May 2011 Archives

Earlier this week, CNN.com published an article about the growing number of colleges and universities that are beginning to acknowledge the ways in which many of them benefited directly from slavery in their early days. From the use of slave labor to build academic facilities to profits made from the slave trade, institutions of higher learning in the North and South, East and West, have begun to recognize and even atone for the ways in which they profited from slavery. The report underscores that this was not just a "problem" for southern universities and colleges. It also offers a couple of examples of the different ways these academies made profits or improvements to their physical plant through slave labor and the traffic in slaves.



This article could cast a wider net, however. Though it concerns itself with institutions that have probed their direct links to slavery, it does little to prod us to think more broadly about the indirect benefits that most Americans and American institutions derived from slavery prior to the Civil War. The notion that we should be surprised by the recently rediscovered links between our most august educational institutions and sordid slavery underscores how we generally continue to think of slavery as an isolated institution. We think of it as being tucked away in the South, separated from the free North and (mostly) free West, unintentionally blinding us to the tremendous reach and impact the institution had throughout the country.

Focusing simply on the country's early academic institutions, we can make an easy case that slavery at least indirectly aided many more of them than we might otherwise think. Numerous genteel southern men were educated in northern colleges and universities, especially the now famous Ivy League institutions that conferred elite intellectual status on their graduates. The tuition of these southern students often was paid from the profits of slave labor. Regardless of whether northern academies employed slave labor or participated in the international or domestic slave trade directly, many still derived at least a portion of their tuition income from the institution of slavery. Similarly, children of northern bankers who financed southern plantations, northern shipping magnates who transported slave produce, and northern textile manufacturers who spun clothing out of slave-picked cotton all could pursue their own higher education thanks to the indirect benefits of slavery and the central place that slave-produced commodities held in the national economy.

Slavery, of course, was not an isolated portion of the American economy. Nor was it an economically backward institution (not with the tremendous exports and profits it produced). Rather, it was a bulwark of the nation's commerce and contributed vitally, even if indirectly, to the country's economic growth, geographic expansion, and institutional development, including the development of many of our oldest and most respected institutions of higher education. This shouldn't surprise us.

Saturday's Charleston (WV) Gazette newspaper ran an article on the deep divisions in West Virginia's sesquicentennial commission which eventually led to the resignations of four commission members. Among other things, that commission is empowered to encourage the involvement of "civic, historical, educational, economic and other organizations throughout West Virginia to organize and participate in activities to expand the understanding and appreciation of the American Civil War." According to the Gazette article, several members of the commission, including Dr. Mark Snell, complained that it was not doing enough to expand West Virginians' understanding of the Civil War and instead was focused too tightly on funding tourist-friendly events, such as re-enactments. According to the article, Snell and some others on the commission thought that it was wasting $100,000 in state funds by funding parades, Civil War festivals, and other such events. Snell and three others resigned their positions fearing, according to the Gazette, that West Virginia's sesquicentennial was being turned into a mawkish, trivial celebration rather than a sober commemoration of a devastating conflict.

 

Of course, the remaining commission members might very well dispute this characterization. West Virginia Secretary of Education and the Arts Kay Goodwin authored a recent op-ed piece that listed the various commemorative events that will take place in West Virginia over the next four years, including educational events such as a lecture series sponsored by the state's Humanities Council. The bulk of Goodwin's article was devoted to detailing activities designed to attract tourists to battlefield sites and state parks, however, suggesting that state leaders might see the sesquicentennial more as a commercial opportunity than as a forum to teach about the state's history. The dispute that led to the defections from the board illustrates divergent and competing ideas about the purpose of commemoration itself. Is the sesquicentennial an opportunity to invest in the education of citizens, or is it merely a literal investment designed to boost the economy (at least in the service sector, like tourism)? It is not surprising that a state commission, whose members represent various organizations, groups, and constituencies, would want its investment in the sesquicentennial to produce a tangible return for private sector businesses that would stand to benefit from sesquicentennial observances. Beyond that though, what is the commission's responsibility to inform its citizens about their past and how it has shaped their contemporary society?

 

The danger of treating such commemorative events as mere entertainment is that it would squander the wonderful opportunity to reach a large attentive audience and get them to think about the Civil War and the myriad ways it still resonates with us. This would be especially galling when we have the opportunity now to redress the wrongs of the centennial commemoration and include traditionally marginalized groups in this commemoration. Ideally, a commemoration that would inform people about the Civil War experiences of all Americans, male and female, white and black, enslaved and free, would encourage us to think about the nature of our contemporary, multicultural society and reflect on the ties that bind us all together.

 

That being said, West Virginia's commission certainly is not ignoring the educational aspect of the commemoration. The real question for them and for all such state commissions is how to balance or even blend education and entertainment. This is a question that essentially came up in our most recent blog post by Tim Orr, in which he put forth the idea that Civil War re-enactors could and should do more to educate their audience on the larger ideological, social and political issues at play during the war, in addition to the detailed demonstrations they typically offer of soldiers' daily lives. Re-enactments and battlefield tours are undoubtedly quite popular, and we historians should not turn up our noses at the thought that many Americans might initially see the sesquicentennial as an entertaining public festival. We cannot expect all Americans to commemorate the conflict solely with sober reflection anymore than we can expect all Americans to see this as a solely celebratory, another Fourth of July ritual, for instance. The commemoration offers an opportunity for historians to reach a large, diverse, and curious audience. We should be willing to try to engage, inform, and educate, while acknowledging that much of that audience will be expecting entertainment too.

Today's blog post is contributed by Tim Orr, a professor of military history at Old Dominion University. Tim is a former Richards Center colleague and received his PhD from Penn State University in 2010. He also worked for several summers as a park ranger at the Gettysburg National Military Park.

In general, academic historians do not like Civil War re-enactors. During my first year of graduate school, I well remember one of my professors lambasting the hobby on the first day of class (this was inside a lecture hall in front of 200 undergraduates). "Those fellows should be ashamed of what they are doing," she declared with the deadly tone of an inquisitor. "If I had my way, I'd line them all up and shoot them." When I first heard her cruel message, I nearly choked. At the time, I had been re-enacting for more than eleven years. I wondered if I would escape graduate school with my life and limbs intact.



Luckily for the tens of thousands of re-enactors who inhabit this country, this particular bloodthirsty professor never got her way. But her outspoken opinions--although a bit extreme--are reflective of a wider feeling of distrust harbored by historians toward Civil War re-enactors (or "living historians" as they prefer to call themselves). With the arrival of the Civil War's sesquicentennial remembrance, some academics have once again reasserted their fears that re-enactors will impinge upon the academy's educational monopoly. A recent example of this comes from the pen of historian Glenn LaFantasie, who published an article for Salon entitled, "The Foolishness of Re-enactors." LaFantasie's lengthy diatribe rails against the impotence of re-enacting as an educational tool, clarifying his declaration of war against these fake armies of blue and gray:



As a re-enactor--and one who has been dressing up on and off in reproduction nineteenth-century garb for over twenty years--readers might be surprised to learn that I sympathize with LaFantasie. I appreciate his comments, bitter though they may be, and, in fact, I share his concern. I agree with him that my hobby is filled with pudgy, obsessive, perverse people. (Although to be fair, the same might be said of my profession--which is also LaFantasie's profession--academic history.) More to the point, I agree with LaFantasie that Civil War re-enacting has reached an intellectual dead end. Its central mission--to recreate battles from 150 years ago and to do so under the guise of entertainment--walks a dangerous tightrope that threatens to cheapen and fetishize the Civil War sesquicentennial. LaFantasie complains,

"These pretend  battles look and sound nothing like the real thing, although reenactors have convinced the public (and themselves) that they do. In the second place, these theatricals lose every bit of authenticity the moment the demonstration draws to a close and the faux dead and wounded on the field rise up in a mass resurrection resembling the Rapture, which is usually accompanied by the applause of the onlookers (who, by the way, have paid a hefty admission price to see grown men shoot at one another with the adult equivalent of cap guns). The crowd usually finds these phony battles truly entertaining, perhaps in the same way that 'professional' wrestling has its devoted fans. Nevertheless, entertainment--no matter how authentic the reproduction buttons and firearms might be--is not history."

So there it is: Civil War re-enacting IS NOT HISTORY. In his analysis, LaFantasie expresses concern that re-enacting will fail to meet the educational demands of the sesquicentennial, which demands reverence and awe--"hushed gravitas" to borrow his phrase. Of course, the 150th Anniversary is but one month old, so his contention that re-enactors will make a mockery of the commemoration remains, as yet, unproven. But let me extend my concurrence to LaFantasie's assertion by suggesting that Civil War re-enacting suffers from an even more debilitating disease than merely its failure to take the sesquicentennial seriously. In my opinion, this one critical miscarriage trumps all others. It is the failure of Civil War re-enacting to meet even the basic goals established by the re-enactors themselves.



This is an oversight that has plagued me since I entered the field of academia. While a graduate student, I chose to continue my re-enacting hobby, believing that I could use one to boost the other. Often, I would ask myself, and later, my fellow re-enactors: "Why do we re-enact the Civil War?" Rarely did I receive a satisfactory answer, either from myself or my companions. Typically, when they responded, my comrades' answers fell into one of four categories:

1)    To educate the public about the Civil War.
2)    To experience the sobering conditions of the Union and Confederate armies and thus feel what it was like to be a soldier.
3)    To honor my ancestor who fought in the Civil War.
4)    To hang out with friends who have a common interest with me.


Tim Orr in blue coat
At first glance, nearly all of these responses seemed reasonable to me, even slightly altruistic. But as I pondered their meaning, I became concerned that goals of Civil War re-enacting had not been met. Allow me to consider them, one by one.

1)    Do re-enactors educate the "general public" about the Civil War? The answer is "no." Many of them try to teach, but without professional training, or even cursory training at that, most re-enacting units and organizations fail dismally. A simple survey of the internet will prove my point. Most Civil War re-enactment units have webpages. I've scoured many of them, but I have yet to find a re-enactment unit/organization that claims to adhere to a set of defined pedagogical standards. Without any educational criteria, Civil War re-enactors have thus established an educational pastime where the participants know next to nothing about the techniques of teaching and even less about conveying the significance of their subject matter to their "students," the spectators who come to see their "living history" encampments. This failure to become proper "public educators" serves as the lynchpin of LaFantasie's argument: that re-enacting is a useless diversion. As he points out, re-enactors do know a few things, they know plenty of minutiae about the Civil War. To him, all they seem to know is trivia and nonsense. Although I tried hard to find evidence of pedagogical standards on re-enacting webpages, I found it easy to find evidence of "accuracy standards," meaning accuracy in terms of dress and appearance. Re-enacting is, as Tony Horowitz once pointed out, a great fashion show for its participants. Re-enactors try hard to appear as "authentic" as they can be. We consider it high honor to be labeled a "campaigner" or "hard core" by our re-enacting peers. (Conversely, we consider it the depths of shame and humiliation to be labeled a "farb," re-enactor lingo for an unauthentic-looking living historian.) In essence, the principal discussion among re-enactors involves advancing the kit, the uniforms, accouterments, camping supplies, and weaponry used by the re-enactor community. Please take it from me, we re-enactors discuss it all, ad nausea, right down to the needle and thread used by our favorite venders, whom we call "sutlers" (Heaven forbid a re-enactor has on a machine-sewn uniform!). Once, a re-enactor friend of mine delivered a half-hour dissertation on Union canteen straps. So, these are the kinds of debates that happen at re-enactments. What are not debated are the larger, more important issues of the Civil War. Re-enactments are devoid of mention of Civil War politics, economics, social history, racial history, gender history, or any of the subjects that tend to win historians the Bancroft nowadays. Civil War re-enactors couldn't care less about such names as McPherson, Foner, Holt, Faust, Neely, or Fields. I doubt any of my fellow re-enactors have read more than four of the recommended books on LaFantasie's reading list. Asking a typical Civil War re-enactor, "What caused the Civil War?" or, "What was the legacy of the Civil War?" will result in a disappointing answer. In short, re-enactors can tell the public plenty about the pointless minutiae of the Civil War, but next to nothing about the significance of the war, its changes, or its ongoing importance. When it comes to educating the public, re-enactors fail dismally.

2)    Do re-enactors ever truly "feel what it was like" to be a soldier in the Civil War? Not at all. Re-enactors usually spend a weekend recreating the Civil War, and then they call it quits. They get no sense of the perpetual and seemingly unending discomfort and distress experienced by Civil War soldiers. They get no sense of the physical demands of soldiering in the nineteenth-century, and they get no sense of the dangers faced. To say that re-enactors even re-live a fraction of a percent of the experience of the typical Civil War soldier is a stretch. I hardly need any specific examples here to justify my point.

3)    Do re-enactors truly honor their ancestors when they re-enact? This is a hard question to answer. Certainly, they perpetuate the memory of a generation that fought hard for its causes, but I highly doubt that any Civil War veteran, if he could somehow be alive today, would look upon re-enacting and be pleased with what he sees. To see a bunch of pretenders making hollow mockery of the sacrifices made from 1861-1865 would likely be infuriating to them. LaFantasie makes a similar point in his anti-re-enactor manifesto. He writes, "Interestingly, a good number of reenactors actually have been in real combat, having served (and gotten shot at) in Vietnam, the Persian Gulf, Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan. Perhaps these veterans find it difficult to leave their military identities behind. But it can't be easy for them to reconcile the actual horrors of battle with the sanitized 'combat' of a reenactment." I agree with LaFantasie that re-enacting is a tough thing to sell if one believes that combat is a grave, incommunicable experience. As Civil War veteran Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. once declared in a Memorial Day address, "We [veterans] have seen with our own eyes beyond and above the gold fields the snowy heights of honor, and it is for us to bear the report to those who come after us." Holmes might snarl at re-enactors who took from him and distorted this hard-won privilege to "bear the report" to future generations.

4)    Finally, do Civil War re-enactors make friends in the hobby? Most certainly they do. I cannot say anything negative about this motive. But it should be noted that re-enactors also make a goodly amount of enemies. If you ask a re-enactor what they dislike most about the hobby, 90% of the time they will answer with this phrase: "the politics." By this, they mean feuds with other units, with parent organizations, or between individuals in their groups. A cursory survey of Civil War re-enactor groups will reveal examples of lengthy unit by-laws and rules and regulations that get amended with each new "administration." Re-enactors vote for "presidents," "vice presidents," and "treasurers," "unit commanders," and a host of other regulatory offices. One group that holds its elections annually on Remembrance Day (Gettysburg's annual celebration of Lincoln's speech) has a "proxy voting form" for unit members absent from this event, and to vote by proxy somehow requires a "qualified witness" to "authenticate" the absentee ballot. (Apparently, this unit suffers from accusations of stuffing the ballot box.) Thus, re-enactors are prone to bickering, individually and collectively, not unlike modern day politicians. As a re-enactor, I have witnessed schemes and plots by units against other units, but I marvel at how these schemes and plots mirrored the scheming and plotting that occurred within the actual Union and Confederate armies. "Why, the politics are the most accurate thing we do," I have often exclaimed to fellow re-enactors. A quick survey of the adjutant generals' files will prove that regiments were rife with deceit and corruption. Re-enactor units are no different, but this one element of recreated historical accuracy--the feeling of aggravation at regimental politics--is the one thing that re-enactors would most like to purge from their hobby.

So, in summation, Civil War re-enactors do not even meet their own standards for success. They fail to educate, they fail to recreate the "soldier experience," they fail to do honor to the dead, and they partially fail at promoting friendship and cordiality. But as LaFantasie notes, they fail on a higher level, in that they fail to be of historic value. For the 150th anniversary, LaFantasie wants a "somber (and sober)" commemoration. He doubts that re-enactors can provide that. What good, then, is re-enacting? Are re-enactors even capable of adding to the sesquicentennial?

My analysis to this point has tended to agree with LaFantasie's grim assessment of re-enacting. But in answering the above question, I now diverge from his article. I submit, there is a reason to include re-enactors in the ongoing 150th Anniversary commemoration, for they are the vital scholastic bridge that can connect the public to the 150th. An oft-quoted maxim of tutelage usually attributed to Confucius reads: "I read and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand." Quite simply, the public needs a sensory connection to the Civil War, one that cannot be provided through the reading of great tomes written by academic historians. The public needs to "see and remember"; it needs "to do and understand." LaFantasie's alternative is to start with reading, but in this increasingly digital age, it is harder than ever to get people to use dry books as the starting point on their journey of historical discovery.

As much as we academic historians would like reading to be the first step on this great journey, it should probably be the last step. The first step should be the sensory step. Re-enacting provides that essential moment of inner commencement. The smell of the campfire (or the odor of a sweaty, wool-encased re-enactor), the creak of the leather, the acrid taste of black powder wafting in the air, the heft of a knapsack, the glint of the bayonets--these are the essential tangible connections that can stir public interest in larger, intangible historical issues. Perhaps re-enacting is not really history, but it establishes a person's primordial connection with history.

The next step on the journey of historical discovery should proceed as LaFantasie suggested: to museums, to preserved battlefields, and to Civil War gravesites. This will provide yet another bridge between the tangible and the intangible. Finally, the truly ambitious person will resolve to take those experiences from meeting with re-enactors and going to public history sites and transition then to reading, that is, trying to figure out for himself or herself the broader issues of the war. As eminent historian Gary Gallagher once opined, it is best for the Civil War buff to start his or her quest by going to a battlefield. Once on a battlefield, most open-minded visitors, as Gallagher asserted, will enter a "receptive state," whereby the enormity of the historical moment awes and captivates them. The best Civil War historians and national park interpreters use this moment to expand the visitors' battlefield experience by discussing the causes, the consequences, and the legacy of the war. They make the bridge, inspiring the visitor to do further research. Teaching history, whether in a classroom or on a battlefield, should focus on the seed, not the tree. I contend that Gallagher is essentially right, but a more embryonic--and perhaps far more effective--moment can precede the battlefield trip, and that is the Civil War re-enactment. When a person encounters a Civil War re-enactor, that sensory experience puts them into a similarly receptive state. The enthusiast often implicitly trusts the re-enactor's interpretive authority. Here, then, is the great opportunity offered by re-enactors, for the experience plants the seed to learn more.

The trouble is this: how can re-enactors be relied upon to say the correct thing? As previously mentioned, they often fail when their opportunity comes. I cannot count how many times I have seen an interested spectator witness a flawless drill done by a Civil War re-enactment unit, then hold a rifle under a re-enactor's supervision, ask question after question about the uniform and equipment, and then ask a re-enactor: "So what was all this about? Why did the nation fight the Civil War?" The re-enactor, who to that point has put on an A+ performance, will then offer a deplorably uneducated answer about states rights or tariffs, an answer that could have been contrived by any modern-day neo-Confederate society. The trouble, then, is that re-enactors do not know what to do when this "receptive moment" comes along. LaFantasie suggests that they should just be discarded from the sesquicentennial. This is a foolish suggestion. Instead of wasting the potential to teach, academic historians need to better harness re-enactors' knowledge and work within on a more unified mission of Civil War education. In essence, re-enactors can unlock a person's mind so that academic historians might fill it with knowledge. The trick is getting re-enactors and historians in the same room (or A-frame tent). How can this be done?

The answer is that both sides need to be willing to work with the other. Re-enactors should look to historians for pedagogical guidelines for their members to follow. Historians can provide re-enactors with valuable knowledge and perhaps refocus their "living history" re-enactments on issues that do not involve sham battles. The Civil War experience involved so much more than military altercations. Cannot Civil War re-enactors re-enact other events? Consider this: for 2011, the sesquicentennial of the beginning of the war, could not re-enactors recreate the moment of enlistment? Re-enactors, dressed as civilians, could sign their name to a roster, take the oath of allegiance, and "muster in" to a re-enactment unit. Such a recreation would bring to life to spectators the importance of this life-altering decision and no doubt, would highlight the political issues of 1861. I've been a re-enactor for over twenty years now. I have never seen such a divergence from the standard "shoot-'em-up" re-enactments. Why is that? Quite simply, re-enactors do not know how to re-enact anything other than battles. They need historians to lead them.

Conversely, historians need re-enactors to provide them practical knowledge from outside the classroom. Historians might disdain re-enactors' knowledge as pointless and trivial, but I imagine that if they watched re-enactors at their hobby, they might find some use for learning "to load in the nine count" or deploying "on the right by file into line" or packing a knapsack, or making hardtack. The historian's effort to make his or her research meaningful gains support if it can be re-enacted. Like the public, academics also need to "see and remember and do and understand." They cannot achieve this until they themselves meet the re-enactors on their own ground. Of course, none of this will happen until academics calm down and stop looking at the sesquicentennial with pessimism. We need to stop calling the re-enactors "foolish," or at the very least, refrain from threatening to shoot them.

@The Sable Arm, @Bull Runnings

As the title amply explains, this is a follow-up to my most recent post, where I posed the question of whether or not the public controversy over black Confederates was beginning to distract historians from other issues or topics they hoped to raise about our Civil War history during the sesquicentennial. In this sense, I wondered if responding to this controversy was yielding diminishing returns for academic historians. This question fortunately spurred a long debate over at Civil War Memory and Crossroads. The resulting debate, as it spooled out initially in the comments section on Civil War Memory, seemed equal parts fruitful and contentious. It began with Kevin Levin's response to the question I posed, in which he argued that my question missed the mark, for it was important to respond to black Confederate claims on the web in order to create a vibrant counter-narrative or argument online that would redress the problem of digital illiteracy, where credulous readers assume a relatively high degree of authority and veracity in information they find on the internet, such as those sites that promote the black Confederate myth. He made a compelling case that educators and historians should seriously engage this problem of digital illiteracy.

Kevin's point is a valuable one, and one that caused me to clarify that what had brought me to this question was not the effectiveness of the ongoing response to the black Confederate myth by educators like him and learned Civil War enthusiasts and intellectuals. Rather, as this controversy has begun to come to the attention of "mainstream" digital and print media, how should historians respond to it, how should they handle it? Having heard from only a couple of historians who had misgivings about media requests to address this topic, I felt prompted to ask  if "undue" media attention to this one topic stymie historians who wish to steer our public discussion of the Civil War toward other issues or larger themes. As I said in my initial post, I have not come to a conclusion about this, for the black Confederate controversy, if handled deftly, could just as well function as a starting point for just such an enlarged discussion. In other words, I guess I am asking just how historians might be able to acknowledge this controversy and respond to it without being trapped in a potentially endless debate over it.

As I said, I have not made up my own mind on this and do not have a strong sense of how even to evaluate the effectiveness of historians' engagement with this issue. Instead, I had hoped to generate a discussion about this issue, but I had had no inkling that it would lead to such a lengthy, thoughtful, serious, incisive, and even heated debate. Kevin Levin of course argued that engaging this topic online serves as a valuable and necessary contribution to public education. Especially with the proliferation of ever-changing online media and networking platforms, it is important for educators to develop their own digital literacy and learn how to use digital tools to engage varied audiences. I should add that this would be a valuable exercise whether historians wish to use these platforms to engage popular controversies or not. Matt Gallman also weighed in with a thoughtful question about the "audience" that historians reach through their blogs. Noting that we do not have good measures of who are reading these blogs, he suggested that it was possible that the black Confederate controversy was neither as public, nor as popular, as we might think. Rather, it might be an unending debate carried on by a small, but vocal, group whose voluminous blogs posts and comments belied their numbers and their larger impact. At the risk of any unintentional misrepresentation of their positions, Kevin and Brooks Simpson did not necessarily agree with this characterization, and both acknowledged that blogging itself is only one digital tool or platform through which to pursue our educative mission.

To me, Matt's question and Kevin and Brooks' responses actually dovetailed nicely with another theme that popped up later in the thread in a comment from Tim Orr: is there any way to assess what people think about this and other Civil War-related issues and what they learn from the online forums that engage such questions? I think this is an interesting question, in that new web formats likely will come with improving metric tools for assessing one's audience demographics. Brooks, however, also accurately pointed out that such an assessment of audience and "teaching effectiveness," need not be the only way to gauge the usefulness of historians' online intellectual endeavors. If one thinks of the web as a vast archive, simply by providing counter-arguments and opposing narratives to inaccurate and mythologizing online "history" sites, one is helping to build a store of knowledge that could teach web users how to read such sites with an appropriate skepticism and discrimination. This question led to yet another debate, at times spirited and other times tedious, which I don't need to get into here.

Overall, the discussion that emerged out of the initial question was, I think, immensely instructive, at least for me. Though Matt, Kevin, Brooks, and I came at this question from different angles and at times took opposing positions, one need not come down firmly on one side or another to gain something substantial from this debate. Though at times the discussion grew heated, it generally showcased the best that digital communication can offer: a lively exchange of serious and well-considered ideas and perspectives. Ultimately, I think these kinds of discussions are vital for helping historians crystallize their own ideas and strategies on how best to utilize online tools and participate in online communities animated by a sincere interest in history. It still will take me much time to become competent in using the ever-evolving digital tools that will have an increasing impact on education in the future; however, discussions such as these, where committed scholars and educators share their perspectives on digital strategies and their utility help to speed that process along for me and hopefully for others too.

With Mother's Day fast approaching, we just wanted to call attention to Heather Cox Richardson's excellent post for the Historical Society blog on the nineteenth-century origins of the Mother's Day holiday. Richardson recounts how Julia Ward Howe proposed the holiday as a call for an international women's peace movement that would put an end to all war in the wake of the carnage of the Civil War and Franco-Prussian War.

The debate over black Confederates, once confined largely to dueling blogs, continues to exert a hold on the professional media as well. Influential news outlets such as the Washington Post, NPR, and CNN (which picked up the WaPo article) picked up on this debate last fall when they reported on the controversy over the fourth grade textbook chosen for Virginia elementary schools that claimed thousands of black Americans willingly fought for the Confederacy. Numerous scholars and historians immediately refuted this outlandish claim, pointing out that while thousands of slaves forcibly served the Confederate army as servants and laborers, they were not enlisted, trained, or employed as soldiers (late in the war the Confederate congress finally passed a measure allowing the recruiting and arming of slaves, but only several dozen were mustered into the service, and none of them served in combat). Since then, judging by the media requests we receive at the Richards Civil War Era Center here at Penn State alone, numerous media outlets have continued to ask if there is anything to this "black Confederate" claim. The online magazine The Root, which is linked to the popular site Slate, is the latest journal to delve into the black Confederate debate.

The Root and the media outlets mentioned above generally have handled this debate with perspicacity. They typically point out the lack of evidence, misunderstanding of evidence, or the amateurish manipulation of that evidence by proponents of the black Confederates myth. Back in the blogosphere a few months ago, Brooks Simpson ably recounted how the favored evidence proffered by black Confederate enthusiasts has been thoroughly and easily debunked. Citing academic historians who have researched this subject exhaustively, the professional media have firmly rejected the myth that thousands of black men eagerly served as soldiers in the Confederate cause.

Of course, the person who has done yeoman work on this issue is Kevin Levin at Civil War Memory. He has challenged black Confederate mythmakers with vigor and gusto for several years now and shows no signs of slowing down, as he will be publishing a book on this subject soon (find his latest post on the topic here). Levin consistently has pointed out the basic historical illiteracy of the mythmakers, particularly their inability to understand how 19th century Americans conceived of citizens, slaves, and the citizen-soldier.

This, of course, is all well and good, especially the heavy lifting Mr. Levin has done on this issue. After all, it is one of the most important aspects of our mission as educators to expose the public to the fraudulent nature of such myths as the black Confederate story. I wonder, however, if historians are not in danger of sinking down into the mire of this debate by continuing to pay attention to every continued claim from the mythmakers and supporters and every rebuttal in the blogs and the news media. To be honest, I'm not sure where I stand on this, but I feel as though this debate is beginning to yield diminishing returns. Surely, the public has been educated about the debate and the shortcomings of the black Confederate thesis. Carrying on the debate with members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans and other true believers yields nothing, for they are resolved to support their position regardless of whatever evidence and logical analysis is marshaled to expose the fallacy of their belief.

Last summer, my colleague Sean Trainor noted that the black Confederate controversy should serve as a spur to further historical scholarship on the lives of black Americans in the southern states in the early nineteenth century. Levin himself is doing this to some extent by posting primary sources that shed light on the life of Silas Chandler, a slave who is often described erroneously as a Confederate soldier. I'm far from the first person to suggest that the best way to counter the black Confederate myth is to do a better job of teaching about the lives and experiences of free blacks and slaves alike in this period. Perhaps though, it is time to move beyond this debate and do just that.

@Crossroads, @Civil War Memory