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Top blue bar image The American Civil War Era
The primary course blog for HIST 246, Spring 2011
 

Wait! Wrong site?

August 17th, 2011 by Caleb McDaniel

This website is the blog for the Spring 2011 version of HIST 246. If you are looking for the Fall 2011 course, please go here. You can also see the final exhibit produced by students in the Spring 2011 and Fall 2011 versions of this course: Dick Dowling and Sabine Pass in History and Memory.

Weekend Round-Up

April 22nd, 2011 by Mercy Harper

I’d like to begin by thanking you all for a wonderful semester; I’ve learned so much from you all. I especially enjoyed reading this week’s blog posts and listening to Thursday’s discussion. Many of you argued that slavery must be acknowledged and even underscored when remembering the Confederacy. Although I’m sure you’re all quite busy with your final projects, I think taking a moment to consider Thursday’s prompt more concretely is worthwhile. If a memorial could be constructed that allowed white southerners to honor their ancestors without insulting black southerners, what would such a memorial look like?

Victor and Juri suggest that statues of great men might be a way for white southerners to honor soldierly courage without emphasizing slavery. But might this approach still offend black southerners? Does placing a monument to a black “hero” – such as the Arthur Ashe monument on Richmond’s Monument Avenue – alongside monuments to Confederate “heroes” solve the problem?

Contrastingly, Courtney suggests:

Perhaps the time for Confederate memorials in the classical sense, of imposing statues or even street names, is past. But this, conveniently, fits in with growing trends in America which value the glorification of communal heroes less and less.

If “hero” monuments are not as compelling to today’s citizens, what should a modern Confederate monument look like? Maybe some of you have seen the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington, D.C., which is inscribed with the names of American veterans killed or missing in action.

What does this monument communicate about the Vietnam War? Why might a memorial like this be more compelling to some citizens today, and why might it be controversial or offensive to others? Could a memorial like this allow white southerners to honor their ancestors without insulting black southerners? Could slavery’s role in the Confederate cause be forthrightly acknowledged in a monument like this?

Perhaps constructing “living monuments” would allow for a more complex and complete acknowledgement of slavery in remembrances of the Confederacy than material monuments. Responding to Horwitz’s account of the trivia contests utilized by Confederate heritage organizations, Alex offers this thought:

Heritage societies need to recognize the violently oppressive actions of their “Confederate Heroes.” Instead of quizzing followers as to “how many horses did Nathan Bedford Forrest have shot from under him during SCV trivia night, a more appropriate trivia question should be “which terrorist organization did Forrest lead to violently oppress black liberty following emancipation?”

If you made a trivia quiz about Dick Dowling, what questions would you choose to include? Do you see your final projects as constructing “living memorials” to Dowling?

Again, thank you all for your thought-provoking blog posts and discussions this semester. I’m looking forward to your final projects!

Some final announcements

April 22nd, 2011 by Caleb McDaniel

First, please be sure to extend your thanks to Mercy, either in comments to this post or by email, for all the work she has done for our course this semester! In addition to grading your blog posts, writing some outstanding round-ups about your posts, and lecturing to our class about her research, Mercy has been doing lots of work behind the scenes on our Dowling archive. Thanks, Mercy!

Second, as noted on the syllabus, you have the opportunity to write a third position paper to replace one of your earlier position paper grades. To take advantage of this opportunity, you must download the prompt and packet of readings from OWL-Space and submit your paper by 11:59 p.m. on May 4. When submitting your paper, you also must specify which earlier position paper you would like to replace. This paper is totally optional, so please think carefully about whether you have the time to take it on, and let me know if you have questions.

Group Project Rubric

April 21st, 2011 by Caleb McDaniel

To determine your individual grade for the group project, I will use the following rubric to assign your group a grade for the project as a whole, and you a grade for your individual contribution. These two grades will be averaged together to produce your final individual grade for the assignment.

As the rubric below indicates, one component that will be required from you is a private email to me, submitted in conjunction with your final product, in which you assign yourself what you think is an appropriate grade for your work on the project, together with a detailed explanation why you think this grade is appropriate. Think of this explanation as a “position paper lite”–you are taking a position (“My work deserves this grade”), but you also have to defend that position by clearly articulating the reasons, providing specific evidence to back up your position. If I believe that your defense of your position is persuasive, on the basis of the evidence you provide, then I will plug your self-assigned grade into the rubric below and take into account when calculating your final grade. If your email is not persuasive, I reserve the right to alter your self-assigned grade to one that I feel is more appropriate, which is why it is in your best interest to be honest and fair when assessing your own work. Before simply saying, “my work deserves an A+” you should carefully consider whether you can defend that position.

Here is how I will break down both your group grade and your individual grade–the two numbers that will be averaged together to get your final project grade:

GROUP PART

G1. GROUP OBJECTIVES (50%)
Did the group produce the digital object assigned? How well does the submitted product meet the objectives laid out by the group in their mission statement? Does the project demonstrate the group’s ability to “work collaboratively to make historically informed, reflective judgments about how to commemorate and interpret the Civil War for public audiences today”? Is there a clear “point” being made by the product?

G2. USE OF SOURCES (20%)
Does the group make effective use of the various repositories of sources available to the class? Are claims made in the project accurate and substantiated by reliable documentary or secondary evidence, with due attention to the perspective of the creators of the sources used? Are sources used somehow documented or cited within the group’s materials (i.e., links or bibliographic citations on Google Docs, blog posts, or other materials produced by the group)? Are there major sources available to the class that are directly relevant to the group’s objectives but are ignored?

G3. PRESENTATION (20%)
Are there repeated typographical, grammatical, or spelling errors in the project? Has the group taken steps to ensure that the final digital product has a finished and appealing look appropriate for viewing by the general public (i.e., resolution of images is consistent and sharp, hyperlinks are not “broken,” files can be opened, etc.)?

G4. DIVISION OF LABOR (10%)
Did the group make expectations about the division of labor clear? Is the record of who did what somehow documented by the group?

INDIVIDUAL PART

I1. INDIVIDUAL ASSIGNED TASKS (50%)
Based on the documentation available prior to the final submission and self-rating, did the individual group member complete tasks assigned to him/her by the group as a whole?

I2. OVERALL INDIVIDUAL CONTRIBUTION (30%)
Based on the documentation available prior to the final submission and self-rating, to what extent did the individual member participate in group work, communications, and internal group feedback? Was the individual group member’s contribution to the finished project (either in the planning or execution stages) demonstrably and grossly disproportionate when compared to the contributions made by the other members?

I3. SELF-ASSIGNED GRADE (20%)

Without Sanctuary

April 19th, 2011 by Caleb McDaniel

Today in class, we talked about the implications of the retreat from Radical Reconstruction, followed by the disfranchisement of African Americans across the South between 1890 and 1910. One of the results was that spectacles of racial violence–like lynchings–increased in number and even, literally, in popularity, as huge crowds attended some of the most gruesome hangings, collected souvenirs, and exchanged postcards about the experience. You can learn more about this period by viewing a gallery of these postcards at the website Without Sanctuary. The movie at this site provides a slideshow of some of the postcards, together with a narrative by the writer who collected them. Viewing this site is optional, and please be aware that many of these images are very graphic and disturbing.

The Numbers Question

April 19th, 2011 by Caleb McDaniel

In class today, Alex raised a good question about how the various groups should deal with discrepancies in the numbers of soldiers reported to have been involved in the Battle of Sabine Pass.

This is an issue that has been raised before on this blog and elsewhere. (For example, see my round-up post on Library Assignment #2, and this comment on one of Kat’s posts.)

What are you thoughts on how we should deal with this issue in the various parts of our project? Should we settle on a particular set of numbers to use across the projects? Or simply say that the number is still controversial? I’m eager to hear your thoughts.

Perhaps one way to begin this discussion would be to share how you yourself have resolved the numbers issue if you have had to pick a number for one of your group assignments. Which source did you rely on and why?

Group Resources

April 18th, 2011 by Caleb McDaniel

Whichever group project you are working on, you may be interested in using and checking out some of the resources that other groups have been compiling over the last week. Since we obviously want to avoid inconsistencies in what we are saying about Dowling in the various projects you are working on, it would be worth checking in with these other resources to offer feedback if you think that something is in error or to get help settling some point of fact.

  • The Movie Group is compiling their drafts of a script for their movie on Writeboard, with the same password we always use in this class.
  • The Timeline Group is compiling their data on a Google Spreadsheet.
  • The Podcast Group is compiling their scripts on their blog (and also on a Google Doc, link forthcoming). [UPDATE: Google Doc now available.]
  • Over at the Map Group, Courtney and Craig have posted some research-heavy posts on sites related to Dowling.

Have other resources you want to make available to all the groups? Let me know.

Blog Post #12

April 18th, 2011 by Caleb McDaniel

As noted on the schedule, there are two assigned readings for the last week of class: pages 79-108 of the Brown book that we read from at the beginning of the semester, and an essay by Tony Horwitz entitled “Cats of the Confederacy,” which is now available for download on OWL-Space.

For your final blog post of the semester, you should do two things:

  • Briefly report on your progress with the group project. What have you been doing this week? What will you do next?
  • Using the assigned readings to support and explain your answer, briefly respond to the question that Horwitz poses at the end of his essay on p. 44: is there “any way for white Southerners to honor their [Confederate] forbears without insulting” black Southerners? More generally, based on what you have learned about the Civil War this semester, what are appropriate and inappropriate ways to commemorate the Civil War in the South, one hundred and fifty years after the War began? Remember: it is imperative to ground your opinion in the readings we have done.

These posts will be due on Thursday morning, April 21, at 9 a.m.

Sectional Disunion: The UCV in Houston, 1895

April 13th, 2011 by Caleb McDaniel

Post written by Ryan Shaver

[NOTE: The author of this post is a student in HIST 300, an independent study group that has been reading historiography about Dowling, the Battle of Sabine Pass, and the contested memory of the Civil War. To satisfy one of the requirements for that course, Kat did some additional research about the context for the re-dedication of the Dick Dowling monument.]

If one did not know better, when Miss Winnie Davis took the stage at the United Confederate Veterans Reunion in Houston on May 22, 1895, she might have been mistaken for a deity. The uproarious reception from the 10,000 people packed inside the specially-constructed auditorium, not to mention the auxiliary thousands in the streets, suggested that she was more than a woman; that she was more than the daughter of the late Confederate President, Jefferson Davis. And she was. The jubilant tears and defiant Confederate battle flags visible at the scene signaled that not only was the Southern cause alive three decades after the Civil War, but Houston was its epicenter for a moment in time.

Read the rest of this entry »

Blog Post Round-Up

April 12th, 2011 by Mercy Harper

In this week’s blog posts, many of you showed interest in how sharecropping did or did not measure up to freedpeople’s interests and desires. Stephanie argues that “from its inception, sharecropping only minimally met the desires of former slaves.” In theory, sharecropping did – albeit minimally – align with freedpeople’s desire to maintain autonomy over their labor and families. However, according to Alex, the reality of sharecropping as it was lived and practiced “completely contradicted the freedman’s aspiration to own and control his own land.”

A post by Ross brings up an interesting question about sharecropping. He writes,

I am not sure that the progress made during reconstruction would have been accomplished, if blacks would have been given land and total autonomy, or if planters had won out and instituted a total wage driven system of labor.

Whether or not sharecropping was in line with the desires of freedpeople, could we still consider sharecropping a “progressive” development for the black community – or for the South as a whole? By what (or whose) standard would you evaluate progress?