"Does the Civil War Matter?": A Roundtable Discussion

Abstract

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• "Does the Civil War Matter?"A Roundtable Discussion
• Jim Downs, ModeratorParticipants: Yoni Appelbaum, Drew Gilpin Faust, Kerri K. Greenidge, Stephanie McCurry, Megan Kate Nelson, and Adam I. P. Smith

In 2004, Civil War History published Drew Gilpin Faust's "'We Should Grow Too Fond of It': Why We Love the Civil War."¹ In the article, Faust analyzed the proliferation of Civil War scholarship and interrogated why the Civil War attracted the attention of a generation of scholars. She connected how the rise of social history benefited from the preservation of Civil War records. The article has become a classic in the field and remains a major contribution. As the journal's current editor, I have wondered if the Civil War still matters to scholars, teachers, readers, and the public as it did twenty years ago. As such, I organized a roundtable bringing together a range of scholars and writers to answer the question "Does the Civil War Matter?"

I am deeply grateful that Drew Faust agreed to participate in the conversation. While anyone publishing or teaching or thinking about Civil War history could have participated, I selected the other panelists based on their specialties. Yoni Appelbaum, a member of the journal's editorial board, is a trained historian and is also the deputy editor at the Atlantic. I wanted his perspective on the reading public's interest in the war and how scholars might frame their research to interest a broader audience. Kerri K. Greenidge is a prolific historian of the Black experience in US history and has written widely on topics related to the Civil War. Stephanie McCurry is a leading historian of the South, whose research [End Page 50] questions led her to the Civil War. I wanted her insights as a Southern historian. Since region matters to the study of the Civil War, I asked Megan Kate Nelson, who has written three excellent books about the Civil War and about the Civil War both in the South and in the West, particularly among Indigenous people. Nelson is also a prolific writer and presents her research widely to nonacademic audiences. Adam I. P. Smith has written about the North during the Civil War and is also the director of the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford. Given the great interest in the Civil War in the United Kingdom, especially among historians of the British American Nineteenth Century Historians organization, I was eager to add his perspective.

jim downs:

Welcome! I'm really excited about this conversation, and I'm extraordinarily grateful for your time, especially in the last dog days of summer before classes start for many of you. One of the most generative aspects of editing the journal for me has been doing roundtable discussions. The goal is to capture the kind of energy that typically happens during the Q & A sessions at conferences and formalizing that conversation and making it, hopefully, part of a larger historiographic conversation.

And so not to waste any time, I'm just going to ask to the first question, "Does the Civil War matter?"

I will start by briefly answering it, and I am hoping you all can follow the lead by introducing yourself and taking a stab at the question.

As a medical historian, I care about the Civil War because it's the largest epidemiological crisis of the nineteenth century. And yet, many medical historians skip over the Civil War, and many Civil War historians skip over the epidemiological crisis.

kerri k. greenidge:

I'm the recent author of The Grimkés: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family. And my first book was Black Radical the Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter.

I most definitely think the Civil War matters, because I think it's the moment in American history; you have a group of people who have been enslaved, who go through the process of emancipation and freedom. I also think it's significant because it's a time when African American people who had always acted in political ways experience a violent backlash. I also think it's intricately related to all the conversations that occur in the United States moving...