If you are going to be a big-picture historian, if you are going to draw sweeping conclusions about great questions, why, oh why get mixed up in a lot of gritty details? To show that you've mastered the materials? But then you have to get the details right, or you look like a fraud.

Look at these errors committed by John Keegan. It's kind to call them "sloppy," because they are career, status, and credibility killers. Note his answer to the challenge on dates of the American Revolution; it shows the kind of hateur pop historians may indulge in - a pride that is the opposite of historic sensibility.

I think this poster is onto something:

"It makes me wonder whether or not he wrote the book himself. I've read Keegan before and he never made such glaring errors. Also, I don't think I've heard of such errors written on anything pertaining the civil war. It's almost comical."

Successful pop historians do not seem to research their own books or write them, as we learned in the Goodwin and Ambrose scandals. They bless the content, then learn just enough about their "own" writings to travel the interview and commentary circuit, and that's that.

This explains the anomalies in McPherson's Antietam book last year. McPherson's interviews and endnotes credit works containing new information and new thinking, but none of the newer stuff makes it into his prose.

For instance, he praises John Hennessy's, Return to Bull Run without noticing four incidents in which generals capture each others' orders before McClellan finds Lee's orders in the Maryland Campaign. McClellan's find remains unique, in McPherson's narrative.

He cites John Michael Priest's Before Antietam: The Battle for South Mountain, without noticing all the movements and orders McClellan issued after finding the Lost Order: in McPherson's new book, McClellan still waits six hours before issuing his first command.

In an interview, he praises Harsh's Taken at the Flood, without actually adopting any of the book's views or conclusions. For example, one of its central ideas is that McClellan seized the intitiative from Lee before finding Lee's orders.

Search McPherson in vain for this or other new insights. And yet these citations serve him as bona fides.

The solution, of course, is to write your own books. If you are Keegan, and you insist the Revolution was fought from 1776 on, give the ghostwriter a little break and tell us why that is so. If you are McPherson and you cite new studies whose findings and content contradict your earlier conclusions, don't restate those conclusions with a smile and a nod to the new material ... send the ghostwriter on coffeebreak and tell us why you reject the new material.

McPherson: "I owe much to existing scholarship. What is different about my book is the compression of these complex events into a brief compass."

No sir. What is different in your work are citations that spite your conclusions. Again and again.

You have read the good stuff, use it.

NEWS | Civil War graffitti discovered in Bagdad, Florida * Cache of Lincoln photos found in Illinois school * Vanished island, site of Battery Wagner, to be restored

A few thoughts on remembering by Paul A. Shackel in Memory in Black and White:

Public memory is more a reflection of present political and social relations than a true reconstruction of the past.

Therefore, public memory does not rely solely on professional historical scholarship, but it takes into account the various individuals and institutions that affect and influence the versions of histories that have become part of the collective memory.

Public memory can be viewed as tactical power that controls social settings. Competing groups battle ceaselessly to create and control the collective national memory of revered sacred sites and objects.

The tensions between and within groups who struggle for control over the collective public memory is ongoing since the political stakes are high.

The meaning of sacred sites on the American landscape is continually being negotiated and reconstructed.

This columnist wonders how long observance of a federal religious holiday will last. She also outlines the three-step program that created Thanksgiving.

Starting in the 1940s, people began donating books to the Alabama State Archives. They were not thrown away, but neither were they cataloged. A part-timer is now going through boxes and finding collectibles like an 1862 Richmond edition of the federal standard, Instruction for Heavy Artillery. "It is a treasure that was neglected. It's not anybody's fault. It's just that they (archives officials) never had money to have the staff to do it," the part-timer said.

I'm not sure that's true. In another part of the same article, we read that "Archives staff members in the last two decades have spent more time repairing portraits and Civil War flags and organizing the archives' collections of photos, maps, newspapers, manuscripts and government records."

In other words, the Archive neglected its books to fuss with knick-knacks.

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It would seem that Richard Norton Smith, who will oversee the conversion of the Lincoln Library and Museum into a tourist mecca, may have enough self-discernment to understand the role he is playing. In a recent speech he notes,

"By his reckless embrace of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Franklin Pierce helped touch off a civil war, even if he did wonders for the Lawrence Convention and Visitors Bureau."

I hope we need never say, "By his reckless embrace of heritage tourism, Smith triggered a nationwide replacement of scholars with celebrities - doing wonders for visitor bureaus everywhere."

Smith's writing is highly entertaining. It should be: he collects the best bon mots for any given president and packs them around fairly ordinary historical insights. But the history behind the writing rarely rises above the level of cafe (or dorm lounge) chatter.

See for yourself here and here.

Thanks for the laughs, but is this an Algonquin Roundtable approach to history? Are we sufficiently amused yet?

This talk was part of his leave taking from the Dole Library. Have Dole studies been advanced? Are there Dole studies?

A better use for such going-away speeches is this. Describe scholarship you admire. Tell us how you will advance Lincoln scholarship. Amuse us last of all.

NEWS | Winchester development plan takes note of Civil War camp, earthworks * Shirtmaker with Rebel flag logo banned in Florida school * New minstrels leave off the blackface

You could easily overlook the little firehouse where John Brown's rebellion ended in Harper's Ferry. It's small and it sits in a little park like some utility building. I had been to HF many times before I noticed it and realized what it was.

The signage is discreet, to say the least, and the location is new, for the "John Brown Fort" has travelled a bit. It was moved to Chicago for the World's Colombian Exhibition of 1893 where it attracted 11 paid admissions. It was supposed to go to New York, too, and at one point was marked for stable duty.

Paul Shackel has an intriguing chapter on the fort in his thoughtful new essay collection, Memory in Black and White. He talks about the different meanings it has, the people of Harper's Ferry not wanting it there, and the changing Brown historiography in which Brown's transformation from Abolitionist hero to sadistic murderer affected this particular artifact.

Underneath this is the question of how historical objects connect to historical understanding. If you think this is banal, think of all those historical institutions believing that objects convey history, or even that objects embody history.

John Brown's daughter refused to attend the Chicago fair or be associated with the firehouse. "I may be a relic of John Brown's raid of Harper's Ferry, but I do not want to be placed on exhibition with other relics and curios and such," she said.

So the human and historical essence of the raid escaped the artifact's fate. By choice. Historical institutions should take note. Especially those managing bric-a-brac.

Shelby Foote on replacing Confederate state flags: “I think the people who want a new flag are worried about tourists. I never cared much for tourists myself.”

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Is it me or have you noticed reenactors being identified as such in crime stories? In this example, the fellow was returning from a reenactment, so it was part of the story. In another link I posted previously, the reenactor committed his objectionable acts in the uniform of a Rebel general.

The "new" or "revived" Civil War units should be careful of whom they recruit.

This nice lady has just unearthed a number of Civil War veteran headstones: they are now piled up in a corner of her yard awaiting disposal. She says her Massachussetts property was never a burial ground. The names are legible, regiments too.

Her hypothesis about their purpose made me think "Contractor shennanigans" and "double billing."

She has no idea of what to do with them.

I would hope a roundtable or historical society would take posession until the descendants can be contacted.

p.s. Wouldn't you have to be living in a civic and cultural vacuum to have this problem?

If you were going to study three Civil War governors, they would have to be Dennison, Morton, and Yates. Their impact on the war was boderline Cabinet level, with Dennison eventually joining the Cabinet. They were exceptional men and loyal Lincoln political operators whose common denominator was personal (career) indebtedness to the President.

Republican General McDowell (of Bull Run) was Dennison's cousin; Dennison seems to have appointed McClellan at Lincoln's behest (the evidence is circumstantial); and Lincoln had him convey to McClellan his relief from the position of general-in-chief (Mac was loading troops, missed his appointment, and read of the relief in the newspaper).

Dennison, Yates, and Morton were part of Lincoln's war management system, his regional (midwest) high command, and military patronage apparatus.

You can make a small start on Dennison here. Battle-centric publishing seem to preclude these men from getting any attention in the near future.

p.s. This is from the same Cincinnati Enquirer that drove U.S. Grant crazy during the Rebellion.

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I had forgotten all the uproar surrounding the Civil War Centennial, but author Paul Shackel brought it back for me in his thoughtful new book, Memory in Black and White.

It was fairly awful from start to finish, beginning with a small scandal, i.e. the Centennial Commission's scheduling an event that black members could not attend (in a white's only hotel).

This caused publicity that led to leadership resignations, including that of Ulysses S. Grant III. History writers Allan Nevins and James Robertson stepped up to run the show, though Grant came back for ceremonial purposes.

Some genius actually had Grant, the grandson of "Unconditional Surrender" shake hands with the great grandson of Robert E. Lee. Whose sense of history informed this little "drama"?

I had also forgotten how large the reenactments were, how many people they attracted, and how controversial they were.

After seeing the first Battle of Bull Run reenacted, Nevins withdrew the Commission's support for any further such events. He called it "trashily theatrical." The Atlanta Constitution referred to "sleazy imitations of Confederate uniforms" and made other complaints, and a Virginia paper pointed out that reenactments were "carnivals" that dishonored the dead.

The National Park Service's director asked the Commission to halt reenactments with the conclusion, "This soldier playing mocks the dead."

The grandstanding in these comments is remarkable. A quiet, comment-free "We do not approve," would have got the job done without insulting or angering large numbers of participants.

But everyone running a Centennial is going to be, by dint of the event, an amateur. And these were the mistakes of amateurs.

More good stuff from Memory in Black and White next week.

NEWS | Missouri Civil War Museum seeks to restore building to house collections * Kentucky golf course may yield battlefield park * Shenandoah Valley Battlefields Foundation seeks funds to acquire field of the Third Battle of Winchester * School paper changes its name to Rebel, incites uproar * Civil War cannon finds new home

Author and professor Gary Gallagher thinks reenactors embody a specific theory of history, if this news story is to be believed.

Although he is part and parcel of the sad legacy of Nevins, Catton, McPherson, and Sears (for a time he was publishing two or more books per year in that tradition), Gallagher deserves credit for having enough perceptiveness to understand that there are schools of thought and that he belongs to one of them. This at least distinguishes him from the "my way or the highway" crowd dominating Civil War literature since the Centennial.

His Lost Cause researches seem to have led him to metahistory. Good.

Here's a report about a Florida town resisting reenactors. And it's not just about pragmatic stuff like noise and commotion. At least one resident opposes reenactment on principle:

"This is personal to me," said resident Arthur Benton, who is black. "Why would you want to live in the past? We need to go forward."

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