Spotlight On: Library Primary Source Databases

If you are interested in learning more about the Civil War, or even doing a thesis project, there are a number of database resources available to UCA students through the library portal (requiring that you sign in with your username and password), providing unique primary sources not available elsewhere on the web.  I’ve listed below the resources most pertinent to our course:

• The American Civil War Online: This is “a diverse collection of searchable databases designed to promote the creative study of all aspects of the Civil War. Equally useful for teaching and research, the resource offers a range of contemporary perspectives on the war and American society. In addition to letters, diaries, posters, photographs, and cartoons, The American Civil War Online includes a wealth of compiled data on soldiers, regiments, and battles.”  It includes databases like “American Civil War: Letters and Diaries,” “The American Civil War Research Database,” and “Images of the Civil War.”
• The New York Times, 1851-2009: This was a leading newspaper in the nineteenth century that ran many articles relevant to the Civil War and sectional crisis.
• Arkansas Newspapers (Historical): This is for on-campus access only.
• American Periodicals Series Online: Periodicals are a general term for magazines and newspapers, and this site includes such publications as William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator.
• North American Women’s Letters and Diaries: This includes thousands of primary sources, including some from the Civil War era.

Study Guide for Quiz #2

Here is the study guide for the second quiz, which will be based on lecture (from September 13 to October 4) and Chapters 2-4, and 8 of Gallagher and Waugh, The American War. Since it comes closely on the heels of Quiz #1, it will be shorter and will consist of multiple-choice, fill-in-the-blank, one chronology, and two short IDs; there will be no essay questions. For the short IDs, be sure you can identify the 5 Ws (who, what, where, when, and why).

Topics to study include: secession, President Lincoln, President Davis, Confederate advantages/disadvantages, Confederate goals at the beginning of the war, Union advantages/disadvantages, Union goals at the beginning of the war, Shiloh, Peninsular Campaign, characteristics of the average soldier (from American War, Chapter 4), conscription (both in the U.S. and C.S.A.), and women’s experiences on the home front.

The dates to study for the chronology question are: First Bull Run, Shiloh, bombardment of Ft. Sumter, fall of New Orleans, Peninsular Campaign. Be sure you can put these events in their correct order, using the start date of each event.

Announcements for 9/22

1. The book review over Faust is due on Blackboard on September 27, Tuesday, by 2:40pm. Remember that students write two reviews in the course of the semester, and it is up to you to keep track of how many you write. I don’t recommend you just count on writing the last two, since life sometimes intervenes, and it is safer to have at least one under your belt.
2. Don’t forget also about the homework assignment due in class on September 29, over the debate about General Robert E. Lee’s leadership.
3. If you are interested in periodic posts about the intersection between the Civil War era and current events, you can follow with an RSS reader or subscribe via email to The Journal of the Civil War Era‘s blog, Muster. The latest piece on the partisan press is of particular interest, given our research project into editorials.
4. Here’s the encyclopedia article on the collapse of the women’s prison in Kansas City that I mentioned, and also my contribution to the site, which is about the Lawrence massacre. The site also includes slightly longer essays on broader topics, such as this one about guerrilla violence on the border.
5. If you are interested in reading more about women’s experiences during slavery and the Civil War, I especially recommend these texts, which touch on sexuality, women who fought as soldiers, and on enslaved women: Catherine Clinton and Nina Silbers’ edited collection Battle Scars: Gender and Sexuality in the American Civil War, Elizabeth Leonard’s All the Daring of the Soldier: Women of the Civil War Armies, and one of my favorite books, Thavolia Glymph’s Out of the House of Bondage. This last one talks about slaveholding households as both social and political spaces.
6. There is a viewing and discussion of the first presidential debate this Monday, September 26, at 7:30pm, in the COB Auditorium. It will be led by Dr. Heather Yates, a professor in political science.

 

Debate Homework

After reading the debate, please answer the questions in this file and submit it in hard copy at the beginning of class on September 29.  Be complete in your responses, and use MLA parenthetical citations to cite your work. Your response should total approximately two pages, double spaced.

Announcements for 9/15

1. I usually aim to return students’ work with grades and comments within 7-10 days. During peak grading periods that might stretch to two weeks, but I do try to not let grading pile up.
2. Make sure you start reading the Faust book (called Mothers of Invention) this weekend, or Monday at the latest. It is kind of a dense text.
3. We didn’t get a chance to talk a lot about conscription (i.e. the draft) in class today, but here are a couple articles about it, if you are interested. This one is from the Library of Congress, focusing on the Confederacy, and the Encyclopedia of Arkansas History and Culture also includes a nice summary of both Union and Confederate conscription.
4. If you are interested in better understanding how the Civil War affects us still today, or at least how it informs the world we live in, the blog of The Journal of the Civil War Era posts once (sometimes twice) a week, publishing short academic articles that connect the Civil War to current events and popular culture. My favorite of the recent posts is Dr. Margaret Storey’s article on the slaves who built the White House, which was published as a response to the drama surrounding First Lady Michelle Obama’s speech at the DNC.

Class on 9/6 Canceled

Class tomorrow (September 6) will be canceled due to illness. Please make sure you keep up with the readings, and please email if you have questions. On Thursday, we will discuss both the Mississippi and Arkansas secession documents, as well as the article by Charles Dew.

Please also download and look over the secession project and let me know if you have questions about the assignment.

Study Guide for Quiz #1

Here is the study guide for the first quiz, which will be based on lecture (from August 23 to September 6) and Chapter 1 of Gallagher and Waugh, The American War. The quiz was originally scheduled for September 8, but since I did not provide the study guide a full week in advance, I will push the quiz to September 13.

Part I: Map Identification
Study the location of the following Southern states: Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, Maryland, Virginia (which at the war’s beginning included W. Virginia), North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, and Arkansas.  You will not need to know state capitals, bodies of water, etc., only the location of the state.  Use this map (or one like it) to prepare.

Part II: Chronologies
Develop a list of key dates in the sectional crisis, using lecture notes and The American War.  Include such events as the Compromise of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Wilmot Proviso, Mexican War, the raid on Harpers Ferry, Dred Scott decision, South Carolina’s secession, etc.).  This part of the quiz will not require you to memorize the actual dates, but instead it will ask you to put a series of events in chronological order–the idea behind this is to help you understand cause and effect, so even if you forget the year of the Harpers Ferry raid, you will at least remember that it came before South Carolina’s secession (as one example).

Part III: Short Answer
Be prepared to answer these questions in 3-4 complete sentences. The quiz will include two of these prompts.

1. How did Bacon’s Rebellion play a role in the establishment of chattel slavery in Virginia?2. Besides sectionalism, what do Gallagher and Waugh identify as some of the other themes of American life during the antebellum period?
3. What is the definition of “free soil?”
4. During the debates over secession, what were the three main schools of thought among white Southerners?

Part IV: Short Essay
There will be one question that requires a written answer of at least one long paragraph or two short paragraphs.  For this section, here are the two questions to study:
1. What were the economic incentives that encouraged the development of chattel slavery in the pre-Civil War South?
2. How would you describe the relationship between slavery and states’ rights in the early nineteenth century?

VIDEO: Bleeding Kansas, Bleeding Missouri

This video includes a compilation of short lectures with historians who contributed to a new anthology on the Kansas-Missouri border wars, titled Bleeding Kansas, Bleeding Missouri: The Long Civil War on the Border (University Press of Kansas, 2013).  Although I’m a bit biased (having contributed to the volume and knowing its editors quite well), this is an excellent resource and the following video gives you a sense of the issues it raises and its relevance to modern scholarship.  Jonathan Earle, Diane Mutti Burke, Kristen Oertel, Jeremy Neely, and Jennifer Weber are the presenters.  Although each is excellent, I particularly recommend Neely’s talk on the Quantrill’s men reunions (starting 40:25).