if you have a question, there are two mikes. you can stand at the mike or tom thurston or melissa mcgrath will -- >> i have a question. it's probably off the subject. the first question, i really wonder how u.s. scholars feel -- >> right into the mike, sir, if you would. oh, tom, turn it on, if you would. >> i really wonder how you feel with the diminution of interest in public schools in particular downgrading history. history is not taught except for 45 minutes one day in a month after lunch or something. i have 12 grandchildren. they don't know their history. and they're not expected to because it's been woven into a thing called social studies. and that's it. so the crop of people to

replace you are coming from the highest academic quadrant and they haven't had this learning experience going back. >> austin is there, though. >> that's different. but even the idea of the black history month, that doesn't tie to the civil war in any way hardly because they don't want to upset the little darlings about that kind of thing. and i really think that there is something that ought to be coming out of the higher academics to tell the school administrators, superintendents, mayors, or whoever makes the decisions that history is important. >> we try. >> we're not in charge of school administrators. >> i'm well aware -- i'm well aware. but i've heard -- >> sir, this is a good news/bad news story. >> i've heard an awful lot of people say on the panel today about how many books they've written and how many things they've written. >> no, i said how many books they've written.

that's all my fault. >> i'm sorry if i disrupted you. >> no, you didn't disrupt anything. no, this is a good news/bad news story. the good news is andy, gary, steph, we all -- every summer we teach teacher institutes all over this country, hundreds of them. we reach thousands of teachers now. this never happened until about 15 years ago. in fact, the gilderman institute is responsible for much of it. on the other hand, the impact we're having is always a hard thing to measure. it's a hard thing to measure. and often we hear from those teachers the very complaint you just made. andy? >> i should say one thing to confirm my reputation as a jeremiah who sees things going downhill. unfortunately, i think the gentleman is more than right, and i would add to that that the percentage of students majoring -- statistics can be a little misleading, but the percentage of students majoring

in some humanistic disciplines, which in my mind includes history, at our elite universities including this one is rapidly declining. so we should be worried. >> one of the best ways to get our world and the world of secondary school and middle school teachers together was the teaching america history grant program which was defunded. >> it's about to die. >> it's about to die. it's almost over with. it was not very much money, but congress is not going to renew that. >> no, it's not. next question. the man in the yale shirt who is now a high school teacher in texas. >> yep. i teach tenth grade world history to 135 high school students. >> god bless you. >> i know. i don't know -- >> what are you doing here? >> escaping. >> escaping is a polite way of saying it. sort of like a two-parter. first sort of working back on that past question, a lot of the struggle i've had sort of -- and i've talked to the u.s. history

center -- sorry, our u.s. history department, trying to work through what's the -- how do we teach the civil war? what's sort of the narrative? what's sort of the interest? and sort of a struggle. sometimes it's an event that happened, there was fighting and there were slaves and they were freed. and that's the narrative. and it's a very -- my first question is sort of like how does one, you know -- >> so your first problem that you've observed is just the sheer sufshlt. >> the sheer superficiality just completely turns them off. how does one try to invest? what are some of the experiences you guys have had when you've had to invest someone sort of caring about the event itself? and the second thing is, you know, the lost cause narratives are very interesting to me because i think of the faulkner quote. and it's interesting because -- >> which is? >> you're looking at pickett's

charge -- i always mess it up. a boy -- a southern boy. it's rather pervasive because i've always said, you know, i was a 13-year-old, you know, hispanic male who very strongly identified with the lost cause. >> you did. >> in south texas of all places, which is bizarre. and sort of pointing out to the pervasiveness of this whole thing. >> why is that bizarre? that's where you grew up and that's what you were taught. >> right. in a 99% mexican environment, which we don't talk about the civil war at all. >> oh. >> that's the bizarre part. pointing out to the pervasiveness of the whole lost cause mythology. i just thought i'd throw that one out there. >> thank you. good luck. where are you teaching in texas? >> in houston. >> houston. good luck, man. >>. >> who's got the next question? on this side of the room. yes, sir.

>> this is brad. tnc. i'm a really big fan of your blog. i consider myself a member of the horde. and one of my favorite pieces of yours is the piece that you wrote about ron paul and louis farrakhan. obviously, you know what you wrote, but i guess for people who haven't read it, you were basically saying that sort of like young people have like gravitated to ron paul because like they're disaffected with the two-party system in the way that young black men gravitated to louis farrakhan. and i was wondering since you follow current political trends is there someone, you know, someone maybe like newt gingrich or someone in the current political sphere who embodies the lost cause for a lot of like disaffected white people, basically? >> well, it was ron paul for a while. it's fascinating. there's actual video -- i've never seen this before. i'm sure it has happened before, but this video of ron paul in 2004 lambasting lincoln with a

confederate flag right behind him. and he wants to run -- i mean, you think about this. literally a flag of treason but running for president of the united states. lambaste -- i couldn't even -- i mean, my eyes just went like this. i couldn't even -- even knowing who ron paul is. so i think it pretty much was him. literally, actually him. he went on tim russert -- this must have been i guess '08, it would have been. he went on "meet the press" and made the argument about lincoln being a tyrant. slavery would have ended anyway. i don't know anybody with the national stage like that who's aggressively made that argument. and is ron paul even a southerner? this is interesting -- he is a southerner. but is he from texas? >> he's from text. >> okay. he's originally from texas. okay. so he's a southerner. there you go. but his appeal is certainly much broader than that. it really, really is. so i would say if george allen wins the senate race, george

allen is another person who's very much, you know, identified -- >> that's in virginia. >> in virginia. and i think he isn't a texan. i mean he isn't a southerner. i think he actually grew up somewhere. i think he's from california or something. >> his dad was a football coach moving around. >> right, right, right. yeah. so it's still -- but i think even saying that i would be shocked if somebody does that again, if they literally stand up in front of a confederate flag. it was not the issue it had been in the republican primary this year, which is interesting. >> thank you. next question. we'll take one more. peter. >> thank you. i actually have a small question referring to i think what professor mccurry mentioned a little earlier about how -- it's kind of exceptional in america -- >> a little louder, peter. >> i actually have a question about how -- i think it was what professor mccurry mentioned a bit earlier about how it seems that america is sort of exceptionally interested in its civil war.

and i'm just wondering, but as a historian did you ever get the impression that at least in recent years interest in the american civil war has sort of been increasing in foreign countries? i mean, professor blight mentioned the kind of a conference in jerusalem, i think it was. and just in my own experience i've had a few friends from on the internet, from facebook and stuff, from countries like europe, my relatives living in london, and even i think a couple of people from asia asking me questions about the civil war -- the american civil war and just sort of wanting to talk about it with me. so i'm just wondering if you've gotten the impression that this american civil war has come to become -- has sort of been going more interesting to historians or just the general public in foreign countries, in europe, asia, or wherever. >> you know, i really don't know. it's a fascinating question. the person who invited us was actually an israeli who was

trained by mcpherson at princeton who came to the united states with her father on a fellowship when she was a little kid. he was a historian of early modern europe, i think. and she saw something on tv when she was in sixth grade in princeton, new jersey and got hooked on the civil war and went back to israel and came back here as a graduate student and wrote a dissertation on how much people -- basically on the disruption and mobility of human beings during the civil war. and then when we went to israel we met all these people who wrote on the civil war, including the american civil war, as a case study of various things like innovations in communication and networks and technology and things like that. but you know, we're a little insulated. i don't think that -- i don't have any sense that there's some upward trend in international interest in the subject. what do you think, david? >> well, i think what we can say, pierre, is there's no lack of interest in this american problem of race and our

pluralism and our history with this dilemma. that's what's always fascinated the rest of the world about us. i taught -- 20 years ago i taught for a year in germany. it was right after the ken burns film series came out, and i taught the ken burns film series, all nine parts of it, with a german class in munich. at the very same time german national television was running it on german tv dubbed into german. so it was an interesting sort of laboratory. and it was fascinating. they were fascinated with the film series but i got very different questions than i would get from americans. one i remember vividly was a german student came up to me after watching an episode one day -- i also gave some lectures. i didn't just show movies. but he came up after and he he said, why do you americans always think that everything that happens to you is the biggest thing that's ever happened? he said, have you ever heard of the 30 years war? and i said no, most americans have not heard of the 30 years war.

we don't know about that. >> we were getting a lot of that last summer. >> andy, go ahead. >> just quickly, i can't give you an empirical answer. i can never give empirical answers to any question. but we want to remember i think that there are a lot countries in the world including what we call the developed western world and other parts of the world where they haven't settled these questions of federalism. right? i mean, scotland wants maybe out of the united kingdom. belgium is going to split up any day. probably not with bloodshed, but they're debating these questions. so i think that's one reason that interest in how we settled our problem in this regard is rising. and i just wanted to say one other thing about what that-nehisi said about ron paul. when i gave a talk in washington, must be close to 20 years ago, sort of hagiographical talk about lincoln which is my mode with lincoln. somebody came up to me afterwards, it was shortly after

the break-up of the soviet union, or the soviet union was beginning to break up. and this person came up to me and said lincoln was a monster. he was a tyrant. here we are, we don't want to see moscow impose its will on all these states that are breaking away. how dare he take the action he took at the cost of so many hundreds of thousands of lives? and i had some mumbling answers to it, about that the outcome was good for everybody. but you know, that point of view is still alive. >> there are the equivalent of civil war buffs. there are a lot of them in england. there are civil war round tables in england. i've spoken to the one in london. >> there are reenactors. >> there are reenactors. in germany and england and australia and other places. and there's a long tradition among british writers to write about the american civil war. very prominent. including winston churchill. so there's always been an interest there. a serious interest. in some sort of classic text has come from british authors.

late 19th century down through the mid 20th. >> there's at least one place where i think there's a boom in interest abroad in the civil war, which is to say in the world of international human rights and humanitarian law ngos. we now live in a world in which for international law purposes our armed conflicts are non-international armed conflicts. this is an acronym. you call them niacs if you're on the inside. i'm not on the inside. and for that population, which is to say the kinds of armed conflicts that are going on all around the world, the united states civil war has become the quintessential reference point, both because it produces a body of international law, and it produces a body of international law specifically for the kinds of conflicts -- not conflicts between states. so there is a huge boom of military lawyers, ngos. it's really -- it's a specialized kind of interest. but it's really important. >> it's interesting. that reminds me the way you guys are talking about this reminds me that one of the subjects that does have international interest

is secession. there's a lost interest -- because secession was handled so differently now through international negotiation and there are all these protocols that have grown up. i mean, you would know a lot more about this. but it's really striking to teach secession now. and you have available to you all this stuff about subsequent secessions and also the success rate of secessions, which are not -- is not very high. >> no. >> which sort of puts the confederacy -- >> even if you like them they're not very -- >> no. but there's a big tendency toward negotiated solutions that permit secessions under certain conditions. so political scientists, international law people are very interested in this. and of course the looming case is the u.s. >> well, and reconstruction is -- we need to end here soon. but has always had a deep resonance abroad because how many other places in the world have had to reconstruct after war? there have been multiple comparative conferences about reconstruction, about occupation.

i was once invited to one in germany, to a whole big germany, to a whole big conference about the history of occupations, and they said we would like you to speak about the occupation during reconstruction. i had not been raised on that argument. so here i was talking about it as an occupation and trying not to talk about it as an occupation. anyway, we are really running out of time. but the le me just if i could end with just a couple quickies, quick thoughts. i actually wanted to get john on this a bit more. but if you want to look for a civil war legacy, and i know many of you know, this but all you really need to do, which most of us don't do, is look at the hundreds and hundreds of bills before state legislatures in this country. all over the country. particularly in legislatures ruled by republican majorities, but that just happens to be the political affiliation of our time. and all of those bills are about states' rights.

they're about bringing power back from federal authority to the states. sometimes it's about endangered species. sometimes it's about land rights. it's often about the commerce clause. it's often about the health care law. montana has a bill right now, i don't know if it's passed yet, which would require the fbi, the federal bureau of investigation, to get the approval of a local sheriff to ever make an arrest in a county and so on and so on and so on. hundreds and hundreds of these bills. there's just a flood of them. now, the only way one can begin to understand a context for these is to go back to this particular historical moment. we have a rough history with states' rights, but we seem to have a political culture now that is almost utterly unaware of it, which goes back to the point of what we actually know about our history. and i frankly think that every time someone mouths the word "big government," whether

they're for it or against it, they're talking about the big government that the lincoln administration created. that's when big government began in this country. and everybody talks about big government but no one ever talks about where it came from or who created it. anyway, just thought i'd point that out. this has been an extraordinary panel. we could go on all night, but we too want to go have dinner. but we're going to walk out here where there's a table with the books of all these folks. if you want to buy anybody's book, go right out that door. that's where we'll be. would you please join me in thanking this extraordinary panel? [ applause ]

>> let's try to move over to the books if we can. otherwise, if anybody wants one -- as commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the civil war continues, join us every saturday at 6:00 and 10:00 p.m. and sundays at 11:00 a.m. for programs featuring the civil war. for more information about american history tv on c-span3 tv including our complete schedule go to cspan.org/history. and to keep up with us during the week or to send us your questions and comments, follow us on twitter. we're at twitter.com/cspanhistory. >> the shifl war battle of shiloh took place april 6th and 7th, 1862 in harden county, tennessee and resulted in a union victory over confederate forces. nearly 110,000 troops took part in the fighting, which produced almost 24,000 casualties, making it the bloodiest battle to that point in u.s. history. american history tv visited

shiloh national military park, where stacy allen, the park's chief ranger, gave us a tour of the battlefield. in this portion he talked about the fighting in a sector of the battlefield known as the hornet's nest. it is known as the horn's nest. it marked the brigades participating in the assaults where the confederates are attempting to attack the federals here. lone brigtds making these assaults in six session in some instances over the course of the midday and through the afternoon. they were dead center on the battlefield.

the confederates attacked through what they describe as a dense underbrush. a they have thicketed zone. they called it an impenetrable thicket of young growth which is different from the normal vegetation on the battlefield which was old growth forest. why are they attacking? it provides cover. they tried to maneuver and get into a position to confront the federals holding the line here. the fire from federals and to the south, another open field. and the thicket provided cover it provided some semblance of protection. it is also apparent that these

confederate troops in the thicket rarely ever saw their opponent. the thicket was that dense. they saw the flashes of the muzzle from both the musketry and the artillery. we just passed up from confederate markers which note the advance of the organization's attacking the horn's nest. two, the union front that ran parallel to an old wagon cut. what's amazing is nobody in either army really mentions the existence of this road on april 6, 1862, not a letter or a battle report or a diary entry that selects on the fact that

there is an old wagon cut here. there is 6,200 federal troops positioned on this wagon cut and not one of them in april 1862 mentions its existence. we know it exists, but they don't select upon it, and that's important. this wagon cut later on becomes an iconic sunken road and it was nowhere near being sunken. a couple of wagon ruts, 6 to 8 inches deep, maybe a foot deep here as it crossed the top of the ridge and that's about it in 1862. we know that's about it because in the initial descriptions of it when they begin to reflect on the fact that, yeah, there was a road there, that's the initial descriptions. somebody applied the term partially sunken and the word stuck. from that point on it is known

as the sunken road. i refer to it as a wagon trace and one of these days, you know, maybe the term sunken will be dropped from the usage, but it is there, it is a post battle term, and it stayed and been applied to the road. what it does do is delineate the federal position, a position the federals will hold from the earliest troops arriving under will wallace's command and occupy about 9:00 and be joined by remnants, the markers to the south note and prentiss goes into position about 10. prentiss retreats through wallace and hurl and he will reorganize in the rear of the two divisions, 5,400 men he began to battle with and gets anywhere from 500 to 600 rally and had joined by the 23rd missouri, 575 souls, so come forward with about 1,200 men and take a position in the center of

the union position. wallace's troops on the north to the right of prentiss and to the south and 6,200 men online and enough to constitute about 3,000 more. so there is a large number of troops on this sector. we know that two-thirds of the confederate army 11:00 to noon are engaged against the union right flank there at water oaks pond in the crossroads, and so you start just factoring out who is not present in that fight, and we know that throughout the course of the late morning and on into the early often johnson is getting about a third of his command engaged over at sarah bell farm, the river road, and the peach orchard sector and stars saying that's almost the entire confederate army, what does that leave in the center. that leaves piecemeal brigades in the center and that's the

story at the nest is that the confederates attack held in force by the federals with a repetitive series of assaults by individual lone brigades for the most part and those brigades are heavily outnumbered. the largest attack the confederates throw against the position is no more than about 3,500 souls and they're out numbered 2:1 and the average attack thrown is around 2,000 personnel, so at any point in time they're clearly out numbered by the federal opponent and then they have to negotiate the thicket and try to attempt to storm and breast the federal fire and the federal fire coming off this position must have been horrendous because confederates afterwards would style that fire and the sound of the whizzing mini balls cutting through the forest as the sound of angry hornets and thus the position forever after will be labeled the hornet's nest, so the

federals seem to be holding their own here quite well at the hornet's nest, so what dooms this position? the demise of the hornet's nest is what's happening on the extreme right flank and the left flank of the union army. we know the right flank is engaged with greater propulsion of confederate force and that driven back to jones field before noon, counter attacks, amazingly, counter attacking at noon driving mac almost two-thirds of a mile and engaging those confederate forces again in the vicinity of water oaks pond. it will take the better part of the afternoon for the confederates to halt, stop, and neutralize that federal counter attack and drive it again back into jones field. by now it is 3:00 and the federals having suffered heavy attrition, growing concern about whether they can hold that flank, will decide to retire across tilian branch, so you can see the right flank of the hornet's net is becoming

somewhat exposed to confederate forces now north of the position. then after johnston falls, confederates will reignite the effort on the extreme confederate right and we know that stewart retires and we know that the union left flank is beginning to fracture and attempts to hold the line and up until 4:00 he is quite successful in holding the line in the successive series of positions back across bloody pond and on into wiccer field stretching over towards the river. by 4 he realizes he is unable to hold that front so he retires and tells prentiss and will wallace that he has to do so, so they will now have to roll their flank back to pick up hurlburt is retiring from. unbeknownst sherman and culman decided to move again and in this move they completely step back and away from will

wallace's right flank and a gap develops. before the federals know it, confederates have worked their way through that gap. all of a sudden wallace and prentiss find themselves cut off at around 5:00 and now have to try to fight their way out of here. what they're fighting against now is the entire confederate army still active on the field. for a long time the confederate left and right flank were over three miles apart. they will meet in the rear of the hornet's nest here at the junction of the hamburg savannah and corinth road no more than a half-mile to our north and east they will slam the door shut and trap roughly 2,250 federal defenders and capture them en mass, and at about 5:30 this fight is over. during of the course of the late afternoon confederates used artillery to try to silence the federal guns and drive them away and a large concentration of