Personal Identity, Intellectual Humility, and Different Ways of Remembering History

The Pennsylvania Soldiers’ Memorial at the Gettysburg Battlefield. Photo taken by the author in 2013.

I like to think of myself as someone who is able to consume a high volume of information in a discerning way. I try not to get too emotionally high or low about anything I read online. I try to think critically about a source’s motivations and potential biases. I think Sam Wineburg and Sarah McGrew are on to something when they discuss the importance of lateral reading, or the idea that when you see a claim online, it’s important to search broadly to see where else the claim is being repeated.

Sometimes I read or watch things from divergent perspectives and find myself making unexpected connections.

I recently finished reading Ty Seidule’s fine book, Robert E. Lee and Me. Seidule grew up in a strongly Southern household. He idolized Robert E. Lee, loved watching movies like Gone with the Wind and Song of the South, and read books by people like Joel Chandler Harris who romanticized the plantation life of the pre-Civil War South. Early in his Army career, he considered himself a Virginian more so than an American. But Seidule’s academic studies and his eventual transition into a historian at West Point challenged the foundation his personal identity was built on. He began to understand that the version of history he consumed was inaccurate and quite racist. He initially idolized the statuesque, “marble man” version of General Lee that portrayed him as a virtuous, Christian soldier who had no choice but to fight for the imperiled South in a valiant cause against the Lincoln administration’s tyranny. But Seidule eventually realized that other Virginians like Winfield Scott, George Thomas, and even most of Lee’s own extended family considered themselves Americans first and chose to defend their country. He came to understand that after more than thirty years of serving in the United States Army, Lee had the power to make a choice in 1861 and chose to fight against the Army that he had previously served.

And yet, as Seidule evolved in his own thinking he found himself confused by the views and behaviors of fellow Army officers who, when presented with scholarly resources and primary source documents about the Civil War, refused to abandon the same sort of Lost Cause/Moonlight and Magnolia’s understanding of history that Seidule had once embraced.

I also recently watched a video by musician Rick Beato. He discussed a recent trend of popular YouTubers giving up the platform and reflected on his perceptions towards online comment sections. One thing that stuck out to Beato about these influencers was that many of them cited the stress they felt about views and comments on their video as one reason for leaving YouTube. While he appreciated the positive comments towards his own work and politely considered constructive criticisms for his own videos, he had likewise learned to not get too high or low about comments in general. That’s because “if somebody writes a negative comment, it’s about them. If somebody writes a positive comment, it’s about them . . . I always realize their comments are talking through their experiences.” In Beato’s mind, the big takeaway was that creative people should focus on things they care about and not get drowned out other peoples’ noise, even if it’s overly positive.

Finally, I recently watched a webinar with the American Association of State and Local History about doing public history during polarizing times. One of the presenters (I don’t remember who), discussed the concept of intellectual humility. The presenter remarked that people who demonstrate intellectual humility are more likely to listen to differing perspectives, ask clarifying questions, seek new ways of understanding a topic, and recognize their own intellectual ignorance and social blind spots. Put simply, people who are intellectually humble are always learning, receptive to constructive feedback, and willing to have meaningful dialogue with others even if not everyone is in full agreement.

All three of these presentations helped me crystallize some of own thoughts about history, memory, and identity.

History is never just about the facts. It is a deeply moral and personal exercise that shapes how people construct their identities. Where did I come from? Who are the people who compose my community and play an influential role in my life? Who are the people from my family’s and my nation’s past who shaped my place in the world today? In the United States, students’ history instruction in the K-12 classroom is tightly embedded within lessons aimed at promoting loyalty to the nation-state, a love of country, and civic participation. History isn’t just about where we’ve been, but where we’re going. Children often receive similar lessons in their home environment when it comes to history.

Vigorous debates about what should be taught in the history classroom are reflective of individual views about the meaning and morality of history as much as teaching good historical scholarship. They are reflective of what people think about the role of history in shaping the present. The present shapes the study of history as much as the study of history shapes the present.

Many people who are invested in teaching what they consider to be good and accurate history in the classroom aren’t necessarily subject matter experts when it comes to primary sources, historiography, or current scholarship. But they understand that how history is taught can be consequential for how students perceive their personal identity and their relationship to the nation-state. For some, history is the glue that creates a shared understanding of what it means to be an American. For others, history provides the blueprint for improving society and avoiding the mistakes of the past (of course, there will always be new and unforeseen mistakes that we’ll commit moving forward). Individual understandings of history are therefore shaped by a complex web of the personal: identity, experience, and politics.

History has been at the forefront of political debates in the present because the past ten years have seen what I would consider to be a fairly successful attempt to elevate the experiences of Black, Indigenous, other People of Color, Women, and LGBTQ people to the forefront of U.S. history. The Cold War era Consensus School of History, which privileges unity, shared values, triumphant historical moments, and the downplaying of previous conflicts, has been criticized for leaving out too many narratives and minimizing the contested nature of U.S. politics over time. Newer interpretations try to highlight “hidden histories” of the past and critically examine the nation’s shortcomings. Most people born in the twentieth century received a consensus interpretation of history in their classrooms growing up. Adherents to consensus history probably support the idea of their children and grandchildren receiving a history education that is very similar to the one they received years ago. Opponents of the consensus approach probably feel that this approach is inadequate for meeting the needs of today. In reality, both consensus history and whatever we want to call the newer school of history have value in the classroom. Adherents to both sides nevertheless view their position through the lens of their personal identity and experiences. They believe that a pendulum swing towards the opposite direction poses a threat to the nation’s young people and their collective understanding of history. I for one certainly support any approach that works towards students receiving an inclusive interpretation of history because an inclusive history is a more accurate history.

All of this is to say that for many people, considerations of identity, experience, and politics loom just as large or even larger than “the facts” when talking about history. The fellow U.S. Army officers who dismissed Seidule when he shared primary sources about the causes of the Civil War probably struggled to move themselves towards a view of the past that was critical of their understanding of history, their family’s history, and their personal identities in the present. They were strongly invested in a worldview that was Too Big to Fail. If the war was really about slavery and General Lee committed treason against the United States, what else could these officers expect to be wrong about when it came to remembering the past? I certainly wouldn’t want to accuse them of lacking intellectual humility, but one could argue that this exchange wasn’t about “the facts” because they were intellectually invested in a particular interpretation that they would not budge on. What Seidule struggled to comprehend about this collective pushback was that it was just as much about them and their perception of their place in the world in that moment as it was about the historical information he shared with the group.

In the end, my work as a historian is undoubtedly shaped by my personal experiences and my perceptions of the world today. My identity, experiences, and politics are both a blessing and a curse for my work. I have learned a lot over the years, but I try to proceed with intellectual humility, doing my best to keep an open mind to information, perspectives, and scholarship that I am unaware or disagree with. And when it comes to the comment section . . . it’s about them, not you.

Cheers

A Review of “Tar Heels in Gray” by John B. Cameron

This is the way a regimental history should be written.

I kept saying that line to myself as I read Tar Heels in Gray (McFarland Press, 2021), John B. Cameron’s fine study of the 30th North Carolina Infantry Regiment during the American Civil War. Cameron, a historian of France by trade, grew up in North Carolina reading about the Civil War. This book was in many ways a return to his roots; a personal effort to understand how the men of his community viewed their participation in the war through their military experience in the 30th Infantry.

I found Cameron’s book compelling because he was not interested in re-hashing the 30th Infantry’s military experiences. One brief chapter provides an overview of previous studies and regimental histories that explored the unit’s experiences in battle. Instead, Cameron seeks to use most of the book to interpret significant questions about the men’s lives before the war, their motivations for fighting, their connections to slavery, and their views of the Confederate nation during the war. What emerges from this study is a powerful, empathetic analysis that dramatically conveys the Civil War’s horrific bloodshed to the reader. Clocking in at a brisk 132 pages of main text, the book moves quickly and succinctly.

There are three noteworthy aspects of Cameron’s book that are worth mentioning for the way they challenge previous Civil War historiography while offering new arguments worthy of further consideration.

Soldier Motivations for Fighting: A central aspect Tar Heels in Gray is Cameron’s effort to uncover the motivations behind the common soldier’s desire to fight for the Confederacy. He paints a nuanced portrait. For most men, military service offered several tangible benefits. They believed the war would be a short one, with Confederate victory assured against a weak, divided opponent. By quickly getting into the fight, these men hoped to get some of the action and enjoy some of the “glory” of military conflict. Military service also offered a steady income while the war continued, an especially important consideration for men who did not immediately join the Confederacy when the conflict began but soon realized it would take years and found bounty and monthly payments attractive. Finally, a sense of shared communal participation also influenced the men. As Cameron explains, “The desire to prove your manhood and emerge from the test of battle a hero no doubt motivated many. When friends and relatives are announcing their decision to march off and win the day, the desire to show bravery and be a hero surely brought more than a few to volunteer” (59).

As such, Cameron correctly argues that the personal motivations of the 30th Infantry’s soldiers for fighting reflected a range of motivations: “No doubt there were some who were desperate to maintain slavery. There may have been some who were Southern patriots and felt some Confederate nationalism. However, neither is mentioned or implied in letters or diaries. What the documents do suggest among initial volunteers is a belief that North Carolina had every right to secede, even if it was unwise, and the reaction of the Union was tantamount to armed invasion. There was much talk about the need to defend their homes, to defend North Carolina” (58). In other words, what may have been a deeply political issue for Confederate leaders was a deeply practical and personal issue for many of the enlisted men: they would follow along with their community to defend their state and their personal homes if that was expected of them at the war’s beginning.

But Cameron does not leave these men off the hook when it comes to slavery. The Confederacy’s political leadership was clear about its interest in defending slavery. The various seceding states that issued Declarations of Secession were explicit in their beliefs that slavery was morally right, constitutional, financially important for the Southern economy, and that it was wrong to ban slavery’s expansion into new Western territories. Abraham Lincoln’s election to the presidency threatened the status quo. Even North Carolina, whose political leaders hesitated to push the state into the Confederacy and only did so after Lincoln called for 75,000 troops to subdue the rebellion after the firing of Ft. Sumter, subtly mentioned its interest in preserving slavery. Weldon N. Edwards, the president of the North Carolina secession convention, announced that he had no interest in partnering with the “Black Republican Union” due to what he perceived as the Republican Party’s desires to end slavery in the South.

Cameron therefore gives readers an important insight about the differences between soldier motivations for fighting and governmental motivations for fighting. The common soldiers who decided to fight for the Confederacy in the 30th North Carolina may have had a range of motivations that did not include a particularly strong view towards protecting slavery. Many of the men were probably poor whites who had limited connections to slavery and no chance of becoming an enslaver someday. But in choosing to enlist for a government that clearly stated its interest in protecting slavery, these men took on that fight and agreed to put their lives on the line for that cause, regardless of how the institution personally affected them.

The same idea can be applied in the other direction. Modern day Confederate defenders are often quick to point out that President Lincoln stated in his First Inaugural Address his wish to not end slavery, only to maintain the Union. Many U.S. soldiers felt the same way. Both of those claims are true. But as the war progressed, the end of slavery became a war measure in the fight to defeat the Confederacy. If a Union soldier who opposed a war to end slavery continued his military service after Lincoln’s issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, he was now fighting a war to end slavery regardless of his personal views.

One does not need to go into a long dissertation about other U.S. wars where soldier motivations and governmental motivations differed to see other examples of this trend.

Soldiers’ Economic Backgrounds and Class Status: A second insight from Cameron concerns the wealth and status of the men who fought for the 30th North Carolina Infantry. Cameron follows a similar analysis to Joseph Glatthaar in his book about soldiers in the Army of Northern Virginia. In that book, Glatthaar used financial data from census records to develop theories about who in Southern society was doing the bulk of the fighting for the Confederacy. Glatthaar broke up the these men into three categories: poor men with less than $800 to their name, middle class men with wealth between $800 and $3,999, and wealthy men with more than $4,000 to their name. Glatthaar’s statistics led him to conclude that the Confederate war was “a rich, moderate, and poor man’s fight.” In other words, Glatthaar argued that all classes of Southern society had a role in fighting for the Confederate cause.

Cameron found that this conclusion did not fit the experiences of the 30th North Carolina and that Glatthaar’s class categories were too broad. He instead broke up the 30th North Carolina into six different classes: Poor laborers who owned no land and had less than $400 to their name, small farmers with less than $5,000 worth of total property, craftsmen/tradesmen, middling farmers with between $5,000 and $25,000, professionals, and wealthy planters with more than $25,000 in personal property.

Using these six categories, Cameron found that 91% of the men in the 30th North Carolina had less than $10,000 worth of personal property and about 78% had less than $4,000. All field and staff officers were professionals or wealthy planters. This data leads to a fairly obvious conclusion: “in military matters as in politics and local society, men of means were assumed to be the natural leaders. Men of no means were assumed to be fit mostly to follow” (45). For the 30th North Carolina, it was indeed a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.

Welcoming the End of the War: A final insight from Tar Heels in Gray follows an argument made by historian Kenneth Stampp in his fantastic 1980 book The Imperiled Union. In that book, Stampp made the provocative argument that by the time Lee surrendered to Grant on April 9, 1865, most Confederate soldiers welcomed the surrender and were not interested in continuing the fight. Cameron makes the same conclusion about the men of the 30th North Carolina. After spending much of 1861 in training and garrison duty, the regiment saw hard fighting for the remainder of the war. Disease, starvation, and desertion was rampant. “Letters from men of the 30th written in the second half of 1864 and into 1865, are filled with despair. Given the lack of food and supplies, large scale desertion and strong anti-Confederate feeling at home, many men of the 30th saw no hope for victory,” argues Cameron (130). They viewed President Davis and General Lee’s continued fighting with anger, despair, and fear. When surrender did arrive, one 30th North Carolina soldier nicely summed up his feelings in a personal diary: “Thank God this war is over.”

Tar Heels in Gray is a great book for a few reasons. By choosing to not solely focus on military matters, Cameron does great work in providing a holistic view of the soldiers and their life experiences. Many of these young men were fairly poor but going about their daily lives in the hopes of moving up in society and, in some case, providing for their own families. Local, state, and eventually Confederate leaders told them that their livelihoods, families, and their state were in danger of being destroyed with the election of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency. Whatever they felt about the politics of slavery or disunion, the men of the 30th North Carolina choose to fight for the new Confederate nation. The price they paid for that decision was an eighty percent casualty rate, untold death and destruction, the death of comrades from battle and disease, and, for the survivors, a lifetime of trauma.

I recommend Tar Heels in Gray for any student of the Civil War. Unfortunately, this book was Dr. Cameron’s last work of historical scholarship. After reviewing the book I was saddened to learn that he passed away in 2022.

Why I Haven’t Embraced the Terms “Forced Labor Camp” and “Enslaved Labor Camp” in My Work on Slavery

“Words Have Power,” a pop-up exhibit displayed at Fort Pulaski National Monument in 2022. Photo credit: APPPublicHistory on Instagram

In his book Robert E. Lee and Me, Ty Seidule rejects the term “plantation” and instead embraces the term “enslaved labor camp” to describe the conditions enslaved African Americans faced while working on large scale agricultural properties in the U.S. South before the Civil War. In her book I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror and Survival in the War Against Reconstruction, Kidada E. Williams likewise rejects the term “plantation” and calls for using the term “forced labor camp.” According to Williams, “the word ‘plantation’ reflects the enslaving class’s romanticized view of slavery. ‘Labor camp’ or ‘forced labor camp’ more accurately describes the living conditions enslavers forced upon the men, women, and children they held in bondage” (1). Last year, Fort Pulaski National Monument created a pop-up exhibit called “Words have Power” that also embraced the term “forced labor camp” as a suitable replacement for “plantation.”

Seidule and Williams have produced wonderful works of scholarship that should be read by all. Any historic site that takes the work of interpreting slavery seriously should be applauded and encouraged to keep up the good work. However, I do not embrace the terms “forced labor camp” or enslaved labor camp” in my own work interpreting slavery.

Let’s begin with the term “forced labor.” What immediately sticks out to me is that forced labor is not synonymous with enslaved labor or slavery. Forced labor doesn’t always mean “enslavement.” Indentured servitude is a form of forced labor, but it is not slavery. The rapidly industrializing economy of the Gilded Age featured company towns, union busting, poor wages, long hours, child labor, and horrific working conditions. Those company towns could very easily be defined as “labor camps.” Depending on your perspective, they approached something akin to forced labor and enslavement in a certain sense, but it’s nevertheless hard to make a direct comparison with the conditions that existed with antebellum slavery.

What makes chattel slavery in the United States a particularly horrific form of forced labor is that it was premised on the idea of human ownership of other humans as property. Property to be bought, sold, traded, loaned, and insured like livestock animals and tools. The U.S. form of slavery was rooted in the idea of enslavement as inherited, race-based, and for life. “Forced labor” conflates different forms of labor throughout history and minimizes the uniquely brutal conditions of chattel slavery that existed in the United States during its first eighty years of existence.

We now move to “camp.” A camp is a temporary structure. Civil War soldiers established camps in the field during down periods, tore down those camps when it was time to move, and then reestablished those camps once they reached their next destination. Prisoners of war were placed in POW camps such as Andersonville and Libby Prison during the war. Enslaved freedom seekers sought refuge at camps established by the U.S. Army that were often referred to as “contraband camps” at the time. Before the war, freedom seekers sometimes established temporary encampments along their path out of enslavement.

What should be evident here is that a plantation cannot possibly described as a “camp.” For the enslaved, the plantation was an all-encompassing experience that shaped almost every aspect of their lives, for the entire duration of their lives. Enslaved people lacked the basic right to freedom of movement, were constantly under surveillance by their enslavers, and endured any number of harsh conditions that made their daily lives a physical and mental struggle. Countless numbers of enslaved people would have been confined to the small temporal radius of the plantation for the entirety of their lives. Plantation slavery was not a temporary status in a temporary place.

We can also see that “camp” runs the risk of leading people to sloppy comparisons with other horrific episodes in history. The World War II context of concentration camps and internment camps is an obvious comparison point. My friend Emmanuel Dabney argued on Twitter that referring to the plantation as a camp was unhelpful because “people already spend too much time making comparisons with the Holocaust to try to emphasize the pain of American slavery.” In other words, U.S. slavery should be studied on its own terms without having to make comparisons to other horrific episodes in history to generate empathy for slavery’s victims. While comparative historical analysis is a welcomed form of study, it must be done carefully and responsibly. Sloppy comparisons create misunderstandings of both things being compared. I fear that even if a well-meaning scholar uses the term “camp” within the context of plantation slavery, it will still lead to confusion from students and lay audiences.

Williams is undoubtedly correct when she asserts that the term “plantation” was used by the enslaving class to romanticize slavery. Indeed, some historic sites and the visitors who patronize them today are susceptible to falling for the romanticized view of Southern slavery that the enslaving class wished to impart on future generations. A couple years ago I wrote about Julia Dent Grant’s Personal Memoirs and how they reflect what I describe as a “plantation narrative,” a literary genre that emerged in post-Civil War America to romanticize slavery and uphold white supremacy. But I do not see why one group’s attempted appropriation of the term “plantation” necessarily means the term has lost all meaning as a signifier of chattel slavery.

I particularly appreciate the work of six scholars who collectively wrote Remembering Enslavement: Reassembling the Southern Plantation Museum last year. The authors freely use the term “plantation” throughout their study of fifteen historic sites that interpret slavery. They provide some good definitions of what else the term might uncover besides a romanticization of slavery:

The Southern plantation played a major role numerically, geographically, and politically in establishing the ancestral footprint of Africans in the Americas and shaping the geography of descendant Black communities, some of whose members still live and work in plantation regions.

Remembering Enslavement, Page 4

They also cite the work of Matthew Pratt Gutterl

More than a big white house on a broad stretch of land with a handful of slaves, the plantation is thus a place, a practice, and a politics. As such, it is tied to histories of colonialism and slavery but also fixed on the land, in the way that a lighthouse marks the establishment of waterways. Imagined this way, the plantation has history, though not usually in the way we imagine such things, and not as a fixture of one particular moment in time.

Remembering Enslavement, page 32

A place, a practice, a politics, a history. A complex term with many layers beyond a form of white supremacist nostalgia.

I am not opposed to revising the language of slavery more broadly. In fact, I have previously written on this page about my own evolving embrace of the term “enslaved people,” which I pretty much use exclusively now rather than “slave.” I agree with every other language revision proposed in the above image at Fort Pulaski. I do not agree with Aeon Magazine editor Sam Haselby, who states that “when scholars rely heavily on terminology which they’ve imposed onto the past and that the actors themselves never used (or did not even know), it is often a sign you’ve left history and entered cultural studies.”

While Haselby acknowledges that there are exceptions to his rigid terms, the reality is that language evolves over time as a natural byproduct of human evolution. We don’t talk the same way people did 100 years ago, and they didn’t talk the same way as someone 100 years before that. I don’t feel comfortable saying, for example, that historians of disability who do not use once-popular language to describe disabled people such as idiot, insane, or retarded in their scholarship are actually cultural critics and nothing more.

I think the term “plantation” could be replaced someday, but I also think we can do better than “forced labor camp” or “enslaved labor camp.”

Cheers

The Historical Enterprise and the Future of Twitter

Kevin Levin has an interesting essay on his website, Civil War Memory, in which he asks the question, “Is Twitter Good for History?” Levin recalls being on the website for ten years, developing a strong following, and working hard to use his historical knowledge to correct misinformation about the Civil War era. However, after quitting the site for good two months ago, he questions whether his time was well spent on the website or whether it’s good for the entire discipline of history.

I am still on Twitter for now, but find myself asking similar questions lately.

I was required to join the website as part of a graduate level digital humanities course in 2013. The stereotypes I had in my head about the website made me question why we had to join the website, but I quickly fell in love with the platform. I was blown away by how many historians were using the website to share articles, discuss the state of the field, and share their own scholarship. I spent a lot of time following these conversations and trying to find historians to connect with. The mix of good conversation, scholarship, and a bit of commentary on current events (but not an overwhelming amount) appealed to me.

Twitter eventually became an extension of my professional career, a sort of digital business card to demonstrate my passion for public history and the Civil War era. I have been very, very fortunate to have received invitations to write essays, contribute book chapters, and give presentations because someone found me on Twitter. The website has undoubtedly been good for me.

It is safe to say, however, that I gave up the notion of positively influencing public discussions about history via Twitter a long time ago. Many historians on the website have argued that there is a sort of moral obligation to advance a more thoughtful, nuanced view of history to public audiences, but I think the field’s collective influence is extremely limited in the first place. The fluidity of the Twitter feed means that information is constantly passing through the screen and dying a quick death. A well-written Twitter thread might get a few thousand views and retweets, and even that occurrence is rare. Levin also points out that “Tweets enjoy a short half-life . . . but beyond that they quickly fly off into the dark never to be seen again.” I also mentioned in a different essay on this website two years ago that Twitter lacks basic tools to ensure that past tweets are easily accessible for future audiences.

Twitter is ultimately beneficial to me not because I’ve been able to shape the hearts and minds of lay audiences, but because it’s allowed me to connect with other historians.

Is Twitter good for history? I think it’s been good for building connections and conversations within the field. Put differently, Twitter allows for historians around the world to communicate with each other beyond the annual conference circuit provided by organizations like the AHA, OAH, and NCPH. However, I question whether it has provided much influence beyond our own scholarly communities. Continued cuts to humanities funding, assaults on tenure, few academic or public history jobs, the popularity of questionable Bill O’Reilly/Bret Baier pop histories, and obnoxious laws prohibiting any K-12 history instruction that makes students feel any sort of “discomfort” about the past all point towards the #Twitterstorians community having little influence beyond its own walls. I don’t see many politicians advocating for the history field lately, or at least a form of history education that professionals could get behind.

Don’t get me started on the book bans!

What’s disappointing about the future of Twitter is that it’s become Elon Musk’s play toy for him to do whatever he wants and promote whatever cause he is concerned about. To be frank, the website has become dull and boring. As Levin’s departure shows, a lot of talented people have gladly left the platform. Divisive content from the loudest voices is pushed to the top while the voices of those who pay $8 a month to get a blue checkmark are given privileged placement by the site’s algorithms. So much for “free” speech, right?

I don’t know what the future holds for the historical enterprise when it comes to social media. Some folks have taken their talents to TikTok and Instagram through fascinating video productions. My friend Marvin-Alonzo Greer (@magthehistorian) has mastered these platforms and is doing great work that genuinely seems to be reaching an audience beyond the academy. I thought Post or Mastodon would be suitable replacements for Twitter, but I’ve been greatly disappointed by both. I personally put a lot of hope into Post, but the site has been geared more towards sharing news. Many users seem to only post about Donald Trump or Musk, which I find boring and unproductive. Mastodon’s platform is too siloed and I couldn’t log into the site from my phone, so I gave up on it quickly. I’ll keep tweeting for now, but I have no idea what will happen with the site moving forward.

I guess I will keep trucking along with this little website and see where that takes me 🙂

Cheers

I Exchanged Texts with Robert E. Lee. It Was Weird.

2023 is shaping up to be the year of AI technology. AI can write song lyrics, auto-tune a singer’s voice, modify historical images, and produce videos with silly facial filters on SnapChat. For those of us interested in research and writing, ChatGPT is poised to revolutionize the ways we conduct research, communicate with each other in our personal and professional lives, and perhaps even transform our need to learn how to write in the first place. AI will soon be able to produce wholesale scholarship in the form of blog posts, articles, and books on its own.

As one tech evangelist recently proclaimed on Twitter–seemingly unworried about sharing misinformation herself–so-called “Knowledge workers” need to be very concerned about AI’s ability to replace their skill sets in the future. (She needn’t worry: the academic job industry has been steadily decimated for a long time already).

In learning more about AI, I came across a fascinating app called “Historical Figures Chat” that proposes to simulate the act of exchanging text messages with historical figures from the past. As described by the app’s creators:

Our app, “Historical Figures,” uses advanced A.I. technology to allow users to have conversations with over 20,000 historical figures from the past. With this app, you can chat with deceased individuals who have made a significant impact on history from ancient rulers and philosophers, to modern day politicians and artists. Simply select the historical figure you want to chat with and start a conversation. You can learn about their life, their work, and their impact on the world in a fun and interactive way. Our A.I. is designed to provide you with a realistic conversation experience, making it feel like you’re really talking to these historical figures.

I decided to download the app and try to keep as open a mind as possible. I chose to exchange texts with Robert E. Lee. I started with some basic questions about slavery and secession.

I began by asking “Robert E. Lee” about his views on the Confederacy and slavery. It became evident that Historical Figures essentially grabs content from Wikipedia and tries to mold it into a language that the historical figure would have said in the aftermath of a key moment in their life. Here we see Lee repeating his oft-quoted line about fulfilling his duties to his state over the interests of the federal government that put him through college and employed him through the entirety of his adult life. However, “Robert E. Lee” provides few specifics on what he meant when said it was his duty to “fight for what I believed in.” What about Virginia shaped his decision to fight for Confederacy? Why did Lee place his loyalty to his state and a new government claiming federal powers over much of the South? “I fought for Virginia to fight for what I believed in” tells us little behind Lee’s reasoning for his decision-making.

Continuing, Lee states that he personally opposed the institution of slavery, another line often paraded by Lee defenders. I believe Elizabeth Brown Pryor’s classic biography of Lee, Reading the Man, still offers one of the best explanations of Lee’s relationship with slavery:

Lee’s political views on the subject are remarkably consistent. He thought slavery was an unfortunate historical legacy, an inherited problem for which he was not responsible, and one that could only be resolved over time and probably only by God. As for any injustice to the slaves, he defended a “Christian” logic of at least temporary Black bondage. “The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially, & physically,” Lee told his wife in the famous 1856 letter. “The painful discipline they are undergoing, is necessary for their instruction as a race, & I hope will prepare & lead them to better things. How long their subjugation may be necessary is known & ordered by a wise and Merciful Providence.” He went so far as to believe that the slaves should be appreciative of the situation and showed displeasure at any sign of their “ingratitude.”

. . . Lee might characterize slavery as “an evil in any country” and state that his feelings were “strong enlisted” for the slaves, but he ultimately concluded that it was a “greater evil to the white than to the black race” and admitted that his own sympathies lay with the whites.

Perhaps more telling that words were Lee’s actions in support of slavery. He continued to participate in the system and distance himself from antislavery arguments up to and during the Civil War . . . In 1856, and as late as July 1860, he expressed a willingness to buy slaves. Those blacks who were in his possession were frequently traded away for his own convenience, regardless of the destruction it caused to the bondsman’s family. He ignores injustice to the slaves and defends the rights of the slaveholder in both his 1841 and 1856 letters to his wife, and he continued to uphold laws that constrained blacks well after the war. During the brief time that Lee had authority over the Arlington slaves, he proved to be an unsympathetic and demanding master. When disagreements over slavery brought about the dissolution of the Union and he was forced to take sides, he chose not just to withdraw from the U.S. Army and quietly retire, as did some of his fellow officers, but to lead an opposing army that without question intended to defend the right to hold human property. Even taking into account the notions of his time and place, it is exceedingly hard to square these actions with any rejection of the institution.

Lee may have hated slavery, but it was not because of any ethical dilemma. What disliked about slavery was its inefficiency, the messiness of its relationships, the responsibility it entailed, and the taint of it . . . If Lee believed slavery was an evil, he thought it was a necessary one.

Elizabeth Brown Prior, Reading the Man, p. 144-145.

I continued by asking Lee about a comment he made about Black Americans after the Civil War.

Here, we see Lee reducing his racist statement to the need to find common ground after the Civil War. “We must strive for unity by respecting each other’s views even when we don’t agree with them.” Unless those views were held by Black Americans and their supporters in which case calls for unity and respecting each other’s views can be thrown out the door.

After some conversation about Reconstruction, I asked Lee if it was true that he had whipped enslaved people he claimed ownership of in the 1850s.

There has been much debate among historians on this subject, but evidence suggests that there was at least one incident in which three enslaved freedom seekers were whipped on Lee’s orders. I believe that evidence. That no allusion to this incident is made in the conversation is troubling. The second text from Lee in this screenshot is just absolutely silly and doesn’t reflect anything Lee would have said at that time, but of course that might also be reflective of my question in the first place.

I then asked Lee how he made amends for slavery and worked for the betterment of the United States after the Civil War.

Again, we see comments that any Civil War historian worth their salt would shake their head over. Lee opposed Black voting rights and warned his son that “you will never prosper with the blacks,” and yet he somehow also supported civil rights, the end of racial discrimination, and the rejection of white supremacy as a governing ideology.

Finally, I decided to go all in and try to break this app.

There is absolutely no evidence to indicate that Lee felt this way about Frederick Douglass or the fight against racial discrimination more broadly. Of Lee, Douglass complained at the former’s death in 1870 that “we can scarcely take up a newspaper that is not filled with nauseating flatteries of the late Robert E. Lee . . . It would seem from this that the solider who kills the most men in battle, even in a bad cause, is the greatest Christian.” Wait ’til Douglass hears what Lee told me about it! Maybe he’ll change his mind.

There are a few things that really trouble me about AI technology used in the context of this app. First, the text replies from historical figures like Lee are a constant string of apologia, whitewashing, and reassurances aimed at putting controversial subjects to rest for twenty-first century audiences. The responses are aimed at tampering down past controversies without thoroughly explaining how and why the emerged in the first place. They aim to make us feel better about historical figures from the past rather than facing tough subjects with the sort of nuanced, complex analysis that the past deserves.

The Robert E. Lee presented in bot form opposed slavery and didn’t join the Confederacy for that reason – he did so because he loved Virginia and nothing else. Lee abhorred racism and white supremacy and was actually anti-racist in asking former White Confederates to treat Black Southerners kindly. In fact, Lee even admired Frederick Douglass! Sure sounds like a Lost Cause argument if I’ve ever heard one made about Lee.

It’s the same for text exchanges with Andrew Jackson, Himmler, Stalin . . . you name it. The app minimizes the words of these people and turns them into tragic figures who regret their past actions and are deserving of our forgiveness and empathy today. The historical figures are constantly rationalizing, explaining, minimizing, and apologizing their actions, even when many of these same figures never expressed such remorse in their lifetimes.

Second, I question the pedagogical value of this technology. What lessons about past historical figures can students learn from engaging in a hypothetical text message conversation that they can’t get from other forms of study already taking place in the history classroom? Does this technology help students better understand these historical figures and the thinking that went behind their actions and words? Is Historical Figures Chat not just a fancy way of delivering content from Wikipedia?

Regardless of my own skepticism of this technology, AI is something that all humanities scholars, practitioners, and supporters must grapple with moving forward. It is not good enough to just say that it should be banned from the classroom. How do we introduce students into the use and abuse of the past by AI technologies? A colleague on Twitter suggested an activity idea in which students are encouraged to “break” the technology by trying to catch historical figures into contradicting themselves or saying things are demonstrably false (which is essentially what I did here).

I also think about the ramifications of AI long term. In discussing the use of AI to write lyrics or create actual music, Rick Beato asks a great question in wondering if the music-listening public would even care if the music they enjoyed was created by AI. I think those of us in the humanities should be asking the same question. I would assume that we as a profession reject the potential eradication of writing skills and critical analysis of society through AI tools like Historical Figures Chat, but our concerns may not matter if university, business, political, and cultural leaders don’t care whether the research they’re reading is created by AI.

There’s a lot to think about here and I’ll be cautiously concerned about new technologies like Historical Figures Chat. Perhaps someone can convince me of the wisdom of AI within the context of scholarly reading and writing, or the technology will improve to such a point that I’ll become convinced of its utility. But one thing is certain: moving forward, I am ghosting Robert E. Lee and removing him from my contacts.

Cheers

In Defense of Political Generals

Patrick Young, a lawyer and historian who keeps a vigorous presence online, has a nice review of Elizabeth Leonard’s new book on the life of General and Congressman Benjamin Butler that I found interesting.

Young points out that Civil War historians and enthusiasts alike are quick to denounce President Lincoln for appointing politicians with no prior military experience to generalships when the war first broke out. After all, why would Lincoln risk the well-being of his armies by placing inexperienced men into such powerful positions?

The standard reasoning behind Lincoln’s decision is that he sought to curry favor with respected politicians, especially those from the Democrat party, who may have been on the fence about Lincoln’s policies and approach to the war. In other words, the “political generals” were appointed because of . . . politics.

Young does a nice job of asking readings to re-examine the situation on the ground in April 1861 and to also look for international examples of politicians commanding soldiers.

Young points out that there simply weren’t enough qualified military officials who were prepared to take command of large forces when the Civil War began. Not least of which was because many regular U.S. army officers joined the Confederacy. “If there were mature, experienced, West Pointers in 1861 to fill all of the top posts in the Union army, I am guessing Lincoln would have appointed them,” Young argues. Seen in this light, it is logical to presume that politicians with experience in leadership and public service could be relied upon to offer their services to the military, not simply from a practical standpoint but a moral one as well. If a politician supports a war, they ought to be willing to fight it too.

Continuing, Young argues that “part of the problem in these discussions is the ignorance of many Americans of revolutions, civil wars, secessions, and other internal conflicts in countries other than the United States. Looking at the Chinese or Russian revolutions, the Spanish Civil War, the Vietnamese armed decolonization struggle against France, or the various 19th Century Latin American independence movements, we see that many non-professional soldiers wound up in command of large numbers of troops. Even a quick look at the American Revolution tells us that the revolutionary movement had to promote non-professionals to command. America’s Civil War was no exception to this rule.”

These two explanations do much to help me understand the situation Lincoln faced in April 1861. A deficit of good military leadership in a rapidly growing volunteer army forced him to look outside of the regular pre-Civil War army for leadership, a precedent set by many previous military conflicts at home and abroad.

I thought Young’s review was very good and I look forward to eventually getting around to reading Leonard’s new book on Benjamin Butler.

Cheers

William Still’s Underground Railroad Data Now Freely Available Online

William Still (1821-1902), a conductor on the Underground Railroad who helped many hundreds of enslaved African Americans to freedom. Photo Credit: Library of Congress.

Throughout the 1850s, the abolitionist William Still played a crucial role in assisting hundreds of enslaved people seeking freedom along the Underground Railroad in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. However, Still was unique among Underground Railroad conductors in that he actively took notes on the enslaved freedom seekers who sought refuge with him. The act of note-taking was a very risky move given that the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act mandated that all Northerners living in non-slave states were required to assist the federal government in returning freedom seekers to their enslavers.

In any case, Still compiled his notes and published a book in 1872, The Underground Railroad, to demonstrate the heroism of the freedom seekers who sought refuge with him.

A new biography of Still by William C. Kashatus was published was published just last year with Notre Dame University Press, William Still: The Underground Railroad and the Angel at Philadelphia. Included this book was a very comprehensive appendix with information on nearly 1,000 freedom seekers who sought refuge with Still. This appendix was organized by the late James McGowan and Kashatus. After some personal contemplation, I decided that I wanted to create a downloadable dataset featuring Still’s Underground Railroad in order to make this information more readily available. Using a combination of the McGowan/Kashatus information along with some of my own research, I produced that dataset and recently made it available to the public.

If you’d like to download the dataset for your own research purposes, you can find it here.

Cheers

Should Monuments Play a Central Role in American Civil Religion?

Although I wrote this essay about Ulysses S. Grant and public monuments two years ago, I recently received an interesting comment in response to that essay. The comment asked about the usefulness of monuments and statues as tools to promote civil religion and whether I felt they could still serve that purpose. I wanted to share the original comment and my response here.

The question:

First, I understand we don’t need statues to document accurate history and that instead monuments are about popular memory. But do you think monuments of heroes meant to inspire veneration as part of America’s civil religion — which helps a diverse society cohere around a shared story — are not necessary or helpful?

Second, as to Grant specifically, do you feel that critics (today, it’s racial justice activists; in the past, it was Lost Causers) are missing a sense of proportion and context? If we weigh:

a) In his personal life, Grant’s benefitted directly from one enslaved person of his own for about a year and indirectly from 30 enslaved held by the Dent family over a couple decades, against

b) In his public life, Grant won the Civil War that permanently ended 250 years of slavery in our part of North America and enabled 4 million people and their descendants to enjoy freedom (imperfect though it be)

Does a fair sense of proportion help us re-orient the discussion towards Grant’s real significance to American and world history?

Here is how I responded:

To your first question, I do admit that I take a skeptical view of the use of statues and monuments within the context of civil religion. My primary concerns are that they promote the worship of false idols and overly simplify the complexities of history. Put differently, I get worried about histories that are flattened in the name of unquestioned patriotism, nationalism, and the glorification of the nation-state. While I think there are many admirable people from the past that we can learn from, I think the language of “heroes” and “veneration” runs the risk of creating division within the diverse groups you speak of. After all, veneration is quite literally the act of honoring a saint. Therefore, within the context of civil religion, if certain individuals or groups do not properly “venerate” historical figures deemed as important to society through monumentation, they are considered unpatriotic, not real Americans, politically radical, etc. etc. So yes, I question the very premise that statues can help diverse societies cohere around a shared understanding of the past.

I am personally interested in Jurgen Habermas’s ideas around “constitutional patriotism,” or the notion that societies work to develop a respect and appreciation for civic ideals central to a republican form of government: freedom, liberty, civil rights, democracy, checks and balances, and the rule of law, etc. rather than the veneration of specific individuals from history. Individuals can help students of history appreciate these civic ideals in action, but I think there are more appropriate methods for achieving these ends, most notably the use of primary sources and facilitated dialogue between historians, educators, and students.

To your second question, I don’t know if I have a great answer to offer. I would begin by saying that it is definitely important for us to study individuals personal lives so that we can see what factors shaped their future actions and beliefs. It is very significant to Ulysses S. Grant’s story to understand the context of his interactions with slavery in the 1850s. At the same time, it is obviously true that those actions alone cannot define Grant’s entire legacy. In fact, those connections to slavery actually help us better appreciate how far he evolved in supporting civil rights as president in the 1870s. All of these factors live together in tension when studying Grant’s life, and professional historians are far from unified in their interpretations of Grant’s “real significance” to history. So it’s no surprise to me that society at large has a very conflicted attitude towards Grant’s significance. As a historian, all I can hope for is that all people make a genuine effort to appreciate context, complexity, and nuance when studying the past.

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To briefly expand my original response, I wasn’t really sure how to address the “racial justice activists vs. Lost Causers” dichotomy. For one, there are plenty of Lost Causers still around today – they have not been removed to the dustbin of history and you only need to get onto social media for about five minutes to see Lost Cause-ism in action. One of the challenges in ascribing a motive for tearing down Grant’s statue in San Francisco is that we still don’t know who did it or what the motivation was for doing it. Was it taken down for racial justice? Was it because of Grant’s slaveholding past or his Indian policies or something else entirely? Do all that many people outside of history even know that Grant enslaved a man? I don’t really know. Within the context of the summer of 2020, I think Grant simply became a symbol of governmental power that was targeted because of that symbolism and not necessarily because of his legacy or “real significance” to American history. That no other statues or monuments of Grant have come down since then suggests it really was about the politics of 2020.

Cheers

Notes on the Value of Historical Knowledge as Helping to Avoid Future Mistakes

A friend shared the following quote from the late author Michael Crichton in his book Prey. It’s been rattling around in my head since I saw it.

“We think we know what we are doing. We have always thought so. We never seem to acknowledge that we have been wrong in the past, and so might be wrong in the future. Instead, each generation writes off earlier errors as a result of bad thinking by less able minds—and then confidently embarks on fresh errors of its own.”

I have mixed feelings about this sentiment.

Of course, without having read the book I don’t know the context in which Crichton uses the term “we.” Putting that aside, I think the quote speaks to the value of studying history while at the same time going too far in trying to make history a tool to solve future social problems.

On the one hand, Crichton argues that societies fail to acknowledge mistakes from the past, but then follows by saying that each generation does acknowledge past mistakes but is too quick to dismiss those mistakes as “bad thinking by less able minds.” It would be very easy to find examples of both in action. All too often, the way history is taught to young people in a formal education setting is a form of what the late James Loewen described as “chronological ethnocentrism.” Put simply, the past is left in the past. Chronological ethnocentrism “lets [history textbook authors] sequester bad things, from racism and robber barons, in the distant past,” Loewen argues. “Unfortunately for students, it also makes history impossibly dull, because we all ‘know’ everything turned out for the best. It also makes history irrelevant, because it separates what we might learn about, say, racism or the robber barons in the past from issues of the here and now.”

Another point not always acknowledged is that it isn’t so much that people from the past were less intelligent than people in the present. It’s that they did not have access to the same tools, technology, and information that people in the present have.

On the other hand, Crichton seems to imply that each generation ends up making “fresh errors” because of historical ignorance, and that by extension a strong sense of historical literacy will help those generations avoid making the same or new mistakes in the future. In other words, it’s a return to the old quote from George Santayana about those being ignorant of the past being doomed to repeat it.

To me, this part of Crichton’s point oversells the value of history.

The reality is that new mistakes will be made regardless of an individual or society’s collective historical knowledge. There will always be new mistakes because unprecedented circumstances, contingencies, and surprises will emerge that history cannot provide an answer for. A specific outcome from a particular historical event does not mean that the same outcome will emerge in a similar future event. To cite but one example, the 1918 influenza pandemic did not prevent another pandemic from emerging a little over 100 years, nor did it provide a solution for reducing sickness and death in this current plague. History alone cannot save us.

Growing up, I got into history for two different reasons. One is that history is simply interesting to me on its own terms. Regardless of what artifacts, documents, or books might have to say about the present, they hold a power in their own right for what they can say about the time period in which they were created. Secondly, I was interested in understanding how present day society arrived at its current social, political, and economic situation. But I don’t know if I ever got into history because I believed it provided a blueprint for the future. I don’t think it can.

There’s a lot of value in studying past case studies to see what worked and what didn’t; to be inspired by good acts while being aware of bad ones; to do our best to avoid the mistakes of the past. But when it comes to predicting the future . . . I’ll leave that to the meteorologists, social scientists, and data analysists.

Cheers

Tony Soprano Loves Watching History Documentaries

A History Channel documentary and bowl of ice cream after a hard day’s work in the waste management industry. Photo Credit: AskMen https://www.askmen.com/entertainment/galleries/tv-s-7-deadly-sins-sloth/

In 2019, the American Historical Association published a fascinating study titled “History, the Past, and Public Culture: Results from a National Survey.” Broken up into ten different chapters, this study saw thousands of people respond to a 40-question survey about their relationship to history. Among other things, the study asked respondents to define what history means to them, what their experiences were like in history classes growing up, and what aspects of history they wanted to learn more about. One of the most fascinating chapters of the study asks respondents to explain what mediums they use to better understand history.

The first thought that came to my mind when seeing this chapter was that the internet had to be the number one source for obtaining information about history. Historians and lay audiences often spend a lot of time online, after all, and scholars of all different disciplines have been pre-occupied with promoting media literacy in recent years given the preponderance of misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theories online.

Much to my surprise, however, only 59 percent of respondents stated that they relied on a “non-Wikipedia” source online to learn about history and only 46 percent relied on Wikipedia as a source. In other words, only about six in ten people use the internet as a source for obtaining information history.

Instead, the survey found that the top three sources relied on by respondents were documentary films/TV series (69%), fictional movies/TV series (66%), and TV News (62% – yikes). As the study itself noted, “the top three choices were all video format . . . of note is that such sources are readily available, usually take minimal effort to engage, and may ask for little imagination on the part of the viewer.” For a variety of reasons, televised historical content does the best at reaching people where they are and meeting them on their own terms. Moreover, these results give the impression that casual viewers are more interested in watching content in a visual format rather than reading that content in a digital or print paper form.

I’ve been trying to wrap my head around the implications of this study, but my own TV watching habits led me to an unlikely source of enlightenment: Tony Soprano.

Tony Soprano is a history enthusiast. He cares greatly about his family’s history, his neighborhood’s history, and the history of the United States more broadly. He likes talking about history at the dinner table. He likes to watch old black-and-white movies and History Channel documentaries, particularly about World War II, in his free time. Very perceptively, Tony also distinguishes between history and nostalgia, arguing in one of my favorite lines of the series that “‘Remember when’ is the lowest form of conversation.” Tony’s life is full of chaos, but those rare moments at the TV set provide watching the History Channel provide some sense of normalcy.

Importantly, other sources of information about history—the internet, history books (popular history or academic history), lectures, museums, historic sites, or a formal classroom–do not figure into Tony’s life. After all, he’s a busy guy in a face-to-face industry. There’s been a lot of change with the internet between 2007 and 2022, but I suspect that many people, particular baby boomers and older, still don’t spend a great deal of time online.

I think the point of my thoughts here is that while I am someone who prefers to read historical content with an academic flavor, I am constantly reminded that the vast majority of history enthusiasts do not consume history the same way I do. Public history, as I have said time and time again, is about meeting people where they are. In this case of Tony Soprano, that means working to ensure that historical documentaries convey good information to their audiences. After all, some people who watch these documentaries might “graduate” to learning more online, visiting a historic site, or reading a book, but many viewers like Tony Soprano might never go beyond watching that documentary. I totally get it. I love watching National Geographic documentaries about nature, but I don’t have many books about science in my library. My interest in science is to a large extent centered around the television and an occasional science museum visit. It’s not that I don’t care about science so much as that we all have busy lives that require us to choose what we want to be experts in.

Moving forward, I’m going to try and work on taking more time to study history documentaries and to think more critically about their format and content delivery. I found Brooks Simpson’s review of the History Channel’s 2020 documentary, Grant, to be quite enlightening on this front. I also applaud the work of my colleagues in the history department at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, who have designed an innovative course on documentary filmmaking for public history graduate students that teaches them the basics of historical interpretation, script writing, and video editing in Adobe Premiere Pro. Such a course could be valuable for public historians wanting to pursue their passion for history through film and television.

Cheers