Taking a Walk on the Civil War’s “Dark Side”
This year, I am embarking on a rather foolhardy ambitious scholarly agenda, and my central project is a textbook for the Civil War and Reconstruction eras. I know, I know…there’s a crying need for...
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The Case of the Missing Adjective: Writing and Choosing Whiteness
Consider the following sentences: “…learning absorbed the lives of southern youth prior to the Civil War in substantial ways.” “A belief in Manifest Destiny cut across partisan and sectional...
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I Will Not Argue About the Confederate Flag.
The murder of nine Americans by a terrorist in Charleston Wednesday night, besides being a monumental tragedy, also gave us the absurd spectacle of South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley (a woman of...
View ArticleIn the Shadow of the Civil War’s Beginning
As a scholar engaged in a study of the Civil War Era in the United States, It’s been my job lately to think about the way we remember and interpret this period. And the more I think about it, the more...
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Our Reconstruction Problem
U.S. History has a Reconstruction problem. This is true in both the literal (Reconstruction was the most problematic era of US history) and representational (we have problems reckoning with this period...
View ArticleHistorical Periodization and the Long Civil War
Periodization is both the most useful and most obfuscatory tool in the historian’s toolbox. In Western historical writing (and because of the West’s culturally-imperialist tendencies, in many other...
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