Harvard University Press Blog

(Word) Clouds Before the Fall

A few of our Fall books have already been making their way out into the world, but it’s hard not to think of Labor Day as the point when autumn’s really here. So, before we get there, let’s take a moment to look back at some highlights from our Spring list, via their word clouds. Each book’s cloud shows the group of words that appear most often in the text; the larger the word’s font size, the more frequently it appears. They’re a nice way in.

Here’s the cloud for Before the Revolution: America’s Ancient Pasts, by Daniel Richter 

 

Peter Fritzsche’s The Turbulent World of Franz Göll: An Ordinary Berliner Writes the Twentieth Century

The Mechanical Turk

Last week our favorite tweeting curator, John Overholt, noted that Harvard’s Houghton Library holds one of ten known copies (in English) of Karl Gottlieb von Windisch’s Brife über den Schachspieler des von Kempelen, or Inanimate Reason, as it’s titled in English. The book, or pamphlet, really, was published in 1784 and is Windisch’s account of the infamous mechanical Turk, a chess-playing false automaton presented by Wolfgang von Kempelen in 1770. Overholt, Assistant Curator of Early Modern Books and Manuscripts at Houghton, tells us that Houghton’s copy (call number SG 3675.34.10) came from a significant collection of books on chess bequeathed to Harvard in 1938 by Silas W. Howland. You can see Howland’s great bookplate here. 

But what’s it to us?

Earlier this year we published Minsoo Kang’s Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the European Imagination. Kang explained his argument in a post here this past winter:

Sublime Dreams of Living Machines looks at how intellectuals have utilized the self-moving, life-imitating machine as a symbol and a conceptual object from the time of ancient civilizations to the twentieth century. I look at the Enlightenment—when various notions of the human-being-as-machine and the machine-as-representation-of-the-human became ubiquitous in Western discourse—as the crucial period in the history of the automaton idea. For almost a century before the automaton craze, philosophers, scientists, and writers described the universe, the state, and the human body as machines, contributing to what the historian E. J. Dijksterhuis famously called the mechanization of the world picture. When later mechanics began to build and display actual automata with astoundingly complex mechanisms, they were seen as beautiful, wondrous, and rational representations of the entire worldview of the Enlightenment.

The mechanical Turk marks a significant turning point in the story that Kang tells. He notes two distinct historical eras for the automaton’s standing in the late Enlightenment. The first is the “golden age of the automaton,” the time of the object’s intellectual primacy, when the concept of the automaton signified much more than an ingenious piece of mechanical craft. It was, Kang writes, “used as a heuristic device to illustrate the nature of the body, the state, and even the entire universe constructed by an engineer-God, functioning as the central emblem of the mechanistic cosmos of the classical Enlightenment.”

Next came the period of “the automaton craze,” a time when the object’s primacy in intellectual consideration had passed but when public interest was rising to its climax. This period of heightened public interest ended, Kang argues, with the chess-playing Turk.

A New Perspective on Florence and Baghdad

We’ve just released Florence and Baghdad: Renaissance Art and Arab Science, a new book from the German art historian Hans Belting. The book’s title stresses conjunction, but it also clearly highlights things we’re perhaps more accustomed to seeing considered in opposition. Art and science; the Renaissance and the Middle Ages; Christianity and Islam. Much of the implied contrast is conveyed by Jill Breitbarth’s jacket design for the book. The geometrically ornate arabesque, reproduced from the tile decoration of an Egyptian mosque, set against the lush realism of the 16th century oil painting beneath it.

The juxtaposition of the images obviously highlights the flatness of the tiling against the painting’s use of perspective. In traditional Arab art the viewer isn’t meant to look through the surface – the surface is the art. In the painting underneath, though, our eyes are clearly directed past the surface, into the distance, the background. Belting shows that the relationship between these two styles and also between the cultures that they represent is far more complex than opposition. Florence and Baghdad, then, is about perspective, and about the gaze, but not just in the artistic or theoretical senses of the words. What Belting gives us is also a study of these two cultures gazing at one another.

Belting reveals the sensational fact that the “invention” of perspective in the West is actually due to a discovery that had already been made in the Arabic World centuries before the Renaissance. The Arab mathematician Alhazen developed an optical theory—in the middle of a culture largely devoid of images—which later formed the basis for Western perspective painting. Belting explains why Islamic art wasn’t influenced by the discovery, due to its religious, cultural and scientific contexts. He also explains why the effects on European art didn’t appear until later:

The rationalism dominant in the era when Arab science reached its peak could not bear fruit in the West until the modern period, since it was based on scientific experiments liberated from every kind of theological baggage. During the epoch that we in the West call the Middle Ages, the subjects of mathematics and astronomy were popular in the Arab world, which had not yet come under the kind of dogmatic constraints so prevalent later.

As Belting puts it elsewhere: “The Arab theory of optics was known at European universities by the thirteenth century, but it did not become a theory of pictures until the fifteenth century. The grounds for its transformation were not scientific but cultural.”

There’s much to digest here. Work like Alhazen’s came from a period when Arab societies were open to scientific inquiry that was remarkably free of theology in a way that Christian science and society were not. At the time of Alhazen’s development of the theory of perspective, there was simply too much “theological baggage” for the concept to yet begin to influence Western art. What should also be clear from Belting’s study is the inaccuracy of the notion of Arab writers as just preservers of Greek knowledge during the “Dark Ages.” They were actually making serious advancements.

So, while virtually rewriting this chapter of art history, Belting also offers a discerning comparison between Arabic and Western culture, opening our eyes to the images that have surrounded us since the beginning of the Modem Age and essentially pioneering a new area of cultural studies: the comparison of the visual perceptions of Western and Islamic culture. Or, more generally, the cultural comparison of the gaze. The differences between the pictures developed in these two cultures, between Renaissance art and Arabic science, reflect their different practices with regard to visuality. The differences involve, as Belting notes, “not just art but also a mind-set and relationship to the world.”

Belting’s study of those differences is an important new work of scholarship that’s also an intellectual and historical adventure. And, if we can add modestly, the book is a simply stunning object, heavily illustrated, full color throughout, and sure to give us a new perspective on art and the world.

The West Memphis Three and False Confessions

Today’s post comes from Brandon L. Garrett, Professor of Law at the University of Virginia School of Law, and author of Convicting the Innocent: Where Criminal Prosecutions Go Wrong.

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This past Friday at a hearing in Jonesboro, Arkansas, the West Memphis Three, who had been convicted in 1994 of murdering three young boys, but had long claimed their innocence, finally became free men by entering a rare deal in which they officially pleaded guilty while maintaining their innocence. Over the years, the cases against the Three had come into doubt. One of the Three, Jessie Misskelley Jr., had implicated the other two after a long police interrogation. His confession was the basis for the arrests. The alleged ringleader, Damien Echols, had been sentenced to death and had been on death row for 18 years. However, new DNA tests excluded all of the Three and instead matched one of the victim’s step-fathers. With that evidence in hand the Three seemed headed towards a new trial, one in which the prosecution acknowledges the men would likely have been acquitted. This deal securing their release preempts the staging of a new trial, though the prosecutor maintains that Misskelley’s confession was true and all three are guilty.

The case has received national attention over the years, particularly after a remarkable movie about the case, Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills, was released in 1996. The case of the West Memphis Three is the latest high-profile case of a contested police interrogation that was not carefully recorded, making it far more difficult to unravel who said what. The lawyers for the Three maintained that Misskelley’s confession was false, unreliable and included all sorts of statements totally inconsistent with how the crime happened. Misskelley was borderline mentally retarded, with an IQ of 72, yet police persisted with his lengthy interrogation. The few recorded pieces of the interrogations showed police using leading questions to try to tell him what had happened, something that interrogators are trained not to do because it contaminates a confession. We do not know what threats or other techniques were used to secure that confession. Misskelley had promptly recanted his confession, but it was used to arrest and convict him.

In my book, Convicting the Innocent, I discuss what went wrong in the first 250 cases in which DNA cleared innocent people in the U.S. Chapter Two of the book focuses on the forty cases where DNA brought false confessions to light. Many of the forty were young or mentally disabled, partially explaining why they may have been susceptible to police pressure. In addition, all but two of their confession statements were reported to have “inside information” that only the true culprit could have known. Those details may have been fed by police. However, none of the forty false confessions that I studied was recorded in its entirely. We do not know everything that happened in those interrogation rooms. As a result, until DNA technology was developed and provided decisive evidence of innocence, those false confessions appeared to powerfully support the convictions.

A new multimedia resource, called “Getting it Right,” co-produced with the Innocence Project, with support from the Open-Society Foundations, shows how wrongful convictions display patterns that can tell us how to improve our criminal justice system. The resource includes video from the false confession of Frank Sterling, who endured a grueling twelve hour interrogation. His case illustrates the importance of requiring the videotaping of entire
interrogations. “Getting it Right” offers a series of links to research and resources for those interested in reading more about false confessions. “Getting it Right” also features an incredibly moving video featuring Jennifer Thompson (pictured at right), describing how she misidentified Ronald Cotton as the man who raped her and how poor lineup procedures played a role. There are also interactive resources on informants and forensic evidence, and on the roles played by law enforcement and lawyers.

The vast majority of criminal cases lack usable DNA evidence. Like the West Memphis Three case, the 250 cases that I studied are all unusual cases in which the “truth machine” of DNA can call into question seemingly rock-solid evidence. That is why it is so important to learn from the wrongful convictions that do come to light – so that we can get it right.

Tragedy and the Civil War

Back in April, sparked by a podcast conversation about what Union and Confederate soldiers saw as their reasons for fighting, Atlantic editor and blogger Ta-Nehisi Coates noted the common ground often arrived at in discussion of the Civil War: that the war was a tragedy. In a post titled “The Civil War Isn’t Tragic,” Coates argued against that position:

I think that ground is generally accepted by almost everyone, and for good reasons. Six hundred thousand people died in the Civil War, a shocking figure which doesn't really capture the toll that this sort of violence took on the country at large. And yet when I think about the Civil War I don't feel sad at all. To be honest, I feel positively fucking giddy.

And I don’t think I’m abnormal because of this. Twenty-two thousand people died in the Revolutionary War, and we celebrate that with hot dogs and hamburgers every year. I’m sure that while Jews feel fairly horrible that the Holocaust happened, very few of them consider the fighting it took in order to liberate the death camps, "tragic." The Holocaust is tragic. Ending the Holocaust is not.

Coates has carried this argument through what’s become a months-long series of posts that engage with the notion of Civil War as tragedy. From this week:

If there is such a thing as an African-American people--and I believe there is--then it must be said that that for 250 years, that people lived in a state of war. The period between 1860 and 1865 are but the final years of that war, during which as Lincoln put it:

“...all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn by the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword.”

It is a privilege to view the Civil War merely as four violent years, as opposed to the final liberating act in a two and half century-long saga of horrific violence, a privilege that black people have never enjoyed, and truthfully that no one in this country should indulge.

In response, the blogger Matt Yglesias argues that that “there’s a certain amount of tragedy lurking behind essentially every large war, even the most righteous one.” In his economic analysis, Yglesias notes that the money spent on the war could have instead been used to purchase the freedom of every slave, thus sparing the war’s loss of life. He continues:

Tragedy may not correctly capture the sense of a situation in which there are clear bad guys. But there’s something to be said for the fact that the human tendency to want to settle things by resort to arms is an ongoing tragedy, and even the “good” wars illustrate it in some important ways.

Coates countered by noting that compensated emancipation was in fact attempted and actually failed. But he also rejected the compromise inherent in the proposition:

I decline to lament that the federal government didn't go into the business of buying people, stripping them of their claim to America, after investing the profits of their labor, and colonizing them in parts unknown.

I decline all offers to mourn the second American Revolution. No one mourns the first.

Guns and Violence in Britain

Last week we looked at what the likes of Paul Gilroy and Zygmunt Bauman have had to say about the rioting and unrest in Britain. They represent a strain of analysis that takes these events as reaction against a system that casts its citizens as nothing but consumers and then looks the other way after economic collapse.

In today’s Wall Street Journal, Joyce Lee Malcolm offers a different perspective, suggesting that the recent violence is instead a reflection of Britain’s “sympathy for offenders, intolerance of self-defense, and unwillingness to pay for adequate crime control.” Noting that baseball bats were Amazon’s hottest seller in the UK last week, Malcolm presents the case against Britain’s approach to crime and concludes that “The lesson from many years of failed criminal justice policies is that deterrence matters, police cannot always protect the public from violence and criminality, and ordinary people must be allowed to protect themselves.”

Malcolm is the author of Guns and Violence: The English Experience and To Keep and Bear Arms: The Origins of an Anglo-American Right, both of which were published by HUP. Last week one commentator noted that both books “ought to be force-fed to every member of Parliament.” The books take the long view on guns, with Malcolm embracing the historian’s charge to hold current conceptions against the past. From the Introduction to Guns and Violence (which was published in 2002):

Behind the passionate debate over gun control and armed crime lie untested assumptions about the connection between firearms and violence. Conventional wisdom equates the number of guns in private hands with the frequency of armed crimes. Contributing causes—poverty, unemployment, an unstable social environment—are acknowledged, but guns are viewed as an important, if not the most important, factor. Indeed some scholars claim that “the weapons effect on aggressive behavior is well established”—that is, the mere presence or sight of a gun triggers hostile action. The removal of privately owned firearms therefore seems the easiest means of reducing violence. This logic undergirds the firearms policies of Great Britain and of most other developed countries. Further, it presumes that legislation is capable of reducing the quantity of guns available to those individuals likely to commit crimes.

The belief that statutes can actually deprive criminals of firearms has long been questioned. But recently the deeper question, the relationship between the number of guns and the number of armed crimes, has been vigorously challenged as well. One forceful argument turns that equation on its head, claiming that having more guns in private hands will decrease crime. Criminals are logical, according to this argument; therefore, when they weigh the cost of committing a crime, they will be more hesitant to prey on individuals who are armed. Thus, if many people are armed, violent crime will decline. On that theory thirty-three American states now have statutes permitting law-abiding citizens to carry concealed weapons. There is a third possibility, of course: the number of guns available to the public may have no appreciable impact on the rate of violent crime, and the solution, whatever it is, lies elsewhere. These alternative approaches deserve closer scrutiny.

Fasting From Information

Jo Guldi, a historian at the Harvard Society of Fellows and author of Roads to Power, is one of the most digitally adept scholars we’ve yet had the opportunity to work with here at HUP. In the piece below, posted to her blog earlier this summer, Guldi considers some of the implications of the constant streams of information in which we all wash. As she explains, not too long ago she experimented in shifting her relationship with that information. She moved away from the common approach of restricting intake and reacting immediately, and toward a practice of exposing herself to an ever-wider amount of information and giving it time to affect her thinking.

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“Fast from stories,” advise the Taoists. The practice switches off old narratives. It’s advice related to a meditation practice of following the breath, remaining attentive from moment to moment, opening to new information, and staying in a state of awareness without judgment.

In an age of information, reading is pulled between two poles: one, reading intensively in the same areas that always intrigue us, the other, skimming for something new, observing without analyzing. A narrowing of focus is the natural shape of attention in an age of overwhelm. Fandom, loyalty to a political issue, and “following” one’s social network all take this form. How often does someone in my twitter network voice a point of view with which I radically disagree? Not so often. How often do I click through to a story on a topic I’ve never read about before? Not so often. Luddites, lamenting the death of the newspaper or our retreat from the forest, draw the conclusion that we have lost both awareness and variety. However modern it is, this narrowing of focus is almost necessary as a means of siphoning the ocean of information around us into a digestible trickle.

What about stepping into the ocean of sound itself, merely tasting its swirling mists without judging them?

I live beside that sea of information and spend more time alone with it than perhaps anyone else I know. For the last three years I’ve had the extremely unusual position of being paid, to read books and to write books, with very little in the way of outside obligation. Maybe 1% of professional historians are full-time professional researchers. The freedom of that position makes way for a diversity of reading unusual even among full-time writers, journalists, and professors.

When I was first granted this freedom, I wrote publicly all the time. Almost daily, fits of attitude would make their way onto the internet: observations about the modern university, the modern church, the modern family, the phenomenon of chatroulette, infrastructure policy, the recipe I most liked, the book I’d just been reading. Nothing was too big or too small but for me to have an opinion about it.

For the last nine months of that time, I haven’t blogged. I’ve confined myself to 140-character observations on Twitter.

“Riots in The Cause of Consumer Goods"

It’s difficult to discuss what’s been happening in London this past week without tipping one’s ideological hand from jump. The language calls for choices that reflect opinions. “Rioting” is the term being used most frequently by politicians and news outlets. Many on the left reject that label, though. “Uprising” is a term they see as more appropriate. Others, like the journalist Darcus Howe, call it an “insurrection.” Many who use the term “rioting” are inclined to dismiss the people on the streets as opportunistic looters, acting out with no cause; those saying “insurrection” and “uprising” tell a different story, of a politically and economically neglected group set off by the police shooting of a young black man.

The shooting itself may have been an unpredictable spark, but Paul Gilroy, via twitter, noted that “It is completely absurd to say that nobody expected this.” Gilroy, a professor at the London School of Economics who we’ve published several times, has been tweeting about the situation all week. People online have been turning to him for insight, but he’s remained resolute in his stance that the cause of these events is plain.

“We all know perfectly well why this is happening. The price of operating inside the official bubble is too high these days.”

“You already know enough. So do I. It's not knowledge we lack what is missing is the courage to understand what we know & to draw conclusions.”

Gilroy also retweeted the following from @DayMoonRoseDawn:

“They said we had to BUY! BUY! We couldn't afford it, so they gave us credit and said BUY! BUY! Then they stop the credit. It's now byebye!”

This socioeconomic analysis was echoed in a Granta post by Gabriel Gbadamosi:

These looters are doing what they’re supposed to; grabbing the goods they see in the shops and can’t buy in a recession. They loot the bling – the sports shoes, gold watches, mobile phones and plasma TVs; and you can recognize the very poor when you see a woman looting potatoes from a corner shop. These acquisitive looters are certainly copying the gold standard of a social contract eroded by and evaporating with the money. These are riots in the cause of consumer goods.

That’s also the explanation offered by the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, whose Does Ethics Have a Chance in a World of Consumers?, we published in 2008. Bauman wrote a post for Social Europe Journal on “Consumerism Coming Home to Roost.” “These are not hunger or bread riots,” he explained. “These are riots of defective and disqualified consumers.” More:

From cradle to coffin we are trained and drilled to treat shops as pharmacies filled with drugs to cure or at least mitigate all illnesses and afflictions of our lives and lives in common. Shops and shopping acquire thereby a fully and truly eschatological dimension. Supermarkets, as George Ritzer famously put it, are our temples; and so, I may add, the shopping lists are our breviaries, while strolls along the shopping malls become our pilgrimages. Buying on impulse and getting rid of possessions no longer sufficiently attractive in order to put more attractive ones in their place are our most enthusing emotions. The fullness of consumer enjoyment means fullness of life. I shop, therefore I am. To shop or not to shop, this is the question.

For defective consumers, those contemporary have-nots, non-shopping is the jarring and festering stigma of a life un-fulfilled – and of own nonentity and good-for-nothingness. Not just the absence of pleasure: absence of human dignity. Of life meaning. Ultimately, of humanity and any other ground for self-respect and respect of the others around.

This way of thinking presents modern society as a world organized around consumption, certain to break down when economic collapse excludes so many from the consuming. Of course, consumption has only replaced other earlier points of consensus, and the events in London serve as a reminder of that shift. We heard from Richard Howells, our European Sales Director, based in our London office, that the past week has left him thinking of Daniel Rodgers’ recent book, Age of Fracture. The book looks specifically at the US, but much of its analysis of the increasing fluidity and even breakdown of all of our mid-century principles of collective purpose can also help us to understand the UK. Rodgers argues that our categories of social reality have been fractured, and, as Richard relates, London is seeing the effects of that fracture on its streets.

Tips for Teaching What You Don't Know: Managing Your Time

So far in our mini-series of tips for teaching outside of your area of expertise we’ve learned how to design the course and how to establish credibility in the classroom. In this final post of the series, Therese Huston offers some guidance on managing your time. Huston is the founding Director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at Seattle University, and author of Teaching What You Don’t Know. 

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Perhaps classes begin for you in the next couple of weeks. Or perhaps you’re one of the lucky ones who won’t be welcoming students until after Labor Day. Either way, if you’re teaching a course on unfamiliar material, you might be asking yourself “How will I manage my time?” Or more accurately, “Will I have a life and will I sleep?”

Yes, you will undoubtedly get some sleep, but you’ll get much more of it if you have a system. Teaching new material is a ton of work. There’s no escaping that reality and everyone I’ve interviewed about it agreed on that one point.

But the faculty who found the workload more manageable had several things in common. One important distinction they shared was a shift in their teaching philosophy—these professors did not view their role in the classroom as that of a knowledge dispenser. They described their roles in many ways; some of them focused on teaching students how to formulate good questions, others said “My role is to show them to think like a chemist | historian | etc.”

In contrast, the faculty who felt the most strained and consumed by the experience basically described themselves as knowledge dispensers, or, as I like to think of them affectionately, “knowledge gumball machines.” In their view, when students ask the instructor a question, a perfectly formed piece of knowledge should come rolling out, preferably in a pleasing color. When faculty hold themselves to that standard in an unfamiliar course on an unfamiliar topic, class prep becomes a nightmare.

So the first step towards managing your time is to reconsider your role in the classroom and make sure it’s realistic.

The next step is to have a system for preparing for class, and the system I recommend is called backward design. It’s an approach that’s well documented in the literature, so here I’ll just explain a modified version, streamlined so that you can use it for every class.

Step 1: Writing Three Questions

When you sit down to prepare for each class, ask yourself “What are the three questions I want students to be able to answer by the end of class?” They can be really broad questions such as “Why was the Vietnam War important?” or they can be more focused questions such as “Why did Johnson escalate the war in 1963?” Depending on your learning goals, they can be questions that require recall or they can be questions that require complex reasoning. Commit to three questions for a given class period. (You might want four questions if your class is unusually long, but three is a manageable number that’s easy for students to remember.)

You’re going to use these questions to shape your class prep time. As we saw in last week’s post it’s still important that you read everything that you’ve assigned, but with the three question approach you don’t have to acquire depth on every single topic in the reading. Your three questions tell you where you need depth, and they focus any additional research you need to do. Your questions also provide the three main pillars around which you can organize your lecture or discussion.

The Bomb in American Memory

In this past Sunday’s Boston Globe Ideas section, a long piece by Gareth Cook considers the question of why Japan surrendered in World War II. The occasion for the article was the August 6th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, long-considered the pivotal event in the ceasing of hostilities. Cook’s article is built on an extended discussion of Tsuyoshi Hasegawa and his book, Racing the Enemy, which we published in 2005.  As Cook details, Hasegawa’s revisionist work on the bombing’s part in the end of WWII forces us to reconsider much of what we’ve come to believe about that conflict and about the efficacy of nuclear weapons.  

The common conception and prevailing scholarly analysis have held that Japan surrendered in the face of the inconceivable devastation wrought by the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Hasegawa makes a convincing argument that Japan was in fact prepared to forge on even after the bombs, and that it surrendered only after the Soviets declared war on Japan several days after the bombing of Hiroshima. Hasegawa also argues that the level of destruction inflicted by the atomic bomb was not quite as singular as we’ve told ourselves. Indeed, as Cook explains in his article, the bomb’s technology was new but its effects were sadly familiar:

“In early March, several hundred B-29 Super Fortress bombers dropped incendiary bombs on downtown Tokyo. Some argue that more died in the resulting firestorm than at Hiroshima. People were boiled in the canals. The photos of charred Tokyo and charred Hiroshima are indistinguishable.”

The implications of Hasegawa’s work are wide-ranging. The perceived role of the atomic bomb in the halting of WWII has been a central factor in the international nuclear proliferation that has followed. What would it mean if the heart of the story that we tell ourselves about nuclear weapons is actually wrong? What would it mean for Japan to recognize that its leaders were actually prepared to fight on, despite the horrific employment of nuclear weapons against their people? And what would it mean for the United States to admit that its use of these terrible modern weapons was actually somehow peripheral to the war’s end, and thus perhaps even tactically unnecessary?

His treatment of all of these questions makes Hasegawa’s work not just a transnational history of military and political conflict, but also an important study of the role of memory in the formation of national character. In this sense, Hasegawa’s study of the aftermath of WWII and how it has functioned in our national consciousness belongs on a thematic shelf with work like David Blight’s ongoing investigation of the Civil War in American memory.