LMU will host fourth “War in the Mountains Symposium”

Cross-posted to the blog of the Abraham Lincoln Institute for the Study of Leadership and Public Policy

Lincoln Memorial University and the Abraham Lincoln Library and Museum will host the fourth “War in the Mountains” symposium April 17-18 as part of the ongoing commemoration of the Civil War Sesquicentennial.  This event is free, but registration is required by April 9 due to limited seating.

The theme for this year’s symposium is “Religion, Death, Martyrdom, and the Civil War.”

• Warren Greer, Director of of the Kentucky Lincoln Heritage Trail: “Action and Reaction: How Enlightenment Ideals Influenced
  American Religion from the Great Awakening through the
  Civil War”
• Dr. Michael Toomey, Associate Professor of History at Lincoln Memorial University: “Under Fire: Lincoln’s Religion and the Civil War”
• Dr. Earl Hess, Stewart W. McClelland Chair in History, Lincoln Memorial University: “Arguing Over the Civil War Death Toll: Does it Really Matter?”
• Dr. George Rable, Charles G. Summersell Chair in Southern History, University of Alabama: “God as General: Was There a Religious History of the American Civil War?”

This event also features a Q&A session, tours of the Abraham Lincoln Library and Museum vault, and a book signing by the speakers.  The sessions will be held in LMU’s Hamilton Math & Science Building, Room 100.

To register or for more information, call the museum at (423) 869-6235 or e-mail Carol Campbell at carol.campbell@lmunet.edu.  The first 150 registrants will receive a free gift.

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Learn about the American Revolution by blasting merrily away at things

One way to get schoolkids excited about history is to give them guns and let them blast the ever-loving crap out of stuff:

Craver Middle School students traded the classroom for the gun range Wednesday as part of a week-long course about the Revolutionary War.

Instructors say the gun-safety class is about showing the 6th to 8th graders how important marksmanship was to winning a war against the era’s most powerful army. 30 students got to participate at the Avondale Clay and Gun Club, and they were able to shoot down “redcoat” targets with their rifles.

Appleseed volunteers and Revolutionary War re-enactors are leading the intensive course, which is one of nine different options at Craver. The instructors brought real guns into the classroom Monday and Tuesday before heading to the range to show how things worked in the 1700’s.
“They showed us the Revolutionary War and how we fought to be Americans,” says Riley Prichard, 13. “It was pretty cool.”

“We’ve learned about the guns they used back in the Revolutionary War,” adds Shelby Plattner, 12. “They came out and shot some of the guns and shot some of the muskets when we were out on the field.”

When I first read this, I assumed they were letting kids do live fire exercises with reproduction flintlock muskets, which would instantly make this the most awesome middle school history lesson of all time.  But in the video, it looks like all the kids are shooting modern rifles.

It turns out the organization that evidently facilitated this event somehow combines marksmanship instruction with Rev War history and civics.  I’m not entirely sure how that’s supposed to work.  Their instructors use David Hackett Fischer’s Paul Revere book, and being a huge Fischer fan I’ve got to give them props for that.  But if the minutemen had been packing hardware with scopes and magazines, you’ve got to wonder whether any redcoats at all would’ve made it back to Boston.

What to do with one of Benedict Arnold’s sunken boats?

If you’ve been to the National Museum of American History, you’ve probably seen the Rev War gunboat Philadelphia.  She was one of the vessels in the flotilla Benedict Arnold assembled in 1776 to try to keep the British from descending Lake Champlain and cutting off New England from the rest of the colonies.

Arnold’s makeshift fleet met the British at the Battle of Valcour Island that October.  They lost the battle, but did buy the American cause some precious time.  With winter looming, the British were unable to keep advancing southward, and when they finally took another crack at the Champlain-Hudson corridor the next year, they ended up at Saratoga.

Lorenzo Hagglund found Philadelphia‘s wreck in 1935, and she ended up at the Smithsonian.  In 1997 researchers found another boat from Arnold’s flotilla, the Spitfire, sitting upright at the bottom of Lake Champlain.  She’s still there, and now they’re trying to figure out what to do with her:

“This is not a sexy boat,” said Art Cohn, the emeritus director of the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum who is now writing a management plan for the Spitfire that he will submit to the U.S. Navy. “It was relatively small, flat-bottomed and quickly built, but that’s not its value.”

“The principal value, in my opinion, is it connects us to 1776 and the formative years of this country,” he said.

For years, the bottom — Cohn won’t say exactly where the Spitfire rests or how far down — has been thought of as the safest place for the Spitfire, thanks to the protection of the cold, deep water above it.

Now the fear is of a looming threat from the invasive species quagga mussels, which could destroy the wreck. They haven’t arrived yet in Lake Champlain, but experts fear it’s only a matter of time.

Cohn’s plan will include recommendations for the future of the Spitfire, including possibly leaving it where it is or raising it, preserving it and then displaying it in a museum. He hasn’t chosen a course yet, but his worry over the mussels is clear.

“Our concern over the length of this study has really been elevated based on what we’re learning about the implications of the mussel invasion. That information is sobering and a concern,” Cohn said. “As we move toward final recommendations our goal is to try to develop a strategy so that this shipwreck survives for future generations.”

Those doggone Ukranian mussels.  Oh, well.  Maybe we’ll get another cool Rev War gunboat exhibit out of this.

David Armitage on the Declaration of Independence at UT

If you’re an early America aficionado in the Knoxville area, you’ll want to stop by the University of Tennessee’s Black Cultural Center at 4:00 P.M. on April 8th.  David Armitage will be presenting the 2015 Milton M. Klein Lecture, “The Global Impact of the Declaration of Independence.”

Dr. Armitage is Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History and Chair of the Department of History at Harvard, Affiliated Professor in the Harvard Department of Government, an Affiliated Faculty Member at Harvard Law School, and Honorary Professor of History at the University of Sydney.  His books include The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (a Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year), The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (winner of the Longman/History Today Book of the Year Award), and Foundations of Modern International Thought.  He is also co-author of The History Manifesto, a New Statesman Book of the Year.

The historical keynote of the war

Cross-posted to the blog of the Abraham Lincoln Institute for the Study of Leadership and Public Policy

Charles Francis Adams was one of many Americans who stood in front of the Capitol 150 years ago to hear Lincoln deliver his second inaugural address.  “That railsplitting lawyer is one of the wonders of the day,” Adams wrote a few days later.  “Once at Gettysburg and now again on a greater occasion he has shown a capacity for rising to the demands of the hour.”  He believed the speech would be “for all time the historical keynote of this war.”

Lincoln himself expected his speech to “wear as well as —perhaps better than—any thing I have produced,” even though it was “not immediately popular.”

Here are a few links to help you commemorate the sesquicentennial of what historian Ronald C. White has called Lincoln’s greatest speech:

• The text of the address itself, from Basler’s Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln
• The inaugural address was actually three arguments in one, according to acclaimed Lincoln authority Harold Holzer
• Ronald White lectures on the address
• An essay by Lewis E. Lehrman
• Resources from the Library of Congress
• Eyewitness accounts of the ceremony

Library of Congress