Current Civil War Research Update: This Week at the Southern

The Annual Meeting of the Southern Historical Association (known as “the Southern”) convenes this week in St. Pete Beach, Florida. The full program can be found here: http://thesha.org/content/pdf/Program_Current.pdf

While the Southern offers sessions covering southern history from the colonial period through the modern era, the program always includes cutting-edge research about the American Civil War. This year is no different, with six intriguing panels considering a variety of topics related to the war. Additionally, the Society of Civil War Historians holds its annual banquet at the Southern, and the winner of the organization’s Tom Watson Brown Book Award gives a lecture after dinner that evening.

Let’s take a look at what Civil War historians will be discussing this year:

Society of Civil War Historians Banquet
Presiding: Daniel Sutherland, University of Arkansas

“Tactics, Training, and Combat: The Civil War as an Event in American and World History” by Earl J. Hess, Lincoln Memorial University

Dr. Hess is the recipient of the 2016 Tom Watson Brown Book Award for Civil War Infantry Tactics: Training, Combat, and Small-Unit Effectiveness (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015).

Coming Out of the Shadows: New Insights into Understudied Aspects of the American Civil War
Presiding: Anne Sarah Rubin, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Panelists:
Judith Giesberg, Villanova University
Lesley J. Gordon, University of Alabama
Susannah J. Ural, University of Southern Mississippi

The Perennial Problem of Poor Whites during the Civil War Era
Presiding: David Gleeson, Northumbria University
Papers:
“The Problem of Poor Whites in the Planter Mind” by David Brown, Manchester University

“Contingent Confederates: A Case Study in the Latent Unionism of a Poor White Soldier” by Gary T. Edwards, Arkansas State University
Comments:
Susan-Mary Grant, Newcastle University
David Gleeson

Calculating the Value of the Confederacy: Southerners Confront the Union Economy
Presiding: R. Douglas Hurt, Purdue University
Papers:
“‘Removing Prejudices and Solidifying the Nation’: Union Bond Sales in the Confederacy” by David K. Thomson, Sacred Heart University

“Expanding the Greenback Zone: Union Soldiers and Greenbacks in the Confederacy” by
Michael T. Caires, University of Virginia

“Would Cotton or Corn Rule?: Southern Perspectives on Their Importance to the Midwestern Economy” by Julie A. Mujic, Capital University
Comments:
Joshua Rothman, University of Alabama

Political and Military Leadership in the Nineteenth-Century South
Presiding: Graydon Tunstall, University of South Florida
Papers:
“The Gray Ghost – John Singleton Mosby” by Kevin R. Youngberg, University of South Florida

“Running Against Himself: Henry Clay’s Two Decades of Presidential Campaigns” by Jacob Wood, University of South Florida
Comments:
Graydon Tunstall

Of Cities and Women: Stories from Charleston, Mobile, and Richmond in the Slaveholding South
Presiding: Connie Lester, University of Central Florida
Papers:
“Young and Old, Town and Country: Expectation and Urban Space in Eighteenth-Century
Charleston” by Anne Lindsay, California State University, Sacramento

“In the Salon of Madame Le Vert Was There a Salonnière? Women and Intellectual Life in the Antebellum Urban South” by Marise Bachand, Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières

“‘The Last Confederate Christmas’: Slaveholding Women’s Rituals of Cultural Authority in the Confederate Capital” by Ashley Whitehead Luskey, Independent Scholar and Historical Consultant
Comments:
Catherine Kerrison, Villanova University

The Cost of Freedom: African-American Experiences in Emancipation
Presiding: Carole Emberton, University at Buffalo, SUNY
Papers:
“The Impact of War and Emancipation on African-American Population and Family Structure” by J. David Hacker, University of Minnesota

“‘Somethin’ went hard agin her mind’: Suffering, Suicide and Emancipated Slaves” by Diane Miller Sommerville, Binghamton University, SUNY

“Finding Shelter, Finding Freedom: Migration in the Occupied South” by Amy Murrell Taylor, University of Kentucky

“Deserting Freedom: African American Runaways in the Union Army” by Jonathan Lande,
Brown University
Comments:
Chandra Manning, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study