The image of Donald Trump signing an order reinstating the global gag rule this February was striking. Surrounded by a group of men — and one woman, all of them white — Trump approved an order that will affect millions of women and girls around the world who rely on programs supported by the United… Read more →
Tag: Civil War
The Young and the Gangrenous
Bandages, Blood, and Bickering, Oh My! A Civil War is brewing within the walls of Mansion House Hospital, the setting of the new PBS drama Mercy Street. Taking a page from the highly regarded Downton Abbey, the producers have created a Civil War soap opera with a cavalcade of characters that spend most of their… Read more →
Mental Health and Criminal Justice in Civil War Kentucky
The Civil War Governors of Kentucky Digital Documentary Edition (CWG-K) is a cutting-edge digital humanities project dedicated to imaging, transcribing, annotating, and publishing documents related to Kentucky’s five Civil War governors and making them accessible/searchable online (free of charge) to researchers and the general public alike. Each week, CWG-K editors highlight interesting finds from the… Read more →
Come to the Dark Side: Disability as “Dark” Civil War History
By Sarah Handley-Cousins
While the rest of the world was happily decking the halls and calling for goodwill toward men, Civil War historians — in the now-famous words of Historista blogger and historian Megan Kate Nelson — were “freaking out.”
They weren’t freaking out because of the discovery of some great new source material, or an exciting new publication. They were freaking out because both Civil War History and The Journal of the Civil War Era, the two major journals in the field, each published an article in their December issues that criticized the state of current Civil War research and writing. The major concern for the articles’ authors — Gary Gallagher and Kathryn Shively Meier for JCWE and Earl J. Hess for CWH — was that Civil War military historians, already a dying breed, are being hurried to their demise by eager social and cultural historians who dismiss military history as unscholarly and old-fashioned. Earl Hess suggests that “understanding the real battlefield of 1861-1865 is essential to understanding everything else about the Civil War.”[1] Gallagher and Meier assert that “because the Civil War was a massive war, every scholar of the conflict should be at least basically versed in its military history.”[2]
Adventures in the Archives: Searching for the Past
by Sarah Handley-Cousins
For much of this past year, I’ve been entrenched in dissertation research. Despite the long hours hunched over dusty papers, trying to decipher century-old handwriting, generally while cold and hungry, I’m not complaining. I’m continually amazed that I’m getting the opportunity to do exactly what I’ve always wanted: the work of history. What I wasn’t prepared for, necessarily, was the emotional work that would come along with it.