I've always considered historic sites as wonderful classrooms and one-dimension of
my civil war class is always a field trip to a Civil War battlefield near
Charlottesville. I have found that taking them to these sites enables them to make
connection with the past. Once you get someone on historic site you sort of have
them. He is the best lecturer that I've ever had, even if it's at eight in the
morning, I still getting up to go to the class. Even though there are like 150 kids
in the class I feel like I'm one-on-one. One of the themes in my classes is always is
how important it is to differentiate between history and memory, and I tell
them that they're very different memories of things that happened in
history often contested memories and I want them to understand how the Civil
War created different streams of memory. My own work often takes the form of
addressing received wisdom about some part of the Civil War. One example of
that deals with a book I wrote on the concept of Union and the importance of that concept for the United States.
It's fashionable and sort of comforting to argue that the white citizenery of the
United States eventually really came around to supporting emancipation and
emancipation was kind of inevitable during the war and I've just never found
that in the
sources union was always the most important thing. There's a fundamental
misconception at the heart of your question and that is that most confederates
were trying to figure out how to get back into the Union at that point. No, most
confederate were figuring out how not to get back into the Union at that point. I
have a very lively classroom when I deal with the Civil War because the issues
are fundamental to our democratic republic. They revolve around race.
They revolve around the power of the central government compared to the power
of the states. The kinds of issues at stake during the Civil War still
resonate today. I have students come up to me all the time and tell me
history really isn't just black and white, is it? It's much more filled with
complexity that I thought it was like tell them that if there's just one thing
they take away from my class, that one thing is that however complicated they
think some scene or period in history was, it was actually far more complicated than that.
That anybody who wants simple answers should not take a history class.