USCWC's
Pursuing research for my tenth novel, Sharpshooter, I gathered around me, over many years, more than 1,500 books, and from those books I gathered thousands of facts about every facet of the Civil War. The first draft was over 2,000 pages long; the published book is less than 160 pages short. During the 15 years between the first long draft and the final short draft, the mere accumulation of facts proved less and less meaningful; but the selection of facts and the placement of facts in contexts that ignite the reader's emotions, imagination, and intellect produced a novel that looks at the war in many unusual ways.
Only 13 when he took up his rifle, the hero of Sharpshooter, at the age of ninety, is still trying to focus the war in his sights. "Why," he wonders repeatedly, "since I was in every battle, East and West, with General Longstreet, do I feel that I missed the war?" The veteran sharpshooter and I had the same mission-- to target the facts. But the more facts we got on target the more we felt-- he as a participant looking back and I as a space age American citizen bemused and beguiled and bewitched by the facts-- that we missed the war.
Sharpshooter's theme is that all the participants, soldiers and civilians, missed the war as it happened and in memory. The vision out of which I created and developed the United States Civil War Center derives from the same conviction. Today, individually and collectively, no matter how many books we read or write, we miss the war to the extent that we fail to place the facts we know in the richest possible contexts and to illuminate them by personal emotional involvement, imaginative conceptualization, and complex intellectual implication. Possession of the facts and the artifacts alone is not enough. And it is not the dull recital of facts only that makes history dry and remote for many American children and adults, it is dull imagination.
The Civil War Center's mission is to facilitate the study of the war from the perspective of every conceivable academic discipline, profession, and occupation. I myself am not an academic historian; I am a novelist and a teacher of literature and creative writing in all genres. The Center strives to help all American citizens, young and old, North and South, avoid missing the war by urging them to imagine fresh perspectives that will enable them to make the war that most profoundly shaped the American character an integral part of our own individual identities today.
The Civil War Center has taken leadership in this new approach. In the spring of 1996, the U.S. Congress passed and the President signed a resolution designating the United States Civil War Center and its partner the Gettysburg College Civil War Institute as the institutions charged with planning and facilitating the Sesquicentennial. The long-range implementation of our interdisciplinary mission will materialize in publications, conferences, and exhibits each year up to and through the Sesquicentennial in the years 2011-2015. It will be the last opportunity for adult Americans living today to reflect upon the war and its legacy together.
The events of each decade in American history provide a fresh perspective on the Civil War. Professional historians, amateur historians, and ordinary citizens revisit, rediscover, and redefine this central event of the American experience. Thus, we reflect on the past, experience the present, and enlighten the future by the fitful light of shifting interpretations. The decade of the Civil Rights Movement was a perfect time for a Centennial reassessment of the Civil War. In the 1980's, several books, the movie Glory, and Ken Burns' PBS documentary The Civil War, gave us a sharp sense of the role of African-Americans and of women in the war.
By understanding the war, we can understand ourselves in the world today, both our dark problems and our bright prospects. We Americans have missed the war by focusing too much and too long on battles and leaders. That focus distracts us from our deeper purpose: to trace back to Reconstruction, to the War itself, and to the Antebellum era the origins of the forces at work in our culture today. Among the dark problems, racism, violence, economic instability, distrust of government daily stare us in the face. The promising benefits to society of the many technological inventions, medical discoveries, industrial techniques, and business methods that evolved out of the war have been only partially fulfilled or have been postponed, partly because the problems put a drag on the pace of progress.
Context is everything. By context, I mean-- webs of causes and webs of consequences. What if all this nation's historians to devote a full year to tracking down every fact about the siege of Vicksburg? What would they have accomplished, if that mass of interesting facts remained unilluminated by an understanding of webs of causes and webs of consequences? Facts alone fail us. Imagination alone fails us. Emotion alone fails us. But emotion, imagination, and intellect, acting together upon the facts, make the facts stand up and speak.
The purpose of making data more accessible is to provide the means for research; the ultimate goal of research is to provide the means for understanding and interpretation, for achieving a personal and a public vision, for seeing how our nation today evolved out of that most crucial event in our history so that we resolve our problems and realize our prospects more forcefully. The kind of interpretation that seems to us most promising is that which is derived from looking at the war not only through the eyes of the historian, but from the perspectives of all academic disciplines, professions, and occupations, an approach that involves people from all walks of life. The effect is that Americans will gain a more multifaceted view of the war than if they relied solely upon the interpretations of other professional experts in various fields.
The major tool of the Civil War Center's interdisciplinary educational effort is its Home Page on the Internet, which in its first two years has received more than five million visitors. Over 15,000 people from all over the world, from Japan to Israel to Germany to Sweden, from corporations to the military, from historians to school children now virtually visit the Civil War Center each day. We link our visitors to almost 2,000 other Civil War organizations. Sixteen organizations have given us their highest rating as a research site. Computer science, as one of the newest disciplines, enables us to see every facet of the war with great speed and precision.
Throughout history, worldwide, the turning of a century has been taken as an opportunity for reassessment, reaffirmation, and resolution. The year 2000 is only the second opportunity since the birth of Christ for the world to mark the beginning of another thousand years with a heightened consciousness of the lessons of the past and their application in the future. That happened in the year 1000, when the western world began to loosen the grip of the Dark Ages. If we the living fail to learn and act, the deaths of over half a million soldiers and civilians in the Civil War will have been in vain.
Americans will step over the creaky threshold into the New Millennium with the legacy of the Civil War still very much alive in the national consciousness, but with major differences from earlier landmark years. In 1900, Americans were far less interested in the history and legacy of the war than they are in 1997. During the four-year Centennial Commemoration of the early 1960's, academic historians controlled the public's perception of the causes, course, and consequences of the war. While reconciliation between North and South and conciliation among whites and African-Americans has not yet been achieved, a new and fervent national interest in the war and a new consciousness about it has been developing over the fifteen years.
Americans in all walks of life, aware more now than ever before of ways it has shaped their identity, are looking at the war from new and more numerous perspectives. The next major step will be to apply those perspectives to an understanding of how the American Dream and the American Nightmare evolved out of the war and how that understanding will enhance the ability of citizens to wake up from the nightmare and turn the dream into reality.
A major question is, What have we learned from our study of the Civil War over the past 130 years that will guide our conduct in the new century and over the next thousand years? Until about 1985, whatever we learned, academic historians were our teachers. In the ways that it is in the nature of historians to pursue, they acquitted themselves very well of their responsibilities. Americans are in their debt. But experts in other disciplines and citizens in other professions and occupations have arrived upon the field, standing shoulder to shoulder with historians. While the ranks of Civil War roundtables and of reenactors have swelled dramatically, devotedly preoccupied with battles and leaders and authentic details, archaeologists, for instance, have knelt to the dirt at dawn to dig and have walked away at dusk with the Civil War under fingernails and artifacts that speak volumes in their hands.
The question, What have we learned? will become more pressing and somehow more poignant on the occasion of the Sesquicentennial. Will it be a simple four-year flagwaving celebration or will it be a complex meditation with active consequences? One answer is that we have begun to learn that many new perspectives have not yet been brought to bear and that many people in academic disciplines, professions, and occupations have not yet realized that they may not only write and teach about the war alongside the historian, but that their unique contributions will be to write about it from their own special perspectives.
"Do you have an interest in the Civil War?" I asked my optometrist recently, just after he had declared my vision good. He was, he said, reading the second volume of Shelby Foote's massive history. "Do you ever relate what you read to your own profession?" He answered, "No." But I saw something dawn on his face. So we talked a long time about the possible effects of faulty vision upon the conduct of the war. Even while reading Shelby Foote's narrative, my optometrist had missed the war; but he now sees the possibilities.
I ask the same question at every opportunity, and I received similar answers when I asked my insurance agent, my accountant, and my physician. Lawyers have a long and distinguished record of publishing books on battles and leaders; but ironically, there is no book by a lawyer that offers a legal interrogation of the issues and ramifications of the war. Engineers are among the ranks of nonacademic historians who become so entranced with a battle or a leader that they write books, yet no study of the astonishingly crucial role of various kinds of engineers in the war has been published.
As we approach the New Millennium, a sampling of recent books reveals, with a few exceptions, a reliance upon familiar approaches and subjects. The discovery of a few facts more than the previous writers had at their disposal or a clever angle is too often the author's justification for writing a new book on a battle or a general, employing a generic narrative strategy and style. Knowledgeable readers, however, are already demanding and getting more: an imaginative conception, a distinctive style, and a fresh method. A sampling also reveals that a trend is already underway toward dealing with new subjects and taking, occasionally, new approaches.
Daniel Sutherland's Seasons of War: The Ordeal of a Confederate Community, 1861- 1865 is a breakthrough study that should influence the way that Civil War books are written from this day forward. In his lively and vivid style, made dramatic by his audacious decision to use the present tense, he places Culpeper, Virginia on the forestage of history, breathes life into a community's past. Culpeper becomes an active and lingering presence in the reader's mind. Sutherland raises and answers such questions as: What was the class structure of the Culpeper community and what feuds or other conflicts erupted? What changes did war force upon politics, education, journalism, religion, health care, and the food supply? What effects did the war have upon the farmers, free blacks and freed slaves, merchants, and manufacturers who struggled to keep the community's economy functioning? How did the people of Culpeper behave during federal occupation? How prevalent were lawlessness, guerilla activity, and fraternization? Sutherland is uncannily adept at placing readers in the midst of it all and activates all their senses, intertwining the social and the military life to create a prism through which readers may feel, know, and imagine the many facets of the decisive moment in their history.
Sorely missing from the Civil War bookshelf until recently were books on Confederate exiles in South America; on medicine and surgery; on the economics of individual southern states; on the role of Native Americans and black regiments; on the role of the Irish, Jews, and other European immigrants, North and South. Several books provide unusual approaches to the question, Why did men on both sides fight and how did they react to battle? Comparative histories show parallels between antebellum Southern planters and European quasi-feudal lords and delineate the European inheritance of the legacy of the Civil War. Serious studies, as opposed to the dominance of sensational potboilers, of military intelligence during the war have appeared. Diaries of women who played various roles--from domestic witnesses to spies, nurses, and soldiers in disguise-- are being published with increasing frequency. A few books provide us with an understanding of how Christian rhetoric and symbols were absorbed by the rhetoric and icons of the tradition of the Lost Cause and transmitted down to the present day through public education in the South and in popular culture. The Civil War Center has discovered that many publishers of books for children about the war are more innovative and venturesome than publishers of adult books. For instance, one publisher has planned a series of books for young readers that looks at facets of the war from the geologist's and the geographer's perspective.
The term "historian" should be used in the broadest and most just sense, in reference not only to academic historians, but to men and women who write about historical events after long hours of daily work at a profession or an occupation, passionately pursuing their interest in Civil War History "on the side." But most of them do not yet bring to those interests the perspectives of their own professional or occupational expertise.
Even so, the achievements of some nonacademic historians have added impressive works to the endless Civil War bookshelf. Peter Svenson, an artist, missed the war until he bought a farm and struggled to restore it and work it, and discovered it was a Battlefield. Walking the battlefield in his backyard, delving into mysteries of the human spirit, he shows us how to mesh our private lives with our country's public history. Jerry Ellis, a young man who refuses to miss the War, recounts his adventures, in this century's final decade, as he follows the route of Sherman's fiery march through Georgia. Arlene Reynolds, an actress, discovers the manuscript of Mrs. Custer's memoir of the war years and the Civil War Center urges its publication. Gene Salecker, a campus policeman at Northwestern University, an independent scholar, recounts the sinking of the Sultana, the worst marine disaster in the history of this nation: more than 1500 Union soldiers recently released from Confederate prisons, drowned.
The possibilities of interdisciplinary studies have remained unenumerated, perhaps to avoid the charge of improbability or outright absurdity. For instance, imagine the announcement of an all-day, three-day conference on the Civil War that consists of talks by experts in 28 distinctly different disciplines. Even those few who profess the conviction that the more perspectives one brings to a subject, the more invigorating the discourse might be doubtful, skeptical, and even disinclined to attend, on the assumption the whole enterprise would be foredoomed to crash in a traffic jam of ideas. To explore the possibilities for interdisciplinary studies, the Civil War Center held such a conference Thanksgiving week in 1996 at LSU. For participants and the audience, made up of students, teachers, and townspeople, it was a provocative success. It provided a yes answer to the question, Is a broadly interdisciplinary approach to the Civil War viable and will it provide Americans with a means of understanding the war's legacy in all its complexities?
Never before had the concept of interdisciplinary studies been applied so broadly to a single, though multifaceted subject; never before, certainly, had the Civil War been scrutinized by so many disciplines and professions at one time. Not only did we understand the War more fully, we understood each discipline more clearly as it was applied to a subject not normally within its domain. We also arrived at a more complex understanding of the dynamics of interdisciplinary study itself.
Having tested our mission in this conference, we plan to test it further, calling on major experts from all over the nation to convene in a major city within the next few years. We will publish papers delivered there in the first issue of our annual hardcover publication, Civil War Perspectives.
Education on all levels everywhere in the world has suffered from a prolonged over reliance on specialization. It seldom occurs to a person who is interested in the Civil War to study it from the perspective of his or her vocation because in the national consciousness, the Civil War is an historical subject-- it says so in library card catalogs and computers; it is therefore the province almost exclusively of the historian. But since this is also, though more recently, the age of interdisciplinary studies, on may wonder why historians are perceived to have a lock on the Civil War?
In the general public's experience, however, it is not the historian who dominates the subject, but the novelist and the movie maker. Most historians have a limited audience. James McPherson may be an exception, but in the popular imagination, Shelby Foote, novelist-turned- historian in the 1950's, remains our greatest living historian. In the realm of popular culture, of mass communication, the study of the war has always been multidisciplinary if not interdisciplinary. More recently, it has also been multicultural and, has thus come under fire as being politically correct. The spectrum of interest now is educationally, politically, and culturally quite wide and varied and extremely complicated.
For over thirty years, we have heard that the interdisciplinary approach to subjects and problems is the wave of the future, and that this educational method will compete with specialization. We need both; each will reinvigorate the other. The melancholy fact is that while the potential is great and the prospects are very good, the interdisciplinary approach has been conservatively practiced. The norm is that two related disciplines work together on a given subject or theme. Beyond the classroom and the covers of books, conferences on selected topics seldom bring together experts from more than three disciplines. Why not? Logistical difficulties may be overcome by determination.
The Civil War Center has already begun to fire the first shots in a revolution that supplements the basic narrow focus with a very broad range of perspectives that will expand and deepen the nation's varied interest in its Civil War. Having sampled the usual and the slightly unusual Civil War offerings to the American consciousness published in these late years of the 20th Century, let consider how we might begin to explore relatively new possibilities for books in the 21st century. Given the fact that Phi Kappa Phi as an organization is in its nature interdisciplinary, I can expect each reader of this journal to recognize his or her own profession in the following list. To illustrate more concretely the possibilities of the interdisciplinary approach, here are a few questions, limited by my own knowledge of these many areas of expertise, that suggest fresh perspectives. Questions for which the Civil War Center has books, conferences, and exhibits planned or underway are marked with an asterisk.
Out of the Civil War Center's active relationships with writers of all kinds and with over thirty publishers, many books have been published and are in the works. As part of its active participation in the education of the young, the Center works with publishers to create revolutionary interdisciplinary Civil War textbooks for courses on all levels.
The most effective way to study the war, to understand it and its legacy of good and ill in all its complexities, is to draw each individual, young and old, male and female, of every ethnic origin, into the discourse, in a multiplicity of forums. And one way to do that is to appeal to each person to bring the principles of his or her vocation to bear upon corresponding facets of the war.
While contributing to a multifaceted approach to a rich subject, one gains a clearer and often rejuvenating perception of one's own discipline. For instance, at my suggestion, a psychologist created a profile of Robert E. Lee's life and personality to present to a routine meeting of a local association of psychologists. Everyone, obviously stimulated to a degree that seemed to surprise themselves, joined in the discussion afterwards. "This was the most invigorating interaction we have had with each other ever," said the president. "It reminds us of what we got into the profession to do." Looking at the Civil War from the perspective of your own profession will pitch you into another dimension of emotion, imagination, and intellect.
To study the Civil War is also to study the antebellum through the reconstruction years as one unbroken series of events. The Civil War is the ideal subject for such an extreme experiment with interdisciplinary studies as I am predicting and proposing here. Because every aspect of human experience in America was brought into play in that four year ordeal and because the consequences have affected every aspect ever since, to study the war is to study everything else; it is well suited to the formulation of the strategies, principles, and techniques and to test the efficacy and reveal the possibilities and benefits of interdisciplinary studies.
The premise behind interdisciplinary studies is that just as no person is an island no subject exists in isolation from all others; that a complex examination of a subject is rewarding; that several disciplines provide the milieu for that complexity; and that each discipline is enriched and made more powerful by interaction with other disciplines. The conscious effort to train and practice this process to achieve a multifaceted perspective on human experience can only yield positive results that even I in my overreaching enthusiasm and eagerness cannot yet conceive. What is learned from the United States Civil War Center's pursuit of its interdisciplinary mission will deepen our understanding of the nature, value, and dynamics of the realm of interdisciplinary studies itself.
Participation in interdisciplinary studies may be for some people an occasional exhilarating and rejuvenating excursion, while others find a permanent home in interdisciplinary studies itself-- a universe of possibilities. People have already embraced this approach with relief and even with fervor, in and outside university settings. It is, of course, people young and old who come to it fresh, with no history of narrow focus, who are most likely to follow where interdisciplinary studies may lead. The effect on education, and with the full participation of people in all professions and occupations, on society and ultimately on human consciousness can have revolutionary benefits.
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