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The primary course blog for HIST 246, Spring 2011
 

Weekend Round-Up

January 28th, 2011 by Mercy Harper
In a footnote to What this Cruel War Was Over, Chandra Manning explains:
…the idea for this study took root in class one day when students and I were discussing [James McPherson’s] For Cause and Comrades. Discussion remained lively until I asked students what made Union and Confederate soldiers different from each other. Sometimes dead silence in response to a question simply means students have not read the book, but on that day, they had been chatting right along up until that point. The student silence led me to resolve that before settling for the notion that 620,000 Americans killed one another because they all agreed on everything, I wanted to take another, more consciously comparative, look (227 n.16).

As many of you showed in your blogs, this comparative approach allows Manning to demonstrate difference and change over time in Union and Confederate motivation. Manning locates slavery as the central and dividing issue. As Craig from the Map Group argues, “For men in both armies, slavery represented the core of the society that needed to be changed or upheld. Thus you didn’t need a personal connection to slavery to fight for it [or against it], only a connection to your Northern or Southern society.”

Some of you questioned the “sweeping” nature of Manning’s thesis. Stephanie from the Movie Group, Clarissa from the Timeline Group, and Alex from the Podcast Group used evidence and close reading to critique Manning’s argument. Stephanie questions how Manning represents the relationship between slavery and the family in Confederate soldiers’ motivation. Clarissa points to Manning’s own evidence to press the issue of change over time in Confederate morale and motivation. Alex questions how Manning can make her argument without broad range survey data. What ideas do these critiques share? Would a greater focus on the economic role of slavery – as discussed by Dr. McDaniel on Thursday – help in addressing these critiques?
I encourage you all to check out these and other posts from the group blogs.

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Student Group Blogs

January 25th, 2011 by Caleb McDaniel

As mentioned in class, I have assigned each of you to a small group. Later in the semester each group will be working on a digital project about Dowling, as explained on the assignments page. In the next couple of weeks, I will be giving you more details about these projects and directions about getting started.

For now, you don’t need to worry about the projects except to know that I have created a blog for each group. For the remainder of the semester, you will be posting your weekly blog post assignments on these small group blogs, instead of in the comments to posts on this blog. The group blogs will also provide a place for you and your fellow group members to work collaboratively on your projects later in the semester.

Here are the group member assignments, with links to each group’s blog:

As I explained in class, these assignments have been made very deliberately to help you put the particular skills and interests that you identified in your survey responses to best use. If you have any questions about them, let me know.

For now, there are three things you need to do to post your third blog post on your new group blog.

STEP 1: Go to http://blogs.rice.edu and click on “Sign in Here” to create a new account. After you’ve entered your NetID and password and logged in, you will be prompted to create a blog, but you don’t have to do that. Once you’ve logged in, you can simply close your browser.

STEP 2: Look for an automated email in your inbox sometime tomorrow about your small group blog. It should provide you with a link that you will have to click to confirm your addition as an author on the small group blog.

STEP 3: Once you’ve confirmed your membership on the small group blog, click on the links below to find you group’s blog. In the lower right hand corner, you will see a link to “Log In” (or it may say “Site Admin” if you’re already logged in). Click there, and you will see the “dashboard” that was displayed on the screen in class today. Once inside the dashboard, click on “Add New” post (it’s in the drop-down menu under posts on the lefthand side). Now give your post a title, type in your response to the Blog Post #3 prompt, and when you are ready, click Publish.

Be sure to take these steps as soon as you can to ensure that you don’t have technical difficulties which prevent you from meeting the 9 a.m. Thursday deadline. If you encounter problems along the way, email Dr. McDaniel as soon as possible. If for some reason technical problems arise during the night before the deadline and you can’t get your response to post, then this time only you can leave your response in the comments box on the prompt post, just as you’ve done in the past. You should, however, treat that as a last resort; you need to get signed up on your small group blog and learn your way around the dashboard as soon as possible.

Posted in Announcements, Blogging How-To, Group Projects | Comments Off on Student Group Blogs

Weekend Round-up

January 21st, 2011 by Mercy Harper

Hello everyone,

As you all have pointed out, the Dick Dowling monument diverges from other Civil War monuments in important and interesting ways. Your classmates have intriguing ideas about why this might be so, and what these differences might mean.

Courtney and others point out how unusual it was that Dowling’s Irish heritage was emphasized, and ask what this might reveal about the status of Irish citizens in Houston at the time.

Stephanie notes that the many differences between the Dowling statue and typical Civil War monuments may mean that this monument was designed to achieve different goals entirely.

As Victor explains, the Dowling memorial at Sabine pass emphasizes vigor and masculinity, while the Houston statue depicts Dowling as a “more placid” and civilized gentleman. Was this more a reflection of the ideals of those who erected the statue, or might it reveal anything about conceptions of gender in early 20th century Houston more generally?

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Blog Post #3

January 21st, 2011 by Caleb McDaniel

As you work on your third blog post this week, you may want to refresh your memory about the rubric Mercy is using when evaluating your posts.

One of the key components of the assignment is to make sure that you respond directly and fully to the assignment prompt. It is perfectly fine for you to offer your own thoughts, unrelated to the prompt, in your post, but make sure that before doing that you have clearly and completely addressed the prompt at hand.

Also, take some time to read what other students have already posted as you craft your response. There are three reasons why this is a good idea. First, your fellow classmates are sharp; they have ideas worth reading! Second, one object of this assignment is to show that you’ve done and comprehended the reading; if you only repeat what another student has already said, it makes it hard to evaluate how well you yourself understood the reading. This doesn’t mean you can’t agree with a point that has already been made, but you can still demonstrate that the point is yours by providing new evidence in support of it, or using different parts of the reading to bolster the point. Finally, the best posts–the ones most likely to get A+ marks–are the ones that show originality of insight. Reading what others have said can both spark new, original insights and also help you identify which of the thoughts you’ve been having are unique insights that have not yet been shared.

Camp Scene, 22nd New York Volunteers

Photograph from Matthew Brady Collection of the National Archives

This week’s blog post assignment relates to the required book by Chandra Manning: What This Cruel War Was Over. The entire book is required reading. This is a longer reading assignment than the Brown book, but here are some tips to help you read.

Based on your reading of the Manning book, your post should respond to ONE of the following two questions.

Option #1: In class on Thursday, Alex raised the question of why non-slaveholders in the South would fight for a Confederate government that was, according to its own Constitution, dedicated to upholding slavery. A related question is why Northern soldiers would ever fight in a war to emancipate slaves if they were not always fully committed to racial equality or abolition. Does Manning’s book offer any evidence or arguments to answer these two questions?

Option #2: The primary aim of Manning’s book is to understand what motivated soldiers in the ranks during the Civil War. Did soldiers’ thinking about the war change over time? To answer this question, focus on one of the two armies–Union or Confederate–and choose two moments in the War, at least a year apart. How were the motivations of soldiers at one of the moments you’ve chosen different from or similar to their motivations at the other moment?

While you’re reading Manning’s book and thinking about these questions, you may also want to pay attention to the basic chronology of the war–major turning points, battles, and events. In class we will not be studying all of the battles of the War in detail, so this book is your primary opportunity to get a basic overview of the war’s history from beginning to end. Taking some notes about the key military junctures and figures will be useful to you later in the class.

Unlike with your previous blog posts, do not post your response as a comment on this post. I’m going to be assigning you to your small groups over the weekend, and each small group will get its own group blog. Your blog post this week will be posted on that new small group blog. Instructions about how to do this will be given in class on Tuesday. [P.S. Instructions are now available here.] In the meantime, you may want to begin writing your response in a text file on your own computer so that you can copy and paste it into the blog post after Tuesday.

Blog Post #3 will be due by 9 a.m. next Thursday, January 27.

Posted in Assignments, Blog Post Prompts | Comments Off on Blog Post #3

Fondren Brown Bag

January 17th, 2011 by Caleb McDaniel

Given our discussions last week about the documentary problems with the black Confederate thesis, you may be interested in knowing about a “brown bag” discussion that will be taking place tomorrow in Fondren Library on the subject of “Trusted Information in Research.” Here’s the preview that was circulated about that event:

Please join us!
Tuesday, January 18, 2011 @ noon
Kyle Morrow Room, Fondren Library, 3rd floor
for a Brown Bag discussion (bring your lunch)

Dr. Melissa Kean, Rice Centennial Historian, speaking on Trusted Information in Research
From web hoaxes to fraudulent research in respected peer reviewed journals, it can be challenging to conduct research with confidence.
How can trusted information be identified? How do researchers proceed in this environment?
Melissa Kean will share her experiences as a historian evaluating the authority and reliability of the sources she finds.

Don’t miss this chance for an interesting discussion and the always entertaining tales of Dr. Kean!

This Brown Bag is part of Fondren Library’s ongoing work towards fulfilling the university’s mission of raising its research and scholarship profile.

We’ll end class tomorrow about five minutes early so that anyone interested in attending this talk can–be sure to bring a lunch with you if you plan to go!

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A “black Confederate” in Texas?

January 15th, 2011 by Caleb McDaniel

As you work on Blog Post #2 and your reading over the weekend, you might also want to check out this post about James Kemp Holland. It’s optional reading, but a timely post in light of our readings and discussions this week.

Holland, like Weary Clyburn and Silas Chandler, is identified on some websites as a high-ranking black Confederate officer in Texas. He married and lived in the Houston area for some time, and he actually settled eventually in Chappel Hill, which is very close to the location of the SCV billboard that I saw on my way to Brenham and talked about in class. (A picture of the billboard is here.)

This well-researched post on Holland offers a good example of how careful documentary research can be brought to bear on the question of whether there were “black Confederates.” And the connection of Holland to Houston makes it especially interesting reading for us!

Posted in "Black Confederates" | 1 Comment »

Blog Post #2

January 14th, 2011 by Caleb McDaniel

Your second blog post assignment is based on the assigned reading for this week. You should read pp. 1-55 of Thomas Brown’s The Public Art of Civil War Commemoration and use specific evidence and examples from that reading when writing your comment. This book is a required text and is available in the Rice University bookstore and on 2-hour reserve at Fondren Library.

Your comment should do two things:

Task #1: Select one feature of the Dick Dowling statue in Hermann Park, which we visited yesterday, and compare it with the monuments whose designs and inscriptions are discussed by Brown on pp. 22-41. Then briefly answer: What conclusions would you draw about the Dowling statue based on its similarity to or difference from other monuments discussed by Brown? (If you would like to look refresh your memory of the statue, an anonymous local artist has posted some photographs of it on Flickr.)

Task #2: Based on your reading of Brown, come up with a potential question for research about the Dowling statue we saw. After reading Brown’s survey of post-Civil War commemorations of veterans, what would you most like to know about this statue in particular and its history? What do you think answering this question would tell us about the memory of the Civil War?

Post your responses to both tasks in the comment section below. You may wish to consult the blog post rubric (PDF) that Mercy discussed in class on Thursday to remind yourself about the important objectives for these posts. Your comment is due by 9 a.m. next Thursday, January 20.

Posted in Assignments, Blog Post Prompts, Dowling | 19 Comments »

Further thoughts on Blog Post #1

January 13th, 2011 by Caleb McDaniel

I’m extremely impressed by the overall thoughtfulness of your comments on Blog Post #1! These very sharp comments in fact got me thinking a couple of further thoughts.

First, many of you provided ample evidence to show that defenders of the “black Confederate thesis” also usually advance two related arguments: (1) that the Civil War was not about slavery; and (2) that interracial friendship and solidarity was possible in the Confederacy, to the point that some black Southerners willingly fought for the CSA. That many people believe these arguments are linked to the existence of black Confederates is clear from all of your comments. But that made me wonder: would the existence of black Confederate soldiers–even thousands of them–necessarily prove that the Civil War wasn’t about slavery, or that slavery was not oppressive? Set aside for a moment the lack of documentation for thousands of black Confederates, and consider this: would the discovery of actual black Confederate soldiers mean the war wasn’t about slavery? What would it take to prove the war was or was not about slavery?

Second, many of you suggested that remembering the Civil War in a particular way fills certain needs people have–to absolve themselves or their ancestors of guilt, for example, or distance themselves from racism. This made me wonder (and some of you alluded to this): if remembering the Civil War as a conflict that was not about slavery meets certain psychological or cultural needs for the people doing the remembering, how does depicting the Civil War as a conflict that was about slavery, or even a war to end slavery, influence the identities or satisfy the needs of people who remember it that way?

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Blog Post #1

January 11th, 2011 by Caleb McDaniel

As discussed in class today, the Civil War–and the role played in it by black Southerners–has recently been the subject of controversy in the national media, thanks to revelations about a faulty claim in a textbook distributed to fourth-graders in Virginia.

If that article proved one thing, it was that you can’t simply cite as fact everything you read on the Internet–perhaps especially when it’s about the Civil War. But this episode put a national spotlight on the ongoing efforts of Confederate heritage groups like the Sons of Confederate Veterans to argue that thousands of African Americans fought as soldiers for the Confederate army during the Civil War. Academic historians unanimously dispute this claim because it is not supported by documentary evidence, but the claims persist on the Internet and Confederate heritage groups continue to point to historical figures like Weary Clyburn–the man mentioned in the Looking for Lincoln excerpt we watched in class–as proof for broader claims about “black Confederates.” Yet the claims made about Clyburn by Earl Ijames, the historian pictured in that documentary, do not rest on solid evidence. And two historians have even discovered how several Confederate heritage websites falsified the image below to make it look like a picture of black Confederates. You can read about their discovery on the webpage Retouching History.

The authors of the website Retouching History discuss modern falsifications of this image of U.S. Colored Troops.

Later this semester we will talk in greater detail about the reasons why historians dispute the idea of thousands of “black Confederates,” and we’ll read a book by Bruce Levine that deals with the subject. But for now, I’d like you to think about this question: why do some groups like the SCV defend the “black Confederate” thesis so vehemently?

You may have your own speculations about what motivates claims about “black Confederates,” but throughout this semester, you need to be prepared to always defend your claims with evidence. To answer the question of why there are defenders of the “black Confederate” thesis, we need to look closely at what other arguments and hypotheses about the Civil War this idea is typically tied to or advanced with. Only then can we come to some evidence-based conclusions about why finding (or inventing) evidence of black Confederate soldiers matters so much to a small but vocal group of Americans.

Here is your assignment for Blog Post #1. First, read the following articles or blog posts, and be sure to also read through the comments left on them by readers.

Then, leave a comment here responding to these questions: What other arguments to defenders of the “black Confederate” thesis make about the Civil War era or the history that has been written about it? Do these other arguments shed any light on the question of why Confederate heritage groups are interested in finding supposed “black Confederates” like Weary Clyburn and Silas Chandler?

Back up your answer to these questions by citing specific quotations, comments, or statements that led you to your conclusion, being sure to say where you found these comments. If another student has already left a comment making the point you wanted to make it, you can still add something new by providing additional supporting evidence in support of it.

Posted in "Black Confederates", Assignments, Blog Post Prompts, In the News | 15 Comments »

Welcome!

January 10th, 2011 by Caleb McDaniel

Welcome to HIST 246 for the Spring 2011 semester at Rice University. You may wish to have a look around by reading about the course, looking over the assignments, and browsing through the schedule.

If you are enrolled in this class, please fill out the student info web survey by January 18 at the latest. Please do not fill out this form unless you are already registered for the course in ESTHER. If you don’t already have one, you will also need to create a Google Account for this course.

During the first week of class, you should also work on purchasing these required books for the course:

  • Thomas J. Brown, The Public Art of Civil War Commemoration: A Brief History with Documents (Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2004). ISBN: 978-0312397913, Amazon
  • ​Chandra Manning, What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War (Vintage, paperback, 2008). ISBN: 978-0307277329, Amazon
  • ​Eric Foner, Nothing But Freedom: Emancipation and its Legacy (Louisiana State University Press, paperback, new edition, 2007). ISBN: 978-0807132890, Amazon
  • Bruce Levine, Confederate Emancipation: Southern Plans to Free and Arm Slaves during the Civil War (Oxford, paperback, 2007). ISBN: 978-0195315868, Amazon

If you have any general questions about the course, please use the contact information in the sidebar of this page to reach Dr. McDaniel, or leave a comment on this post.

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