American Culture in the Civil War Era

Introduction

CWES 400 is an upper-level reading seminar which surveys various aspects of the American Civil War era on a revolving basis, and serves as the capstone to the Civil War Era Studies minor (or, in some cases, doubles as a history department senior seminar). This year’s CWES 400 focuses on American culture, with the term “culture” used very broadly to embrace studies of American “artifacts and modes of expression that serve as tangible evidence of understandings and sensibilities of individuals and groups active in public discourse” (Encyclopedia of American Cultural and Intellectual History, 2001). This includes, among many other things, the host of images, ideologies, concepts, visions of behavior, institutions — and the means for promoting and disseminating of all of these — which abounded in American life between 1848 and 1877. It does not exclude politics, but it concentrates on the internal aspects of political life: how politics mirrored the aspirations of those who participated in political life. It includes the arts. It also pays attention to the emergence of markets for the arts and the restraints which those markets and 19th-century technology placed on them. It does not include literature; similarly, it includes only one session on American philosophy, largely because another history department offering dwells upon 19th-century American philosophy in much greater detail.

Cultural history is a comparatively recent newcomer among historical disciplines, although it has long antecedents in American intellectual history and American studies. In many respects, it is still not entirely divorced from the study of American intellectual history. Although the structure of the seminar is roughly chronological, each topic really stands on its own. The purpose is to guide you through these major topics and through the most important books to have been written about them, and, by the end of the seminar, have you at a place we can call with reasonable confidence, “the cutting edge” of Civil War cultural history scholarship.

Class Responsibilities

The seminar will involve three major responsibilities. FIRST, you will prepare, as your meisterstück in Civil War culture studies, a 15-20 page research paper on a selected Civil War era topic. This assignment will function in the place, and have a standing equivalent to, a final examination. Accordingly, it should demonstrate your acquisition of the methodological skills illustrated by the texts. I prefer to allow a great deal of discretion in selecting topics, but you should keep three things in mind:

1. Do not make it too broad (“Why the South Lost the Civil War”will not work in 15-20 pages) and do not make it subjective; this is not about your personal responses, feelings, &c., &c. I am not adamant about a particular style (Turabian, Chicago Manual) but I will insist that the essay include the following:
   • A title page, listing in centered sequential lines
     • Your title
     • Your name
     • CWES 400 American Culture in the Civil War Era
     • Gettysburg College
   • Text in twelve-point type, with footnotes at the bottom of the page
   • Not less than 1.5 spacing, or more than 2.0 (double) spacing
2. The reading assignments are crucial to acquiring an overall command of the literature about American Civil War era culture. To that end, I will ask you to prepare a working outline of approximately three-to-five pages of the book assigned for that session. This outline will be turned in to me at the end of the class session, but it will form the basis for class discussion during the session.
3. There will be three in-class presentations. The first, on February 18th, will be an introduction to the topic about which you are writing your research paper. I have pitched this session early in the semester with a deliberate and sneaky end in mind, which is to get things moving on the paper early-on, rather than waiting and scrambling at the very end. You will not need to submit anything in written form, but you may wish to use multi-media formats for the presentation (PowerPoint and so forth). This presentation will introduce your topic, how you plan to structure the paper, and what your principal sources are. The overall point is to engage your peers in the seminar and let them suggest angles, resources, and new directions that they have encountered in their own research. The second in-class presentation, on April 1st, will be a follow-up to the material I present in the preceding week on Civil War-era music, in which you will provide a brief introduction to one or more of the pieces on the music CD accompanying the texts. Once again, you will not need to submit anything in written form, but you may wish to use multi-media formats. These introductions, which should not last more than 10 minutes, should be broken down as follows:
   • Military music (tracks 1, 23-27) – Hadley
   • Early American sacred music (tracks 2 & 3) – Tercha, Rakoff
   • Serious music in the Early Republic (tracks 4-8) – Montgomery, Bilodeau Minstrelsy (track 9) – Causey, Roland
   • Brass band music (tracks 10-11) – Ryckbost, Penta
   • American composers during the Civil War (tracks 12-14, 22, 29) – Towle, Leamy
   • Southern popular music of the Civil War (tracks 15 & 16) – Cannella Northern popular music of the Civil War (tracks 17-21, 28) – Conserette, Thomas
   • Post-war American composers (track 30) – Mills

The third in-class presentation will follow on April 15th, on American art, and will be based on the other CD distributed to this class. Once again, there will be no written submission; you are simply preparing an introduction of not more than ten minutes length. In this case, you should definitely use some form of multi- media format to display items from the CD. The introductions should be grouped as follows:

• Birch, Cole, Martin, LeClear, the Peale family – Ryckbost Frederic Church – Montgomery
• George Caleb Bingham – Mills
• Winslow Homer – Hadley
• Albert Bierstadt – Rakoff
• Xanthus R. Smith and Naval Paintings (Chambers, Hays, Joffray, Overend) -Conserette
• G.P.A. Healy – Bilodeau
• Prang chromolithographs – Roland
• Political cartoons – Causey, Penta
• Images of the Confederates (Washington, Chapman, Gaul, Brooks) – Thomas, Tercha
• Images of the Union Soldier – Cannella
• Cycloramas – Leamy
• Portraits (Sara Peale, Neagle, Hovenden, Curry, Marchant) – Towle

This brings me to one last responsibility, which is class participation, based upon the readings. Not everyone is a born classroom orator, but being able to speak to a particular question in an informed and balanced fashion is part of what makes for any liberally-educated person; so it will be here. I encourage people to volunteer questions, comments, evaluations, &c., but I have no reluctance in calling upon individuals. Everyone has the right to speak, disagree, object, and debate, because there will be few cases in which any single book you’re reading has answered all the questions, or answered them satisfactorily. And what you bring from your own wealth of Civil War reading should certainly be applied to the books you are reading here. Since we meet only once a week, in a single mammoth seminar session, attendance is a matter of the highest priority. Each un-excused absence drops your final grade by one letter.

Grading

Weekly book outlines 25%

In-class presentations 25%

Research paper 50%