Page assignments

Here is the Google Doc that we used in class today to divide our labor for the exhibit. Please note which page you have been assigned to write text for.

As you begin thinking about your page, remember that there are various resources about Dowling that you can draw on for information, including the collection itself, this earlier blog post, and the resources and blogs collected last semester.

Please be scrupulous about noting down the source for information and facts that you plan to quote or use in your text for this assignment. We will be working on this in class next week, and you will need to have a rough draft ready to share with classmates next Friday, our last day of class.

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For Wednesday …

In class today we developed a rough outline of sections for our exhibits. But now we need to do a quick analysis of how the “items” in our collection might be distributed across those sections. Not every item in the collection has to be mentioned in our exhibit, but we do need a sense of which items could conceivably be used in each section so that we can decide how to break the sections up into pages.

Since we will need to make that decision on Wednesday, your assignment for class is to browse through the collection and make a note of items relevant to the section you were assigned in class. Then, make a list of those items, together with a brief (just a few words) description of what the item is, on this Writeboard, which you can access using “dowling” as the password.

Here’s what we had on the board by the end of class:

Abby suggested that we open the exhibit by juxtaposing Jefferson Davis’s battlefield speech with the text of the historical marker erected in the 1990s and posing the question “How did we get here?” (It occurs to me that we could also on this splash page juxtapose the original location of the statue with its current one, which raises the same sort of question.)

After that we came up with three rough sections:

1. Elizabeth and Clare will be finding items related to “The Battle of Sabine Pass: What actually happened.” This section may also reference the facts of Dowling’s life, but we agreed that his business enterprises and Irish ethnicity would probably be better emphasized in later sections, when discussing how later commemorations emphasized these parts of his life.

2. Abby, Matt, and Michael will be finding items related to the way Dowling was remembered in the immediate aftermath of the Battle up to the early twentieth century, for a section that will emphasize how Dowling was remembered as a Confederate hero and the initial construction of the statue.

3. Adam and Zach will be finding items related to those who were interested in remembering Dowling from about 1958 on, especially Anne Caraway Ivins, for a section that will help contextualized and explain the movement towards emphasizing his Irishnessness and business exploits and deemphasizing his Confederate service.

You may wish to confer with your group members to divide the labor for Wednesday. Also be aware that if you find only a few items that seem relevant in the actual Omeka collection, there may be relevant items that we could import into the exhibit listed on or linked from this page.

On Wednesday, using the information on the Writeboard, we will finalize the organization of our exhibit and assign pages to work on during the last week of class.

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Weekend Reading

As discussed in class today, we need to decide next week on the basic structure of our exhibit for the Dowling collection. That means that over the weekend, you should read the following items; on Monday, you will be the “resident experts” about these texts, so be prepared to answer questions about them as we discuss our plans together.

We will use the Google documents to orient our discussion on Monday. All of the work represented in these documents will be reflected in our finished product, but we don’t necessarily have to stick absolutely to the structure they outline for the exhibit. As we discussed today, there are several possible ways of organizing the exhibit, especially now that we have so many more items than we did in the spring semester. Should the sections be chronological? Thematic? The “multiple faces” of Dowling? Some combination? Think about that question as you read and be prepared to share your viewpoint in class.

You should also have a look at the projects produced by students last semester, which are available on our OWL-Space Resources page. The map group’s work is in the folder “Dowling Map,” the podcast group’s work is in the folder “Dowling Podcast”, and there is also a link to the dynamic timeline made by the Timeline group. The movie you have seen before, but you may want to refresh your memory. Each of these groups recorded their own reflections and discussions on their blogs, linked from the course webpage from last semester. You may want to browse some of their posts as we think about how to structure the Omeka exhibit.

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Dowling Links

Here are some links to Dowling resources that you should begin looking through. Obviously you may not read through all of these by Friday, but get started, get as far as you can, and keep track of what you’ve looked at and record any questions you have.

See you tomorrow for our discussion of Levine.

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Levine Discussion

I forgot to mention in class today that there may be some high school students joining us in class next Wednesday for our discussion of Levine. They are from Carnegie Vanguard High School in Houston and will be visiting Rice with their class to check out a college course.

For your required comment on this book, I would like you to write something addressing ONE of the following prompts, based on your reading of the Levine book:

  1. How does Levine explain why, when, and how Confederate officials began to embrace the idea of enlisting slaves as soldiers? Based on what you’ve learned about making causal arguments in your position papers and in our in-class discussions, do you find his explanation persuasive?
  2. The title of the book is “Confederate emancipation.” Is “emancipation” the best word for what Confederate supporters of slave enlistment were envisioning? How did their notions of “emancipation” compare to the ideas we’ve seen in the “Emancipation Proclamation” and other federal policies like the Confiscation Acts?

Optionally, after addressing your prompt, you may also use your post to discuss anything that you found surprising, confusing, or particularly interesting about the book. I believe it is the Brownians’ turn to comment before class.

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“Black Confederates”?

As discussed in class today, the Civil War–and the role played in it by black Southerners–has recently been the subject of controversy in the national media, thanks to revelations about a faulty claim in a textbook distributed to fourth-graders in Virginia.

If that article proved one thing, it was that you can’t simply cite as fact everything you read on the Internet–perhaps especially when it’s about the Civil War. But this episode put a national spotlight on the ongoing efforts of Confederate heritage groups like the Sons of Confederate Veterans to argue that thousands of African Americans fought as soldiers for the Confederate army during the Civil War. Academic historians unanimously dispute this claim because it is not supported by documentary evidence, but the claims persist on the Internet and Confederate heritage groups continue to point to historical figures like Weary Clyburn–the man mentioned in the Looking for Lincoln excerpt we watched in class–as proof for broader claims about “black Confederates.” Yet the claims made about Clyburn by Earl Ijames, the historian pictured in that documentary, do not rest on solid evidence. And two historians have even discovered how several Confederate heritage websites falsified the image below to make it look like a picture of black Confederates. You can read about their discovery on the webpage Retouching History.

The authors of the website Retouching History discuss modern falsifications of this image of U.S. Colored Troops.

Next week we will talk in greater detail about the reasons why historians dispute the idea of thousands of “black Confederates,” and we’ll read a book by Bruce Levine that deals with the subject. But for now, I’d like you to think about this question: why do some groups like the SCV defend the “black Confederate” thesis so vehemently?

To answer the question of why there are defenders of the “black Confederate” thesis, we need to look closely at what other arguments and hypotheses about the Civil War this idea is typically tied to or advanced with. Only then can we come to some evidence-based conclusions about why finding (or inventing) evidence of black Confederate soldiers matters so much to a small but vocal group of Americans.

So, before class on Friday, please read the following articles or blog posts, and be sure to also read through the comments left on them by readers.

As you read , think about these questions: What other arguments to defenders of the “black Confederate” thesis make about the Civil War era or the history that has been written about it? Do these other arguments shed any light on the question of why Confederate heritage groups are interested in finding supposed “black Confederates” like Weary Clyburn and Silas Chandler?

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Total War on Wheels?

On the heels of our recent discussions about the Civil War on film, and your recent papers (some of which are due tonight, remember) on the question of “total war,” you may want to check out this review of a new AMC series that features a former (non-slaveholding!) Confederate as one of its main characters. See also this response by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Will any of you be tuning in? I am bereft of cable at home, so if you do catch an episode, I’d be interested to hear about it.

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Horwitz Book

Tomorrow we will be discussing Tony Horwitz’s book Confederates in the Attic. Unlike earlier book discussions, this week we’ll have an “open thread” for comments. The Non-Brownians among you should post a comment before class, and the Brownians can post after class. Use your comment to discuss something of particular interest to you in the book. If you believe you can connect certain parts of the book to questions we’ve been discussing in class, so much the better. See you tomorrow!

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Brown Book Comments

Monday’s reading is from one of our required books for the semester, Thomas J. Brown’s The Public Art of Civil War Commemoration. The assigned pages (pp. 1-55, 79-108) cover a wide range of documents and themes related to how people have commemorated the war in the past and how it is remembered today.

For your required comment on this post, I would like you to visit the Dick Dowling statue in Hermann Park, and compare it with the monuments whose designs and inscriptions are discussed by Brown on pp. 22-41. Then briefly answer: What conclusions would you draw about the Dowling statue based on its similarity to or difference from other monuments discussed by Brown? See below for a map of how to get to the statue, which is about seven-tenths of a mile away.


View Larger Map

The “Brown College” group should post comments before class, and the rest of you can comment after class.

Although the comment assignment only relates to part of the Brown reading, be prepared to discuss the other parts in class on Monday. In particular, I’d like you to think about whether a culture of Civil War commemoration that focuses on “conciliation” and “reunion” inevitably tends to work in tandem with a “Lost Cause” memory of the war. Is it possible to commemorate the Confederacy without focusing on its ideological objectives? Also, based on the readings, think about how you believe the war should be commemorated today, on its one-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary.

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Changed dates

I was not selected for a jury (sorry, Elizabeth), so we will meet as usual tomorrow. Please note two important changes to our schedule for the next couple of weeks.

  • Position Paper #4 will now be due on Friday, October 28 instead of October 26. The packet and prompt for the paper should appear on OWL-Space shortly, and we will talk about the topic of the paper tomorrow in class.
  • Our discussion of the Brown book, currently scheduled for this Friday, will instead take place next Monday, October 24.

Also remember that those of you who have taken an extension on Position Paper #3 have until this Friday to turn it in.

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