Symposium Spotlight: William Tecumseh Sherman in 1864
Welcome back to our spotlight series, highlighting speakers and topics for our upcoming symposium. Over the coming weeks, we will continue previewing of our speaker’s presentations for the 2024 Emerging Civil War Symposium. This week we feature Cecily N. Zander’s topic.
Refining War: William Tecumseh Sherman in 1864
As he conducted his famed march to the Sea in 1864, William Tecumseh Sherman supposedly remarked that “war is cruelty, and you cannot refine it.” Yet Sherman spent most of that pivotal year refining his methods of waging war, based on his decades of experience in the army—and as a teacher of future soldiers. This talk will examine the surprising origins of Sherman’s total war philosophy, while analyzing the extent to which this new, harsher form of warfare succeeded in achieving the demoralization and devastation Sherman sought to inflict.
Find more information and tickets for our 2024 Symposium by clicking here.
Sounds cool! I still would not list Sherman as “total war”, or any other major figure of the CW on either side except small nobodys like Turchin.