Spring Break? Is that when your mattress needs replacing?

[khaosworks]

In the midst of throwing all these news links at you, you might want to know what's going on in my life this Spring Break.

What's happening? not much. I'm stuck in Athens, with a stack of papers to grade and impending deadlines on some projects I'm supposed to do. I spent most of yesterday (and I'll do so today) in the Library, trying to pull together some sources for a proposed community study on Athens during the Civil War.

Although I found collections of letters and papers aplenty, I was horribly discouraged at first to find that the Civil War studies of Athens had already been done in the late 1960s - two books by different writers, one on the home front ("Confederate Athens", Kenneth Coleman) and on the Athenians who served in the Confederate Army ("These Men She Gave", John Stegeman). However, I was cheered up a bit by Ichiro, a fellow grad student, who pointed out that these works were probably done with little to none of the new historiographical analyses since then like gender, race, et al. and new questions could still be asked based on the same materials.

I'm still flailing about for a possible topic for a thesis, Masters or otherwise. The real difficulty here is not just finding something I'm interested in, but finding something that also plays to my strengths. At first I was looking at a history of the Georgia Militia - but a quick look at the sources just overwhelmed me. Page upon page of muster rolls with no context to be able to know even when to start. That's when it hit me that for a proper study you have to go at it the other way... start from detailed diaries, and individuals, and then track them by way of the rolls. But anyway, I also discovered that it too has been done, or will be. William Bragg wrote a book on the Georgia State Line ("Joe Brown's Army") and will be coming out with a new book on the militia in general ("Joe Brown's Pets") in May. From what I read though, it's a straight military study, and probably more of the same Joe Brown vs. Jefferson Davis guff again.

Currently, as I'm doing a directed study this semester on military legal history, the thought of doing war crimes during the Civil War intrigues me. Obviously, this was before war crimes were recognized by international convention, but that doesn't mean atrocities didn't take place. It might be an intriguing area of analysis to research into whether or not and to what extent the military and civilian authorities recognized the concept of war crimes.

Anyway, that's me, in my hermitage. You know, give me a call once in a while, or come visit. I'm pretty starved for company other than my TV and musty old tomes.

Comments

[filceolaire.livejournal.com]

War crimes? You mean like selling enemy soldiers into slavery 'cause they were the wrong colour?

The bit that intrigued me was the march on Atlanta. How come Sherman was able to race down to Atlanta? From the dates in the Diorama he would have been hard pushed to have got his supply train to Atlanta from the mountains any faster even if there had been no Confederate army. Is it true there were mass desertions from the confederate side? Is it true there was a regiment of Georgian troops in the Northern army? That's probably well documented somewhere though.

The other one that fascinated me was the Seminole wars - ending just before the Civil war. The campaign that went on for years and years and cost more than Vietnam. The use of guerilla tactics. The fact that the US army never actually won they just declared the war over and went home. The multiracial nature of the seminole - a mixture of indians refugees from many tribes and runaway slaves from Georgia, living in Spanish Florida, backed by the English (has anyone ever checked out the English records?).

The role of runaway slaves in the seminole army especially intrigies me. Is it true that:
* One reason for the war was to recapture them.
* They were a factor in stiffening resistance - surrender was not an option for them.
* A contradiction of the myth that slaves in the south couldn't resist.

[khaosworks.livejournal.com]

I've never looked into the Seminole Wars, so I can't really answer your questions, I'm afraid...

[lawgeekgurl.livejournal.com]

When I was in undergrad, I was doing my senior honors thesis on D.C. Stephenson and the rise of the Klan in Indiana in the '20s. I was fascinated by the idea that this slick huckster took the Klan for millions because he adopted the rhetoric but were really after the money. Also, I had a theory that the rise in nationalism after the first world war, and the fear of immigrants "taking what's ours" is what led to the huge rise in the Klan's rolls. (It's not at all dissimilar to the anti-immigrant rhetoric you hear today, sadly enough.) Anywho. I was pleased as punch at myself for coming up with such a cool thesis and I was poking around the archives at the state library, when I ran into someone who was consulting on a freakin' TV MOVIE on Stephenson, to debut in a few months, right when I was ready to turn in my thesis. That was really depressing. He'd also written a book. He was a nice man, and shared a lot of his research, but damn it. *sigh*