YIKES! Has it really been that long since I’ve posted anything? I suppose it has, since we’ve been up to our eyeballs in the museum renovation at the ALLM.
Speaking of which, Knoxville’s ABC affiliate WATE came out last week to do a short piece on the museum, our reconstructed log village, and LMU’s own history. Here it is:
Filed under Abraham Lincoln, Civil War, Museums and Historic Sites
The bad news is, LMU’s Homecoming had to switch to a virtual format this year because of COVID. The good news is, since we recorded a lot of the programming, you folks can watch the ALLM staff’s panel discussion about our big museum renovation. Here it is:
Filed under Abraham Lincoln, Civil War, Museums and Historic Sites
It seems like we’ve lost so many towering, venerable historians over the past year or two. On September 15, the eminent Civil War authority Ed Bearss passed away at the age of ninety-seven.
Bearss began his career with the National Park Service at Vicksburg in the 1950s, where he helped discover the wreck of the gunboat Cairo. In 1981 he became the NPS chief historian and occupied that position until 1994. He was the author of a number of books on the Civil War (particularly the war in Mississippi) and received nearly every accolade there is for battlefield interpretation and preservation, including the inaugural Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Battlefield Trust.
His battlefield tours were legendary. Over the course of his career, he guided thousands of visitors across the ground where the Union endured its ordeal by blood and fire, and continued to do so at an age when most public historians are decades into retirement. His vivid, dramatic, and eloquent style of narration brought these landscapes to life, and made him one of the most memorable commentators from Ken Burns’ Civil War series.
Bearss was not only a student and interpreter of military history, but a combat veteran himself. He enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1942 and fought in the Pacific Theater, where he was badly wounded by machine gun fire.
He inspired and influenced generations of students, scholars, and enthusiasts, and I doubt we will see his like again.
Filed under Civil War, Historic Preservation
Here’s a little sneak peek the folks in LMU’s University Advancement division put together for us.
Filed under Abraham Lincoln, Civil War, Museums and Historic Sites
It’s called “Lincoln Log,” a series of conversations with Lincoln scholars. They’re also uploading the interviews to Youtube. Here’s the first episode, featuring David Blight and his work on Frederick Douglass.
Filed under Abraham Lincoln, Civil War, History on the Web
In the seventh installment of Civil War Connect, the ALLM‘s own Natalie Sweet and the National Museum of Civil War Medicine‘s Jake Wynn discuss health (or the lack thereof) in Civil War prisons.
Filed under Civil War
We lost one of America’s finest historians this year.
Some time ago word went around on Twitter that Charles Royster had passed away, but I didn’t see anything official until somebody passed along this obit from the AHA. Royster was Boyd Professor of History at Louisiana State University.
He completed his Ph.D. at Berkeley under Robert Middlekauff, writing a monumental dissertation—monumental both in its importance and its size—on the Continental Army. The dissertation became the basis of his book A Revolutionary People at War: The Continental Army and American Character, 1775-1783, which won the Francis Parkman Prize, the National Historical Society Book Prize, and the Fraunces Tavern Museum Book Award.
That volume alone would have been sufficient to establish him as one of the premier scholars of American history, but his Civil War study The Destructive War: William Tecumseh Sherman, Stonewall Jackson, and the Americans was just as acclaimed as his first book, winning both the Bancroft Prize and the Lincoln Prize. He was also the author of Light-Horse Harry Lee and the Legacy of the American Revolution and The Fabulous History of the Dismal Swamp Company: A History of George Washington’s Times.
I first encountered Royster’s work when I was fresh out of college. At that time I was a newly-minted aspiring historian who had decided to study the American Revolution. On a family trip to Williamsburg I found a copy of A Revolutionary People at War in a bookstore. It probably had a bigger impact on me than any academic book I’ve read, whether at that time or since. It was one of my first experiences with a work of history that asked such probing questions and constructed such meaningful answers.
Sometimes, when you’re just beginning to engage with a field, a book will smash its way into your intellect like an asteroid, but then you revisit it later when you’re more seasoned and find the magic’s worn off. You decide it must have made a big impression only because you read it when you were green and had a narrow frame of reference. That’s never been the case with me and A Revolutionary People. Every time I take it off the shelf, it’s as powerful and insightful as it seemed before I started graduate school. To this day, I think it’s an unparalleled analysis of the Continental Army and its role in defining what the Revolution meant.
The SMH devoted a panel to A Revolutionary People at the first academic history conference I ever attended. I heard Royster himself would be there, and brought my copy to ask if he’d sign it. Unfortunately, he didn’t make it. I regret that I never got to meet him and thank him for his body of work. But that body of work remains. I’m sure people will be turning to it for as long as there’s an interest in the American past.
Filed under American Revolution, Civil War
In the sixth installment of Civil War Connect, the ALLM’s own Natalie Sweet and the National Museum of Civil War Medicine’s Jake Wynn discuss medicine and the African American experience in the Civil War.
Filed under Civil War
In the fifth installment of Civil War Connect, the ALLM‘s own Natalie Sweet and the National Museum of Civil War Medicine‘s Jake Wynn discuss hospitals during the Civil War.
Filed under Civil War
In the fourth installment of Civil War Connect, the ALLM‘s own Natalie Sweet and the National Museum of Civil War Medicine‘s Jake Wynn discuss nurses in the war.
Filed under Civil War
Past in the Present 