are the interests? it's a struggle. sometimes they'll be like, 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 -- >> your first problem is just it's a sheer superficiality. >> it's a sheer superficiality that just turns them off. how does one try to invest? what is the experience you've had when you had to invest someone sort of caring about the event itself? and the second thing is, you know, the lost cause is very interesting to me because i think of the faulkner quote and it's interesting because -- >> which is? >> you're looking at pickets charge -- i always mess it up. the southern boy. it's rather pervasive because i've always said i was a

13-year-old, you know, hispanic male who very strongly identified with the lost cause. >> you do. >> 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, and 96% of the environment, we don't talk about the civil war at all. that's the bizarre part. i'm talking about the pervasiveness of the whole lost cause philosophy. just throwing that out there. >> well, thank you. good luck. where are you teaching in texas? >> in houston. >> houston. good luck, man. who has the next question on this side of the room? yes, ma'am. >> i'm a really big fan of your blog. i consider myself a member of the board. one of my favorite pieces of yours is a piece that you wrote about ron paul and louis farrakan.

i know what you know what you wrote, but for people who haven't read it, you were basically saying young, white people have gravitated to ron paul because of the two-party system and young black men gravitated to louis farrakan. you follow current political trends. is there someone like newt gingrich in the political sphere who embodies the lost cause for a lot of disaffected white people, basically? >> it was ron paul for a while. it's fascinating. 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. literally a flag of treason. running for president of the united states, i couldn't even -- my eyes went like this. i couldn't even -- even knowing

who ron paul is, i think it pretty much was him, literally, actually him. he went on tim russet -- this must have been '08 it would have been -- he went on "meet the press" and made the argument that lincoln being a tyrant, it would have ended, anyway. i don't know if anyone has aggressively made that argument. is ron paul even a southerner? he is a southerner. but is he from texas? >> he is from texas. >> he's originally from texas, okay. >> all right. so he's a southerner. there you go. his appeal is certainly much broader than that. it really, really is. i would say if george allen wins the senate race, george allen is another person who is very much identified -- >> that's in virginia. >> -- in virginia. i think he is a southerner. i think he actually grew up somewhere.

i think he grew up in california or somewhere. >> his dad was coaching. >> his dad was a football coach moving around. >> right, right, right. yes, 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 a republican primer, which was interesting. >> next question. one more. pierre? >> i actually have a question referring to what professor mccurry mentioned earlier about it's exceptional -- >> a little louder. >> i have a question of what professor mccurry mentioned a little bit ago how america is exceptionally interested in its civil war. i was wondering, 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?

professor blight mentioned a kind of conference in jerusalem, i think it was. just in my own experience, i've had a few friends on the internet and facebook and stuff, countries like europe, my relatives living in london, and even a couple people from asia asking me questions about the american civil war and wanting to talk about it with me, so i'm just wondering if you've gotten the impression that this american civil war 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 as 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, went back to asia and came back here as a grad student and wrote a dissertation on people and the disruption of the civil war. then we met all these people who wrote on the civil war, including the american civil war, a case study of various things like innovations and communication and networks and technology and things like that. so -- but we're a little insulated. i don't think that -- i don't have any sense that there is some upward trend in international interest on the subject. what do you think, david? >> i think what we can say up here is there is 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 all nine parts of it with a german class in munich. at the very same time, german national television was on german tv. it was a sort of laboratory. 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. he came up to me and said, why do you americans always think what happens to you is the biggest thing that happened? have you ever heard of the 30 years war? i said, no, most americans don't know about the 30 years war. >> we were just getting to that last summer. >> yeah. >> i can't give an empirical answer, but there are other parts of the world where they

haven't settled these questions of federalism, right? scotland wants out of the united kingdom, belgium is going to split up any day, probably not about bloodshed, but it raises these questions. i think that's probably how we settled our problem in this regard is rising. and one thing he said about ron paul, when i gave a talk in washington, it must be close to 20 years ago now, a graphical talk about lincoln which is my mode with lincoln, somebody came up to me afterwards. it was shortly after the breakup 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 -- you know, 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, that the outcome was good for everybody. but that point of view is still alive. >> there are the equivalent of civil war buffs and there are a lot of them in england, there are civil war round tables in england, i've spoken at the one in london. >> there are reenactors. >> there are reenactors. in england and other places. and they want writers about the civil war. they are very prominent, including winston churchill. there's been a serious interest in classic texts coming from british authors, late 19th century down through the mid 20s. >> there is one place where i think there is a boom of interest abroad in the civil war, which is to say in the world of international human rights and the humanitarian law ngos, we now live in a world

which for international law purposes our armed conflicts are nonarms international flikts. you call them niacs on the inside. i'm not on the inside. and for that population, which is to say the kinds of armed conflicts that are gone 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 international lawyers, ngos. it's a specialized kind of interest but it's important. >> the way you guys are talking about this reminds me that one of the subjects that does have international interest is cessation.

cessation is handled so differently now, and there are a lot of protocols. it's really striking to teach the session now and you have available to you all this stuff about subsequent cessations and the success rate of cessations which are not very high. >> even if you like them. >> no, but there's a big tendency toward negotiated solutions that permits the sessions under certain conditions, so political scientists, international law people are very interested in this, and of course the looming case is the u.s. >> and reconstruction -- we need to end here soon -- but has always had a deep resonance abroad because how many 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 conference about a history of occupations, and they said we would like you to speak about the occupation during reconstruction. i had not been raised on this 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. if i could let me end with a couple quick thoughts. i also wanted to get john on this. 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. all those bills are about state's 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 now, i don't know if it's passed yet, which would require the fbi, the federal bureau of investigation, to get 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, 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 we actually know about our history. 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. we could go on all night, but we, too, want to have dinner. we're going to walk out here at 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 ] 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. on

stories about the civil war. for more information about american history tv on cspan 3 including our complete schedule go to cspan.org/history. to keep up with his throughout the week or send questions or comments follow us on twitter. we're at twitter.com/cspanhistory. as the presidential campaign enters its final months and the political parties prepare for conventions american history tv will air cspan's original series "the contenders" featuring 14 key political figures who ran for president and lost but impacted american political history. we'll air the series june 3 to september 2 on sundays at 8:30 a.m., 10:30 a.m. and 10:30 p.m. join us as historians preview the series on saturday, june 2 at 10:00 a.m. eastern.

the civil war battle of shiloh took place april 6 and 7, 1862 in tennessee. it 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 chief ranger, gave us a tour of the battlefield. he talked about the fighting in a sector of the battlefield known as the hornet's nest. >> we have moved to the center of the union line astride the eastern corinth road into a position iconic with shiloh known forever after the battle as the hornet's nest. they marked the center of the brigades participating in the assaults where the confederates

are attempting to attack the federals here. they are doing so in piecemeal fashion, primarily lone brigades making assaults in succession in some instances over the course of the mid-day and through the afternoon. they were dead center pretty much on the battlefield. and the confederates attack through what they describe as a dense underbrush, heavy 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. the confederates are attacking through the thicket. people say, why are they attacking through the thicket? why? it provided cover, some protection as they tried to maneuver and get into a position to confront the federals holding

the line here. besides that, if they moved to the north they would pass over a wide open field which would brighten their line under fire from federals and to the south there is 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 artillery. they saw the smoke. they rarely saw physical form of an enemy force. so we just passed up the eastern corinth road from confederate markers which note the advance of the organizations attacking the hornet's nest to 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. there is no letter, battle report or a diary entry that selects on the fact that there is an old wagon cut here. 6200 federal troops are positioned here on this wagon cut and not one of them in april 1862 mentions its existence. now we know it exists, but they don't select upon it. that's important. because this wagon cut later on becomes an iconic sunken road. it was nowhere near being sunken. a couple of wagon ruts six to eight inches deep. maybe a foot deep here as it crossed the top of the ridge. 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, hey, yeah, there was a road there, that's the initial description. then somebody 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 useage, 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 on the 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 he was joined by the 23rd missouri 575 souls. 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 out numbered. 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 artillery, as many as 11 to 12 batteries participate and receives a lot of writing in the reports, known as ruggles' line or concentration of artillery and serves good effect to pin down the union infantry. it does, does force the federal artillery to leave the field. one of the reasons the federal artillery is leaving the field is because they used up the available ammunition and have to retire to find more. it isolates the position, pins the union troops down and allows the two wings to envelope or circle the position. that's the demise of the hornet's nest and what crushes

it from existence where as throughout the entire day the federal troops here have been masters of all they survey and only been hit by piecemeal fragments to the confederate army and able to check those easily but when they're left here, isolated by the retraction of the union right and the retirement of the union left and non-able to successfully get themselves out of the envelopment, a fair number of them will find themselves surrendered including general prentiss and will wallace will be mortally wounded trying to lead his command to the north and left on the field as dead. >> you can watch this or other american history tv programs on the civil war at any time by visiting our website, cspan.org/history and watch programs on the civil war every saturday evening at 6 p.m. and 10 p.m. eastern and sunday morning at 11 a.m. on c-span 3.

each week american history tv sits in on a lecture. you can watch the classes here every saturday at 8:00 p.m. and midnight and sundays at 1:00 p.m. this week james connolly looks at immigration and the roots of pluralism in the united states. this one hour and 15 minute class took place at ball state university in indiana. >> all right. on tuesday in class we looked at europe. and one of the things we talked about was the ways in which european governments attempted to appease the working classes, alleviate some of their concerns, reduce social tension, one of the tools they used was mass politics as we talked about. the united states, that process takes on a much different

context. the main reason for that is that in the u.s. you have universal white male suffrage by 1820 unlike in europe where it is france and the 1870s and other countries later on, in the u.s. you have basically full mass democracy very early on and you have it before most immigrants he show up, so when the immigrants begin to be integrated into american society and particularly when they begin to be integrated into american politics, they're being integrated into a much different world than are those immigrants that we talked about in europe. so what i want to do today is talk about how the united states begins to develop a pluralist philosophy, a pluralist vision and i want to trace the roots back to the way politics worked in 19th century america. i have here just to give you a sense of the kind of politics