. So the writers either wrote propaganda, shut up, or fought."  Seeing the ravages of war up close, he served with distinction as an ambulance driver in Italy.  Gertrude Stein coined the phrase "lost generation," which applied to Hemingway and other wayward souls like T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

What accounts for the gap between Hemingway's tone and the gallant, heroic one of war memorials?  Did region have a role to play in war remembrance?  How do we make sense of the conflict now that the last veterans have passed away?

As we near the 100th anniversary of the start of World War I Don Yerxa has been conducting a series of interviews on the subject in the pages of Historically Speaking.  Watch for other essays, forums, and interviews in the coming months.

Here at Northumbria University my colleague in the History Programme, James McConnel has put together a stellar series of lectures to commemorate the war in the northeast of England.  This region responded in greater numbers, per capita, than any other.  So, the memories of the war take on a special meaning here.  Below is the full list of the lectures and the dates.

Tynemouth World War I Commemoration Project. (Lectures to be held at 6pm at Northumbria University, Sutherland Building, Northumberland Road, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 8JF).

9 October 2013
Professor Sir Hew Strachan, All Souls College Oxford
"The Ideas of War, 1914"

12 November 2013
Emeritus Professor Martin Pugh, Newcastle University
"Women and the First World War: Emancipation or Domesticity?"

3 December 2013
John Lewis-Stempel
"Six Weeks: The Life and Death of Junior Officers on the Western Front"

British Empire Union poster, 1918. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

21 January 2014
Emeritus Professor John Derry, Newcastle University
"Hindenberg and Luddendorf: A Brilliant Parnership?"

18 February 2014
Dr Edward Madigan, CWGC
"The Better Part of Valour: British Understandings of Courage during the First World War"

4 March 2014
Professor Gary Sheffield, University of Birmingham
"Douglas Haig, the First World War, and the British People"

8 April 2014
Professor Andrew Lambert, King’s College London
"The War at Sea from the July Crisis to the eve of Jutland"

8 May 2014
Professor Joanna Bourke, Birkbeck College London
"'Sharp Shooting Pains that Make Me Shout Out': A History of Disability and the First World War"

For more, click here.

Eric Schultz

I was fortunate in early July to attend three days of the 150th commemoration of the Battle of Gettysburg, including a number of events sponsored by the Gettysburg Foundation. It was busy, colorful, sometimes somber but always tropical, a good reminder of what conditions were like in July 1863.  The battlefield itself, nearly 6,000 acres and sometimes called the “symbolic center of American history,” is both inspiring and beautiful. 

The 150th commemoration included a retelling of the battle and featured first-person accounts.

Events included a spectacular retelling of the battle (focused on first-person accounts), and the grand opening of the Seminary Ridge Museum at which visitors could climb its historic cupola to get a bird’s eye view of the battlefield and town.

As I attended various gatherings, however, it struck me that Gettysburg was nothing less than a kind of living laboratory for how people access history.

For example, there were lots (and lots) of folks taking tours of the battlefield, often led by certified National Park Service guides.  To walk in the footsteps of soldiers and view the battle lines redefines history in a whole new way for many.  Likewise some of the largest groups could be found on Little Round Top, where Col. Joshua Chamberlain made his famous stand--a tribute not only to Chamberlain and his troops, but to the power of Hollywood and films like Gettysburg, capable of creating historical celebrities. 

There were plenty of other visitors taking self-guided tours, some with maps and some with iPods, and some with their noses pressed to air-conditioned windows as they followed along a self-guided auto tour.  There were individuals, couples and families, the latter often gathered around a monument while Dad took pictures and the youngest played surreptitiously on a Gameboy.  (Years later. . . Dad: “Remember when we took that great trip to Gettysburg?” Son: “Um, I think.”)  There’s no telling how many monuments and battlefield scenes were “Instagramed” that weekend, speaking of interesting new ways to access history.

At one event, a young Marine sat next to me.  He’d served three tours in Iraq and was now, in his words, “doing time” as an instructor.  He said he’d driven over from Quantico for the weekend, spent all day on his mountain bike touring the battlefield, went to every event he could attend, and planned to do the same for every 150th Civil War celebration he was able.  He was clearly and enthusiastically engaged in accessing history.

The bookstores were full, and, I’m told, did a landmark business in souvenirs and (I hope) books.  There were certainly plenty of people in hotel lobbies, restaurants and under trees reading as they tried to absorb and understand events.  At the same time, souvenirs are ever-important and, for that matter, first cousin to “relic hunting,” a time-honored (if not always honorable) way of accessing history.  Gettysburg’s famous copse of trees, perhaps the most sacred spot place on the battlefield because it represented the “high tide of the Confederacy” where Pickett’s and Pettigrew’s men were finally turned back, had to be fenced in as early as 1887 because so many souvenir hunters were cutting branches to make walking sticks.

A view of the battlefield, including tents of some of the reenactors, from the cupola of the new Seminary Ridge Museum.

Some ways of accessing the history of Gettysburg are clearly unwelcome.  The National Park Service has long held that the battlefield ought to be unblemished so that visitors can use "grounded imagination" to experience the battle.  When businessman Thomas Ottenstein erected a 307-foot galvanized steel viewing tower--“a classroom in the sky”--near the battlefield in 1974, it was enjoyed by many but seen by others as an abomination.  The structure lasted 21 years until the National Park Service seized it under eminent domain and knocked it down with explosive charges.

In Sacred Ground, Edward Tabor Linenthal describes the long, often controversial history of the Gettysburg battlefield as veterans attempted to access their own history.  Beginning in the 1870s, Pennsylvania chapters of the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) held reunions at Gettysburg.  With the dismantling of Reconstruction, Union troops were joined by Confederate veterans.  Combined groups tended to emphasize valor on both sides, as veterans like Maj. Gen. Daniel E. Sickles proclaimed at the 25th reunion in 1888, "To-day there are no victors, no vanquished.  As Americans we may all claim a common share . . . in the new America born on this battlefield." 

Not everyone agreed.  Addressing a chapter of the GAR that same year, Bvt. Brig. General J.P.S. Gobin angrily declared that he was "tired of this gush and pretense for the glorification of the veteran simply because he wore a gray uniform with a Southern flag printed on his badge.  That badge meant treason and rebellion in 1861, and what it meant then it means now. . . ."   Others felt that in the rush to reconcile North and South, the plight of blacks and the issue of slavery were lost.

At the fiftieth anniversary of the battle in 1913, enough time had passed that 55,000 Union and Confederate veterans converged on Gettysburg for a four-day celebration.  Festivities included 6,500 tents, 173 kitchens, stores filled with pennants and flags, and a handful of fistfights.  Nonetheless, the event emphasized collective heroism and healing, and featured the ideology of the Lost Cause that had developed in the postwar South.  Capt. Bennett H. Young, commander of the United Confederate Veterans now accessed a kind of combined history by saying, "It was not Southern valor nor Northern valor.  It was, thank God, American valor." There was a famous handshake near the copse of trees when 300 veterans of Pickett and Pettigrew’s charge and defense met.  Four years later Virginia became the first former Confederate state to erect a monument on the battlefield.

At the 75th in 1938, 1,400 Union and 500 Confederate--average age 94--were still hearty enough to gather at Gettysburg for the "Last Reunion of the Blue and the Gray."  But something interesting happened with the passing of the last veterans of the Civil War in the 1940s: A kind of enthusiastic “subculture” arose as a way to continue accessing history.  Civil War Roundtables (discussion groups begun in Chicago), relic hunters and collectors, war-gamers and, of course, reenactors emerged--the latter being among the most controversial.  Dressed in authentic period clothing and intent on recreating the battle experience in every way, reenactors were among the most visible visitors during my time at the Park.  I found General and Mrs. Lee escaping the heat in my hotel lobby, for example.  There were fields of tents spread around the park and soldiers at every turn.

Frankly, reenactment doesn’t seem like much fun to me.  I was hot enough in shorts, and much of the time I saw the troops, clothed in wool, standing at attention in the hot sun.  (Not to mention, I gave up sleeping in pup tents when my son graduated from Cub Scouts.)  And there is certainly a school of thought that abhors reenactors as much as it does galvanized steel “classrooms in the sky.”  Popular Civil War historian Bruce Catton was especially critical of battle enactments which, he said, "require us to reproduce, for the enjoyment of attendant spectators, a tin shadow-picture of something which involved death and agony for the original participants."

Despite the heat, guided tours of the battlefield and monument were in full swing throughout the 150th.

However, the view is entirely different among reenactors, who staged two large-scale battles during the 150th commemoration.  One participant wrote passionately afterwards, “The horror of the Civil War hit me then, in ways that history books and Ken Burns’ films never had.  I was watching real people, all of them Americans, killing each other.  I knew it wasn’t real, but I also knew that if it had been, I would have fallen on the ground and sobbed.”

It’s pretty hard to say that that’s not accessing history.

235,000 visited Gettysburg during the commemoration; they read, walked, drove, toured, listened, visited museums, bought souvenirs, took thousands of digital pictures, camped, mountain-biked and reenacted, accessing history in all sorts of interesting ways; one new film even uses drones to illustrate the battle. As with most things Gettysburg, however, it may be best to look to Abraham Lincoln for the final word: How we preserve and interpret the battle’s meaning--and by implication, find ways to make and keep it accessible--should be, he said, all part of the "great task remaining before us."