Head’s Blog

With Thanksgiving over and winter term underway I am back in the classroom teaching my course on the American Civil War once again. While there is always a lot of prep work leading up to any course—however often you have taught it—it’s nonetheless energizing and exciting to be back in the classroom.

My course has four main goals:

1. As writer and historian Shelby Foote once said, the Civil War is “the crossroads of our being.” Much of American history up to the 1850s leads to the war and so much of what comes after either stemmed from the war or was complicated by it. Students should have a more than passing knowledge of U.S. history and of the Civil War in particular. That conflict continues to shape the ways in which today we see and experience national identity, regional difference, and race. Our national narrative is neither straightforward nor easy—it is not a simple story of heroes undertaking good deeds. More often we are faced with trying to understand how good people could do some pretty awful things. The study of civil war—any civil war—encourages this reflection perhaps more than any other discussion of history.
2. I want my students to appreciate the complexity of the past and to think like historians. Much high school history is about making the past comprehensible to students by providing straightforward narrative structures, clear motives, and easily discernable consequences. While these are certainly helpful, life, politics, and national events rarely follow such easy logic, and the Civil War is a wonderful test case for just how messy history can be. Students will read many different interpretations and viewpoints on the war. Our History Department does an outstanding job of encouraging students to engage directly with historical materials. I’m looking forward to further honing these skills within my particular area of expertise.
3. My students should also be able to relate the lessons about human nature that inevitably come up in our discussions to their own lives and experience. The war is a wonderful theater to discuss human nature and the personal skills that lead to success. The war has it all—big moral issues, life-threatening situations, petty grievances, malicious ill-motivated squabbles, and raw ambition. How did Abraham Lincoln stack up against the far more experienced Jefferson Davis? What makes for a great general? How do you get things done? What can we each learn from the struggles our protagonists faced?
4. Finally, of course, I would love my students to take from the war insights into our own times. I like Mark Twain’s line that it’s not so much that history repeats itself as that it echoes. And today, the echoes of the Civil War seem louder than ever. We have a president who appears to model himself, at least in part, on Lincoln not only in the eloquent phrases that he borrows but also in the way he put together his cabinet and in his slow and measured approach to the decision on whether to increase US troop levels in Afghanistan. The Civil War provides us with a lens through which to try to understand our current conflicts. What are we fighting for? How do presidents, generals, Congress, the media, and the public interact to develop a strategy? How does a president manage generals who disagree with him? What is the interplay between goals and strategy?

I have attached my syllabus (starting with just the first three weeks) for those of you who might be interested in what we are doing. One of the remarkable things about this new information age is that a student of history, and particularly of the Civil War, can find a vast array of materials online. This year I am using James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom as my main text. McPherson writes beautifully and this book has to be the best single volume on the war. His book as well as all the supplementary materials are available online including Lincoln’s speeches, newspapers from the time, soldiers’ letters, and on and on.  So feel free to follow along and to email me any questions you might have.