March 2011 Archives

A few readers may recall my recent post on the percentage of Democrats and Republicans sporting facial hair before, during, and after the Civil War. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that I consider myself an enthusiastic historical quantifier. As such, I wholeheartedly support Virginia and North Carolina's efforts to get an accurate count of their Civil War dead. For those who haven't read the Wall Street Journal's coverage of the recount, or perused recent posts by Brooks Simpson and Andy Hall, I'll fill you in on the details: as part of the sesquicentennial commemoration in VA and NC, historians Edwin Ray and Josh Howard have been commissioned by their respective states to undertake a recount of wartime fatalities (including those killed in battle, those who died of wounds, and those who died of disease). The results: North Carolina's current figure of 40,000-plus stands to fall to around 31,000, while Virginia's count of 14,794 will likely be revised upward to around 31,000. This means that Virginia, which previously ranked fourth in the Confederate fatalities count, and North Carolina, which has historically ranked first, will now be running neck-and-neck in the race for which state can claim the dubious distinction of having sent more of its sons to an early grave.

Had this process of recounting the dead concerned any other war, members of the public would have probably issued a unanimous yawn and moved on with their lives. Professional historians would have thanked Messrs. Ray and Howard  for their indispensible grunt work in the service of historical accuracy, and the world would have kept on spinning. But because this concerns the American Civil War, a few fanatics and nuts have crawled out of the woodwork to protest the historians' findings. More emotional than statistical, many of these complaints come from proud Tarheels who are jealous of their state's status as the most sacrificing in the Confederacy.

The unreasoned nature of the protesters' response should come as no surprise. After all, the mountain of available evidence suggesting that the Southern states seceded from the Union to preserve and protect the institution of slavery has yet to work its magic on many of these 'heritage' activists. But what does come as a surprise is the simple-mindedness of their number crunching. Fine, North Carolina may no longer be the most-killed state of the Confederacy. But even if it is forced to play second fiddle to the Old Dominion, Tarheel patriots can still take pride in the fact that their state had a much smaller white population in 1860. This means that, even using the revised fatality figures, a higher percentage of North Carolina's 1860 white population was killed during the war than that of Virginia (4.69% for NC, versus 2.8% for VA). See this spreadsheet [Confederate Dead_A People's Contest.xls] for the details (and please pardon any mistakes - I put this chart together quite quickly).

Of course, North Carolinians may have other reasons to avoid looking at fatalities as a percentage of the pre-war white population. Using the revised total of 22,000 Civil War fatalities for the state of South Carolina, the Palmetto State's dead as a percentage of their considerably smaller 1860 white population far outstrips that of their northern neighbor (7.3% for SC, versus the above quoted 4.69% for NC). Meanwhile, Virginia continues to come in fourth place in the dead-as-a-percentage-of-1860-white-population competition.

So much for the new figures: it just goes to show the validity of Mark Twain's old maxim that untruths come in only three guises - lies, damned lies, and statistics. More disturbing, however, is the tendency of a few Civil War enthusiasts to rate valor in terms of a willingness to give one's life (or, more accurately, to die - since a considerable portion of Confederate deaths were caused by diseases that attacked soldiers regardless of their battlefield bravery). Again, this baffles me. With reference to what other war do the descendants of combatants fight tooth and nail for who sacrificed the most lives? I can't help but see this as part and parcel of a Lost Cause mentality, in which 'noble sacrifice' is held in higher regard that, say, efficacy on the battle field. It's bad enough that so many people had to die in the first place; do we really have to disgrace their loss by squabbling over body counts?

So, let's get the record straight. Historical accuracy is a noble end in itself. But let's leave the chest-thumping politics of the 1860s where they belong: in the 1860s.

In the April issue of The Atlantic Monthly, veteran journalist James Fallows contributes an essay in defense of the so-called new media. Defined by the proliferation of internet sites that cater to niche "news" markets, the new media emphasizes, among other popular topics, celebrity gossip and overheated partisanship. In the article, Fallows gives special attention to veteran news anchors (most significantly, Ted Koppel) who bemoan what they see as the trivialization of news, a decline in journalistic standards, and the abandonment of impartial reporting. Taking these critiques in turn, the author concludes that the new media, while certainly very different from its immediate predecessor, is not necessarily a worse incarnation of news and information. He asserts that the new media, which he acknowledges is "shallow, divisive, and unreliable," simply is providing content its audience wants, rather than dictating what kind of news and information it should consume.


Fallows presents this as a revolutionary change in our media, but in some ways, we've seen this story before. The new media might be new in form, but there is nothing new or revolutionary in its content. Up until the very late 19th century, the country's dominant media, newspapers, largely were overheated, blatantly partisan, sensationalistic rags. And they were tremendously popular as a result. They espoused specific worldviews and were not a reliable source of so-called "objective" news. The false notion that news could be impartial, judicious, and nonpartisan has been a relatively recent and quite possibly short-lived phenomenon in our country's media history. As scholars across disciplines have demonstrated, bias is inherent in every form of communication in which we engage, for it not only influences how we communicate, but the very decision to communicate.

News has never been immune from bias, and it always has been produced with specific intents. The first colonial newspapers, for instance, essentially were advertising sheets produced by merchants and booksellers. In other words, they were not a novel form of dispensing news; they were a novel form of advertising. During the crises that preceded the American Revolution, newspaper owner/editors began to realize that political content attracted even more readers. In the young republic, most newspapers improved on this method of building readership by allying themselves with specific political parties in order to attract patronage form party leaders and subscriptions from party members. These papers were unapologetically biased, and they consistently served up editorials and correspondent articles that celebrated the pure and intelligent motives of their own party while lashing the venal and base character of their opponents. For those readers unmoved by politics, these newspapers gloried in detailed accounts of grisly crimes, horrible fires, and destructive natural disasters. These papers rivaled Jacobean theater in their eagerness to provide their audience with spectacles of blood, gore, and death. The dominant news media of this period thus conceived of "news" as information that incited and titillated.

As an example of the new ethic (or lack thereof) in the digital media, Fallows alludes to the decision by the gossip site, Gawker,  to pay a man for his story of having had a tryst with Delaware's recent Republican nominee for Senate, Christine O'Donnell. Perhaps Gawker could learn a few things from perusing partisan newspapers from the 19th century. Democratic journals in late 19th century New York did not have to pay anyone for salacious stories about the state's Republican leaders. Instead, they invented such stories themselves, including the rumor that Theodore Roosevelt, then an up and coming young Republican, was gay. Their thinly veiled, lurid euphemisms about the political neophyte's sexual orientation dangerously skirted libel.

Fallows' article also questions whether the new media has inflamed our political discourse and made it more rancorous. Political commentary in the media of late does often appear to be shallow, bombastic and generally dismal, but this also is not without precedent. One of the lasting images of my dissertation research was an account in the Albany Argus of how New York State Attorney General John Van Buren, son of the former president, sent "an organized gang of ruffians" to attack his intra-party rivals at the Albany County Democratic convention in 1846. Despite the fact that Van Buren's goons punched, kicked, stomped and even stabbed numerous convention delegates, his victims made peace with him in time to unite behind a common slate of candidates for county offices that election year. On May 17 that same year, the Democratic Cleveland Plain Dealer, angry over Ohio Whig Senator Tom Corwin's opposition to the country's ongoing war with Mexico, insinuated that the senator committed the possibly treasonous act of sending copies of one of his anti-war speeches to Mexican General Santa Anna to distribute among his troops. This thoroughly unfounded rumor likely was an item of keen interest to the Plain Dealer's loyal Democratic readers. Whatever the nineteenth century news media might have been, it certainly was not demure.

Obviously, the new media differs in substantial ways from earliest forms of news in this country. Web-based metrics that chart customers' consumer habits and consumption patterns (including such minutiae as the average time we spend "reading" any one page of online content) allow media providers mind-bogging flexibility and specificity in marketing their products to the public. Yet, the shiny new packaging of web-based and television media should not blind us to the fact that its content is not terribly novel. It is as much a reversion to older "pre-professional" concepts of news, as it is an innovative form of information. The "unbiased" news media, whose passing the supercilious Ted Koppel laments, simply was not the historical norm. In fact, one could argue that it never really existed, at least not in the way that it is being fondly remembered by the titans of the "old" media.

Brooks Simpson recently re-posted a commentary on training PhD students that he initially had contributed to the Civil Warriors blog in 2007. In this post, Simpson notes that the goal of PhD programs is to train its students to critique and engage the prominent historical debates in their chosen fields and subsequently engage those debates with their own original research and publications. Beyond this, Simpson admits, "professional training is more haphazard," particularly when it comes to professional skills such as teaching. While some graduate programs offer systematic training in teaching or at least supervise new teachers, others, as Simpson points out, "appear to assume that teachers are born, not made." Indeed, teaching is a vital, but often overlooked aspect of graduate training.

When I entered the PhD program at Penn State, graduate students were expected to learn the teaching ropes by first serving as teaching assistants, leading weekly discussion sessions for survey classes and handling grading responsibilities. Whatever training we received in the art or skill of teaching largely was at the discretion of the instructor whom we served. Once in charge of our own classes, we were assigned a teaching mentor who would observe us teach once or twice in a semester and serve as a sounding board for any questions or concerns that might arise. The onus was on us, however, to take advantage of this opportunity, and it was somewhat easy to feel isolated or adrift in the classroom. Since then, Penn State's History department has instituted a much more systematic method of teacher training, requiring new graduate students to complete a 6-8 week teaching seminar that covers such issues as pedagogy and the implementation of online technologies in the classroom. Such seminars should be essential requirements, and their benefits would be enhanced through evaluative observation of new teachers in the classroom, too.

While PhD programs train their students to make crucial, relevant contributions to ongoing historical debates, they must also train their students to use relevant methods to share their work and communicate with a wider audience, especially those whom they teach. Ironically, PhD programs often are dynamic and flexible in recognizing and engaging burgeoning historiographical trends, while at the same time moving at a glacial pace when it comes to recognizing how to engage and educate the young people we will be teaching for years to come.

As Simpson notes, historians often complain that they do not have a wider audience for their work, but then, many graduate programs do not train them to reach that wider audience. That training should begin with the first and most important audience we encounter: our own undergraduate students. Of course, a survey course packed with undergrads is not designed as a venue for sharing your own narrow research interests, but it does provide you the opportunity to discourse on historical method and communicate the passion and thrill that you find (and that we hope our students will find, sometimes in vain) in doing history. The form that that communication takes is integral to your success as a teacher and to reaching a wider, and often younger, audience. No matter how tired we might be of hearing it, it is no cliché to say that new technologies absolutely have changed the way we communicate with each other (as a nerdy aside, the term cliché itself was a neologism that referred to a specific innovation in communication technology: the stereotype printing plate that became common by the 1830s). Since the advent of widespread public education in this country through the end of the last century classroom instruction methods did not change that dramatically. From individual slates to blackboards, from mimeograph copies (I still remember the peculiar smell of freshly mimeographed handouts) to Xeroxes, little really changed in the methods teachers used to dispense information to their charges. The occasional use of television or videos largely provided infrequent respites from the standard use of textbooks and handouts and the usual method of teaching by lecture or, in sufficiently small classes, discussion and debate.

In contrast, students today clearly are increasingly familiar with and adept at using various web-based formats to search for and receive information they deem relevant to their lives. I know some professors do not wish to pander to what they might see as youthful infatuations with media that might well be more distracting than edifying. The reality is, however, that these technologies soon will be, if they are not already, the standard means by which people navigate their world, and it is vitally important that we, as teachers, recognize that. If we fail to do so, not only will our own research become less relevant to subsequent generations, but teaching itself, mired in the same tired practices, might very well become so as well. I know I am not the first person to make a case for updating our teaching practices, but the message bears repeating as many PhD programs still seem to take a laissez-faire approach to training their graduate students for the rigors of teaching.

Of course, I don't mean to sound unduly alarmist. Young people clearly are flexible and discerning enough to adapt to both traditional and innovative educational techniques. The more we can communicate with them in the modes that are familiar to them, however, the more likely we are to make a lasting impact on them. PhD programs, therefore, should train graduate students not only to develop systematic pedagogies, but also to assess, critique, and update those pedagogies periodically. In particular, graduate programs should encourage their students to incorporate technologies that engage students into the classroom. Contrarily, training teachers in the same pedagogy that long-tenured department faculty members learned anywhere from ten to thirty years ago will not be sufficient, and it is incumbent on young teachers to cultivate an interest especially in emerging technological formats that might aid their teaching.


Let me stop here and assure you that I don't intend this as a lecture from an expert on the subject. In fact, I might be one of the last people who should opine on teaching with technology. The first two semesters that I taught my own courses as an ABD lecturer, I did not utilize the university's online course management system, because not only had I not been trained to use it, I did not even know the university had such a system. To my embarrassment, my students had to prod me to use the online system to manage my courses. Lo and behold, it streamlined communications between us and among the students themselves and made it much easier for me to provide them with course materials. Though I am very comfortable with using online management systems now and have taught a few courses wholly online, I still am trying to learn how best to employ web-based technologies and communications formats to benefit both my students and myself . I still need to build a website with my professional profile, for instance.

While there is much more that I can do to connect with my students in ways that are familiar to them, becoming more comfortable with web-based instruction allows me to present them with a variety of materials in various formats. New technologies even serve as a way to introduce students to certain, seemingly stodgy, aspects of history and historical research that they might otherwise miss. Getting students to add the National Archives to their twitter feed for instance (yes, I am as surprised as you are that the National Archives has a twitter page), can expose them to NARA's function in preserving important aspects of the country's history. And though many predict that blogging will become a less influential means of communication in the near future, having students peruse such blogs as Cenantua's Blog, Civil War Memory, Civil War Women, Crossroads, Dead Confederates, Jubilo, the Sable Arm, etc. not only can expose students to dynamic contemporary discussions of historical events and debates about the practice of history, but it also can serve as an opportunity to discuss the merits and problems such a format presents for engaging in historical discussion. Regardless of the specific format, communicating with our students in a familiar technological vernacular allows us to demonstrate to them that history is not a stodgy, distant, or alien intellectual exercise. Rather, it is a dynamic, vital practice that is intimately connected to understanding contemporary life.

Ultimately, to ensure that we keep our profession, not just our research, lively and relevant, we must be willing to familiarize ourselves with the communications formats that shape our students' lives. Even as these formats change and evolve, staying abreast of them at least holds out the promise of being able to communicate with students in ways that resonate with them. And this will be necessary if we truly want to maximize our engagement with our students as a first step to expanding our audience generally.

Why the sudden concern with Ulysses S. Grant's alleged drunkenness? And why is no one talking about the historical context in which these accusations were made? This is wrong-headed. We won't be able to make sense of the question of Grant's drinking until we consider how Americans understood alcohol and drunkenness in the antebellum era and beyond.

Devotees of the Civil War blogosphere will have noticed the explosion of conversation concerning the subject of Gen. Grant's tippling and its effects on his generalship. Keith at Cosmic America kicked things off with a link to a video of Grant biographer Joan Waugh discussing the Union general's boozing. Translating Waugh's position into more colloquial terms, Keith asks his readers to lighten up. "Grant was a complex fellow ... with flaws," Keith argues, "just like you and me, compadres ... so quit judging and get used to it." If the general drank at all, Keith says, he did so on his own time, and no one was hurt by it.

Taking a very different approach, Brooks Simpson at Crossroads compellingly argues that a general is never off duty, and that, contrary to Waugh's argument, three of Grant's reported binges may have taken place in the midst of major operations and seriously impaired his ability to lead troops. True, much of the evidence pertaining to the subject of Grant's drinking is conflicting or inconclusive, and more than a few accusations seem to have been motivated by politics (both partisan and professional). But the point remains: ideally, a general should always be prepared for the worst.

I have no new evidence to contribute to this debate, but I do think it's important to remember the context in which these accusations were made. Attitudes toward alcohol were undergoing massive transformations at the time of the Civil War. Only a few decades earlier, according to historian William Rorabaugh, Americas were consuming more than 5 gallons of whiskey per person per year (see link for source, Rorabaugh's classic The Alcoholic Republic, pp. 8-9). At the commencement of hostilities, thanks to massive inroads made by the temperance movement, Americans were drinking a little more than 2 gallons of the same (for comparison's sake, Americans were drinking just over 1 gallon of whisky per capita per year in 1950). Benders and hard-drinking remained important parts of antebellum American culture - especially among city-dwelling men and members of the rough-and-tumble sporting culture - but more and more Americans were abstaining from alcohol altogether.  More to the point, teetotalers begin identifying even moderate drinking as unhealthful drunkenness. 

Why is this important? For two reasons: first, it suggests that many Americans had plenty of experience with drinking - and processing - massive volumes of alcohol. Secondly, it suggests that what one person thought was near-sobriety, another might regard as sloppy drunkenness. All of this should complicate our understanding of Grant's drinking. Not only did Grant's political and professional enemies have good reason to depict his mild tippling as evidence of drunkenness; even well-meaning teetotalers - folks who would otherwise identify themselves as allies of Grant - might honestly misconstrue a few stray drinks as proof of the general's staggering intoxication.

We always interpret substance use and abuse through ideological lenses; but I believe this was especially true in the Civil War era, when attitudes toward alcohol were more radically polarized than they would be in many years prior or since (with the notable exception of the Prohibition era). So as we continue to discuss Grant's alleged drunkenness, let's keep in mind the full range of biases that might have colored contemporary accounts of his drinking.

Actually, I'm a little late on this, so it would be more accurate to say that it's lukewarm off the presses. Last week UNC Press, in partnership with the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center here at Penn State, rolled out the inaugural issue of The Journal of the Civil War Era. We list the articles for this issue below. Of particular interest perhaps to graduate students or recently minted PhDs is the Professional Notes section, in which Aaron Sheehan-Dean examines trends in the US History job market over the last decade. We at the Richards Center are excited to get this singular journal off the ground, and we sincerely thank the myriad scholars who, as contributors, reviewers, and editors, have made it possible.


The Journal of the Civil War Era

Articles
Edward L. Ayers and Scott Nesbit
"Seeing Emancipation: Scale and Freedom in the American South"

Melinda Lawson
"Imagining Slavery: Representations of the Peculiar Institution on the Northern Stage, 1776-1860"

Leeann Whites
"Forty Shirts and a Wagonload of Wheat: Women, the Domestic Supply Line, and the Civil War on the Western Border"

Review Essay
Douglas R. Egerton
"Rethinking Atlantic Historiography in a Postcolonial Era: the Civil War in a Global Perspective"

Professional Notes
Aaron Sheehan-Dean
"The Nineteenth-Century U.S. History Job Market, 2000-2009"

If this piques your interest, subscriptions are available at the journal's website. 

@Crossroads, Civil Warriors, Civil War Memory, Dead Confederates, Cenantua's Blog

David Greenspoon, a doctoral candidate in the Richards Center, contributes this post on the logistics of creating and proposing panels for conferences. Mr. Greenspoon currently resides in the Baltimore area, so we took the liberty of posting this on his behalf. He is finishing his dissertation, "Children's Mite: Juvenile Philanthropy in America, 1815-1865," which examines the commercial overtones of children's philanthropy in the mid-nineteenth century. Mr. Greenspoon has presented his research at the Society for Historians of the Early Republic annual conference in Rochester, New York and the Society for the History of Children and Youth in Berkeley, California. This coming weekend, he will be presenting a paper at the annual conference of the Organization of American Historians in Houston, Texas.


Presenting papers at conferences can be a rewarding experience, providing an opportunity to receive feedback from a new audience and meet people in your field. However, getting your paper accepted into conferences is not automatic. More competitive conferences normally privilege conference papers that have already been organized into a ready-to-roll panel with two to four papers, a chair, and/or a respondent. When you are a grad student and do not know many historians outside your department, putting together a panel can be a daunting process (at least it initially was for me), but if you go in with an idea of the kind of panel you want to assemble, and a plan of how to find additional panel participants, it can go much more smoothly.

When you are a graduate student finding other panelists can be tricky, because your network of academic connections is not as extensive as it will become later in your career. In fact, this is where you can start to build that network. One of the best ways to find people in your area is to post a call for panelists on relevant listservs on H-Net. H-Net is a collection of listservs related to the humanities and social sciences covering topics such as the American Civil War, the Early Republic, women's studies, slavery, and childhood studies. If your research is in the humanities, it is a near certainty that there is an H-Net listserv relevant to the paper you intend to present.  The size of membership and volume of messages on H-Net listservs vary, but normally they include relevant calls for papers, book reviews, inquiries from scholars pertaining to their research, and calls for panelists. I have found excellent panelists, chairs, and respondents through H-Net, by outlining the topic of the panel, the issues addressed by papers already on board, and mentioning who (if any) has agreed to chair or comment. I also recommend you give listserv subscribers a deadline by which to respond so that you have time to complete your panel and submit it to the conference. Because these forums are moderated by scholars, who are otherwise busy, anticipate that it will take several days for your call to appear on the listserv. 

Once you have a couple of conferences under your belt, and have had the opportunity to meet people who do similar work, finding panelists will become easier. Besides being useful venues to share portions of your work, conferences are great for meeting other people with whom to share ideas and collaborate at future conferences. Not surprisingly, a lot of the other young scholars at conferences are also looking for potential co-panelists. I have found several wonderful people at conferences whom I have later joined on subsequent panels.

Unless you are putting together a roundtable for a conference, your panel will need a chair to introduce speakers and moderate the questions and answers following the presentation of the papers. You will probably also want a respondent (though not all panels have one), who can offer feedback on the papers, and draw out common larger themes. It can be nerve-wracking to critique your work for several minutes in front of an audience of scholars. A respondent adds a new dimension to your panel, however, and because they receive your paper several weeks prior to the conference, the respondent can offer more thorough feedback than the audience. I have received helpful feedback from commentators who would have never otherwise read my work, which has allowed me to push my work in new directions.

If you are preparing a panel for a professional conference, the chair and respondent should be established people in your field. I have found great chairs and respondents through H-Net, but have also arranged for this part of the panel through direct emails to professors from other departments. This can be an intimidating process, especially because these are often going to be professors you do not know at all, or, perhaps, have met only once or twice. Though it is scary to email professors out of the blue, in my experience, they are very gracious in their responses, whether they can participate in your panel or not. When I write to a professor, I always remind them if we have met, or note that I am familiar with their work and explain why they would be a good fit for my panel. This way they know that I am not flooding hundreds of professors' inboxes with the same request. I also end my emails by asking them to suggest someone else, should they be unable to participate. This way, if they are unable to join the panel, I may receive a new lead for someone who can. This also helps broaden the network of academic contacts that you're beginning to build through this process.

Contacting potential panelists, chairs, and respondents can be time consuming, because it is appropriate to wait at least a couple of days for their responses before contacting other potential participants (of course, you can ask a panelist and chair/respondent simultaneously). Though I like to imagine that the scholar I contact is waiting by their computer for my email, this is, of course, not the case. Agreeing to participate in a panel is a big commitment; they are agreeing to travel to a conference location and either write a paper or offer feedback, so, it might take them a few days to see if they have done appropriate research for your panel, cleared their schedules, and make sure they have the funds available.

Waiting for email responses can mean anxiously checking email repeatedly, but not giving a potential panel participant a reasonable amount of time could have far more unpleasant consequences. If you ask multiple people to chair your panel at once, you might end up with multiple positive responses, and be put in the uncomfortable position of telling a senior professor that even though he or she responded promptly to your email, you will not be able to include him or her in your panel.  This, of course, is an outcome you would like to avoid at all costs. Because unavoidable delays in correspondence make it impossible to put together a panel in a hurry, you need to plan your panel far in advance. I try to put panels together at least one month ahead of the deadline listed in conferences' calls for papers, and I prefer, when possible, to do it much earlier than that even. As a general rule, it's best to ask for participants as early as you can, so you can catch them before they might agree to join other panels.

Once you have a panel put together each panelist will be required to write a short proposal, normally a couple of hundred words. The proposal should outline what your essay will examine and what your paper will contribute to the historiography in your field. I find it effective to begin a paper proposal with an especially engaging anecdote that will catch the attention of the program committee, and then connect the example to the larger issue that my proposed paper will address. I usually conclude a proposal by stating what I intend for my paper to argue (this might be speculative, since the conference paper does not yet have to be written), and why this is significant.

Writing a proposal for the entire panel can mean a very different process from the regular lonely work of historians, since it usually is a collaborative task. Normally, one panelist will write a rough draft of the proposal and then the other panelists take a crack at it, until all of the panelists agree on a finished copy. I find the template of opening with a historical anecdote less effective for a panel proposal, because it is difficult to find an example that neatly captures the significance of all of the papers. Instead, I have had greater success opening the panel proposal with a prominent historiographical debate, or a well-known argument by a senior historian which will be addressed, in some way, by all of the paper proposals.

Finally, there is the matter of money. For graduate students, going on a trip and spending several days in a hotel can be pricey. However, there are a number of ways to receive financial assistance. Check with your department, or affiliated units in your institution (such as the Richards Center, in Penn State's case) to see if they offer funding for conferences. Also, look at the website of the organization sponsoring the conference, because some offer support to graduate students to encourage attendance. Some organizations offer merit based scholarships while others are first-come first-served, which means it is important to investigate scholarships quickly after you have been accepted. Receiving funding for your trip will help ease the financial burden of a rewarding experience.

In the end, all of the advance planning, the anxious waiting for responses from potential panel participants and respondents, and the search for travel funds are well worth it.  At the conferences in which I have participated, I have received useful feedback, met terrific people, and have had a lot of fun. I've also been able to connect with a lot of great, young historians and kept abreast of exciting, new research in our field. Ultimately, that is the main goal of conference participation: to further your scholarship and introduce yourself to a scholarly community whose own work will influence yours and vice versa.

Yesterday's Washington Post online announced the opening of a new exhibit at the city's National Museum of Crime and Punishment on the trial and execution of the Lincoln assassination conspirators. What's interesting about this exhibit is that it is based on the Hollywood drama, The Conspirator, set for release on April. The film traces the arrest, trial and execution of the Lincoln conspirators, focusing on Mary Surratt (played by Robin Wright). Trailers for the film paint Surratt's character as a martyr and suggest that a major theme is the injustice of trying civilians by military tribunal. The film's focus on the trial and punishment of the conspirators seemed to dovetail nicely with the mission of the NMCP.

The WaPo article notes that the NMCP faces stiff competition from other Washington archives and museums, when it comes to chronicling Lincoln assassination. Most of those other museums, naturally, have built exhibits or archives around historical materials from the Civil War era. The museum at Ford's Theater, for example, a scant few blocks from the NMCP, houses the derringer John Wilkes Booth used to execute the president. The NMCP has found a novel way to get around its own lack of authentic Lincoln materials by building exhibits around props from the film. Can't get into Ford's Theater to see the authentic Booth derringer? Then trot over to the NMCP and see its replica. The new exhibit illustrates the creative methods by which public history institutions hope to translate increasing interest in the Lincoln assassination as a result of the Civil War sesquicentennial into increasing numbers of customers.

There likely will be some, call them traditionalists or purists if you will, who will shake their heads at the utilization of a commercial film as the basis of an educative museum exhibit. They perhaps will lament the cheap commercialization and superficial gaudiness of such public history. Now, I've never been to the NMCP and thus cannot offer an opinion on the value or quality of its exhibits. I would say, however, that their new Lincoln exhibit nicely illustrates the challenges that public history institutions face. These are businesses after all, and they have a multi-fold mission to educate the public and preserve historical artifacts and historical memory of a particular kind. They cannot do that without customers of course, and getting customers through the door, especially in museum-dense Washington, requires savvy marketing.

Now, it's possible that the film and exhibit will make an awful hash out of the conspirators' trial and misrepresent or misunderstand the historical context of this event. Fears of historical inaccuracy and concerns over historical interpretation attend every museum, archive and exhibit, though. Check out a few presidential libraries to get a sense of this (the Reagan Library has some interesting things to say about the "necessity" of the Grenada invasion, for instance, as recently profiled in the radio program, This American Life). The NMCP obviously has discovered a clever way to enter the crowded Lincoln field. Hopefully for its sake, The Conspirator is a hit (or at least, not a flop) and brings a new stream of customers through the museum's doors.

@The Abraham Lincoln Blog
 

We hope that you'll bear with us as we indulge another discussion about the impact of secession on the future of the Union. Today, however, we want to leave the Civil War behind and revisit the War of 1812, perhaps the United States' best-known non-victory in its martial history. Unfortunately, this disaster of a war often is overshadowed by the Civil War when it comes to historical commemoration. Timing plays an important role. The secession crisis and the Civil War took place a tidy 50 years after the country's military build-up and entry into the War of 1812. The main reason that we so easily and quickly forget the latter conflict, however, was that it was fought on a much smaller scale and was so dissatisfying in its conclusion. The Civil War is, unquestionably, the country's great dramatic conflict, while the War of 1812 might be the country's most incompetent conflict.

But today is a fitting day to give the War of 1812 its place in the sun. On this date, two hundred years ago, President James Madison presented Congress with a trove of letters exposing sinister British designs to encourage the New England states to secede from the Union and join British Canada. New England's commercial trade had been prostrated by the American embargo against both the British and French, and the president was deeply distrustful of the loyalty of the region's Federalist leaders. As Garry Wills recounts in his biography of Madison, the president authorized Secretary of State James Monroe to pay $50,000 to purchase the collection of letters from a French nobleman who had obtained them surreptitiously from John Henry, an English spy. Wills describes the unprecedented purchase as part of a concerted effort by Madison to push Congress to increase the size of the American military and declare war on Britain.

The Henry Letters, as they've since come to be known, however, turned out to be a fantastic hoax. It was discovered rather quickly that Henry was a largely ineffectual Canadian spy, not an English one, and that his letters were filled with dubious information cribbed from various New England and Canadian newspapers. Moreover, the intermediary who delivered the letters to Monroe was no French nobleman but an imposter who had played the role to ingratiate himself into Washington's high society. He was Henry's accomplice in the affair, splitting the exorbitant reward with him. The revelation that the president had paid such a princely sum for fraudulent documents was embarrassing, but it did not amount to so much as a speed bump in Madison's steady march toward war.

One wonders why the president felt that these documents, which only confirmed what many  Democratic-Republicans like himself already suspected, were worth such a steep price. New England Federalists ultimately showed their true blue colors at the so-called Hartford Convention, which took place at the tail end of the war from December 1814 to January 1815. Some members of the convention toyed with the idea of seceding from the Union, though no such proposal was adopted. Instead, the Hartford delegates drafted a demand for a host of political reforms, including amending the Constitution to eliminate the 3/5 clause and re-balance political power between free and slave states. In the epitome of bad timing, representatives of the convention arrived with these demands in Washington just as the city was celebrating news of Andrew Jackson's victory over the British at New Orleans and the end of the war (which occurred in reverse order), causing easily outraged Democratic-Republicans to see the demands as unpatriotic at best and treasonous at worst.

Both the War of 1812 and the Civil War demonstrated, in different ways, not only political conflict over slavery but also the imperfect union of the country during the first half of the nineteenth century. The War of 1812 exposed the feeble communications and transport networks that ineffectively knit the disparate states together, and it incited New Englanders' jealousy of the seemingly outsized political power of slaveholders. The Civil War exposed the ideological divisions of a country that still had not achieved a substantial measure of national unity, and it revealed slave state leaders' consternation with the advances of a free soil movement that pledged to obstruct slavery's expansion. In some ways then, the Civil War perhaps finally corrected some of the grave problems first exposed in the War of 1812. So as we commemorate the Civil War, let's not forget America's most important non-victorious war and the connections between the two. The state of Virginia has planned a commemoration of the War of 1812 and hopefully others will follow suit.

I can think of no better way of illustrating how to combine our commemorations of the War of 1812 and the Civil War than with the following episode from Ellen Degeneres' old sitcom, in which she joined her father in a Civil War re-enactment. At about the 10:50 mark her proud father offers her the family sword, which, he announces, her great-great grandfather had used in 1865..... in a re-enactment of the War of 1812.

We are a bit late on this, but about three months ago, award-winning historian Brooks Simpson launched a new blog, titled Crossroads. Simpson is the ASU Foundation Professor of History at Arizona State University and formerly was a contributor to the Civil Warriors blog. He describes his new blog as a forum to discuss history, historians, and "the academic life." We particularly welcome the latter subject. In the face of mounting criticism of all levels of the education profession (see the Wisconsin budget battle as just one example), it seems increasingly vital that academics demystify their profession by talk candidly about it, their work, and their intellectual mission.

Indeed, today's Crossroads post is part of a series titled "Debating DiLorenzo," referring to Thomas DiLorenzo, a professor of Economics at Maryland's Loyola University and a strident critic of Abraham Lincoln. In a previous post, I referenced DiLorenzo's provocative but sloppy histories of Lincoln and his contempt for what he sees as a liberal historical profession that mythologizes the former president and denigrates his detractors. In today's post, Simpson adroitly critiques DiLorenzo's absurd notions of the existence of a conspiratorial, academic Lincoln cult and soberly points out that no serious historian seeks to build a career on preserving a Lincoln hagiography. Rather, the historical profession is a contentious and competitive field in which believers and dissenters, to paraphrase DiLorenzo, tend to enjoy similar levels of success.

To me, it would be more accurate to suggest that not only is there no "cult of Lincoln," but rather DiLorenzo is working tirelessly to create a cult of himself as the lone, persecuted historical critic of the 16th president. Creating this cult is serving him well, as it results in a bevy of speaking engagements and, one safely assumes, a growing audience of readers of his iconoclastic books. In assuming this martyr's role, DiLorenzo arguably has garnered more attention than he has for his contributions to the field in which he is actually educated and trained (Economics, in case you forgot). Of course, Professor DiLorenzo is not Lincoln's only critic in the academy, and he also is far from the most skillful, but Professor Simpson does a better and more thorough job of exposing that reality in his blog than I could do here, so I'll leave it at that.

We look forward to Professor Simpson's future posts on this and other topics, and we highly recommend this exciting new blog.

@Crossroads, Blog Divided, The Abraham Lincoln Blog