More than a Contest between Armies

More Than a Contest between Armies collects expanded versions of a dozen lectures delivered at Marquette University as part of a series to celebrate the legacy of Frank L. Klement. The title echoes Klement's belief that the Civil War affected more than just the men on the battlefield, that its effects were broad and deep on the home front and during Reconstruction and beyond. These lectures were delivered by many of the field's best-known and most celebrated scholars—among them Edward L. Ayers, David W. Blight, Catherine Clinton, Gary W. Gallagher—especially those who have worked to reach across scholarly boundaries to a wider reading public. The lectures are loosely organized in a chronological way according to their subjects, but they were delivered between 1992 and 2005, offering a look at how the field shifted in these more-than-a-dozen years. Klement understood himself to be a liminal figure in Civil War historiography, a devout Roman Catholic in a Protestant-dominated field analyzing the home front rather than the battlefield; this series was meant to honor the insight of the revisionist impulse. Many of the subjects here are seemingly traditional—generals Ulysses S. Grant and Jubal A. Early, Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln, even Frederick Douglass—but methodologies and angles of vision have changed and themselves represent shifts in the scholarship from 1992 to 2005. So if Blight takes up the well-worn yet never-finished question of Abraham Lincoln's legacy, it is through the prism of African American memory, specifically Douglass's. And Joan Waugh's take on General Grant as a historian is remarkably fresh, a moving look at the struggle Grant went through to write “truthful history” (p. 223). In “I Never Was a Coward,” Lesley Gordon revisits the story of the common soldier, but this time through the lens of a single Northern regiment from Connecticut, working to make sense of their understanding of cowardice and bravery, words redolent with meaning. If the history and memory of their service erased any tinge of cowardice, she found, at the time such a tinge was a matter of heartfelt scrutiny and confession

Ancient history · Archaeology · Art history · Battlefield · CONTEST · Dozen · Historiography · Political science · Scholarship · Spanish Civil War · Veneration · American Constitutional Law and Politics · American History and Culture · Classics · History · Law · Race, History, and American Society

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