Announcements

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.

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).