academic quadrant and they haven't had this learning experience going back. even the idea of black history month, that doesn't tie to the civil war in any way. because they don't want to upset the little darlings about that kind of thinking. and i really think there is something that ought to be coming out, higher academics that tell the school administrators, superintendents, mayors or whoever makes these decisions, that history is important. >> we try. >> we're not in charge of school administrators. >> i'm well aware. i'm well aware. but -- >> sir, this is a good news bad news story. >> i heard a lot of people say on the panel today about how many books they have written and how many things they have written. >> i said how many books. >> i'm sorry if i disrupted you.

>> you didn't. this is a good news bad news story. look, the good news is, andy, gary, we all, every summer we teach teacher institutes. we reach thousands of teachers now. this never happened until about 15 years ago. the guilder institute the responsible for much of it. on the other hand the impact is always a hard thing to measure. it's a hard thing to measure. often we hear from those teachers the very complaint you made. >> 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 misleading but the percentage of students majoring in some humanistic discipline which to my mind includes history at our elite universities including this one, is rapidly declining.

>> absolutely right. >> 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 american history grant program. which was defunded. >> it's about to die. >> it's almost over. it was not very much money but congress is not going to renew that. >> no, it's not. >> next question. man in the yale shirt who is now a high school teacher in texas. >> i teach history to 135 high school students. >> god bless you. >> what are you doing here? >> escaping. >> escaping. polite way of saying. first sort of working back on that last question, a lot of the struggle i had, i talked to the

u.s. history department, how do we teach the civil war, 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. it's a very sort of -- my first question is sort of how does one -- >> your first problem that you observed is the superficialality. >> that turns them off. sort of hard thing about -- how does one sort of try to invest. perhaps experiences you have where you had to sort of invest someone sort of caring about the event. the second thing, sort of, you know, the lost cause narratives are interesting to me because i think of the faulkner quote, it's interesting. >> which is? >> you're looking at pickett's charge. i mess it up.

a boy, that southern boy. it's pervasive because i've always said i was a 13-year-old, you know, hispanic male, who very strongly identified with the lost cause in south texas of all places. which is bizarre. sort of pointing out the pervasiveness of this. >> why is that bizarre. that's where you grew up and what you were taught. >> in 99% mexican environment we don't talk about the civil war at all. >> oh. >> that's the bizarre point. the pervasiveness of the lost cause. >> well, thank you. good luck. where are you teaching in texas? in houston. good luck, man. who's got the next question. on this side of the room. yes. >> i'm a really big fan of your

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

you think about this. literally a flag of treason but running for president of the united states. i couldn't even, i mean, my eyes just like went like this. i couldn't -- even knowing who ron paul is. soy think it pretty much was him. literally actually him. he went on tim russert. this must have been i guess '08. 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 who is has aggressively made that. is he a southerner? he is. but is he from snext >> he was from texas. >> okay. okay. all right. so he's a southerner. there you go. he got it. but his appeal is much broader. it really is. so i would say him and 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 isn't a texan. i think he grew up in california or something. >> his dad was a football coach moving around. >> yeah. yes. but i think even saying that, i would be shocked if somebody does that again if they stand up in front of a confederate flag. it was not the issue that it had been in the republican primary this year which is interesting. >> next question. one more. here. >> thank you. actually have a small question referring to i think what professor mccurry mentioned about how it's kind of exceptional in america -- i have a question how i think it was professor mccurry mentioned about how it seems that america has sort of exceptionally interested in its civil war. i'm wondering but as 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 the kind of conference in jerusalem i think it was. just in my own experience i've had a few friends from on the internet on facebook and stuff from countries like europe, my relatives in london, and even i think a couple of people from asia asking me about the civil war, the american civil war and wanting to talk about it with me. i'm wondering if you have gotten the impression that this american civil war has become sort of growing more interesting to historians or the general public in foreign countries in europe, asia or wherever. >> you know, i don't know. it's a fascinating question. the person who invited us was 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, came back here and wrote a dissertation on how much people basically on the disruption and mobility of human beings during the civil war, then when we went to israel we met these people who wrote on the civil war including the american civil war as a case study of thing likes innovations and communication and networks and technology and things like that. we're a little insulated. i don'ts think that -- i don't have any sense that there is some upward trend in international interest in the subject. what do you think, david? >> i think we can say 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 after the ken burns film series came out. i taught the ken burns film series all nine parts with a german class in munich, at the very same time german national television was running on german tv dubbed into german. so it was an interesting sort of laboratory. it was -- they were fascinated with the film series but i got very different questions than i would get from americans. one i remember was the german student came up to me after watching an episode one day, i also gave lectures, i didn't just show movies. he said why do you americans always think that everything that happens to su the biggest thing that happened. have you heard of the 30 years war? 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. >> quickly, i can't give you an empirical answer, i can never give empirical answers to questions. we want to remember there are a lot of country tins world including what we call the developed western world and other parts where they haven't settled these questions of federalism. scotland wants maybe out of the united kingdom. belgium is going to split up any day. they are debating these questions. so i think that's one reason that interest in how we settled our problem in this regard is rising. i just wanted to say one other thing what ta-nehisi said about ron paul. when i gave a talk in washington, must be close to 20 years ago now, a talk about lincoln. somebody came up to me after, it was shortly after the breakup of the soviet union or was beginning to break up, and this person came up 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 of these states breaking away, how dare he take the action he took at the cost of so many hundreds of thousands of lives. i had some mumbling answers, that the outcome was good for everybody. but you know, that point of view is still alive. >> there are the equivalent of civil war buffers in their a lot of them in england, civil war round tables. i have spoke tune the one in -- there are re-enactors in germany and australia and other places and long tradition among british writers to write about the american civil war, including winston churchill so there's always been an interest there a serious interest and some sort of classic text from british authors through the mid 20th

century. >> there's at least one place i think there is a boom in interest abroad in the civil war, which is to stay in the world of international human rights, we now live in a world in which for international law purposes our armed conflicts are non-international armed conflicts, this is called niaks. i'm not on the inside. and for that population, which is to say the armed conflicts that are going on around the world t united states civil war has become the quintessential reference point because it produces a body of international law that specifically for the kinds of conflicts not between states, so there is a huge boom among military lawyers, ngos, a specialized interest but it's important. >> it's interesting that reminds me the way you guys are talking about this that one of the subjects that does have international interest is

cessession. it's handled so differently now through international negotiation and there are all of these protocols. you would know a lot more about this but it's striking to teach it now and you have available to you all of this stuff about subsequent sessessions. the success rate which is not very high. which sort of puts the confederacy. >> even if you like them. >> there's a big tendency toward negotiated solutions that permit secessions so law people are very interested in this and of course the looming case is the u.s. >> in reconstruction, we need to end soon but has always had a deep resonance abroad. how many places had to reconstruct after war. there are multiple comparative conferences about reconstruction, about occupation. i was once invited in germany to

a big conference about the history of occupations and told we'd like you to speak about the american occupation of the south during reconstruction. now, i had not been raised on that argument of occupation. here i was talking about it as occupation and trying not to talk about it as occupation. we are really running out of time. but let me just if i could end with a couple of quick thoughts. i actually wanted to get john on this a bit more. if you want to look for civil lar legacy, many of you know, this all you need to do which most of us don't 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 happens to be the political affiliation of our time. all of those bills are about states' rights, about bringing power back from federal

authority to the states. sometime it's about endangers species, sometimes it's about land right, it's often with the commerce clause, it's often about the health care law, montana has a bill right notice, i don't know if it's passed, which would require the fbi, the federal bureau of investigation to get the approval after local sheriff to ever make an arrest in a county, so on and so on. hundreds of these bills. it's 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 back to the point what if we know about our history. and i frankly think that every time someone mouths the word big government whether they are for it or against it they are talking about the big government that the lincoln administration

created. that's when big government began in this country. everybody talked about big government but no one talked about where it came from. or who created it. just thought i'd point that out. it's been an extraordinary panel. we could go on all night but we, too, want to have dinner. we're going to walk out where there a table with books of all these folks. go through that doorsh that's where we'll be. would you join me in thanking this extraordinary panel. [ applause ]

>> as commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the civil war continues join us saturdays 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 including our complete schedule, go to cspan.org/history. to keep wake-up us during the week, or to send us questions and comments follow us on wait toer. @twitter.com/cspanhistory. >> the civil war battle of shiloh took place april 6-7, 1862 in hearten 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, the bloodiest battle to that point in u.s. history. american history tv visited

shiloh military park where the ranger gave us a tour of the battlefield. in this portion he talked about the fighting in a sector of the field known as the hornet's nest. >> we've moved to the center of the union line, astride the eastern corinth road in an area known forever after the battle as the hornet's nest. it marked the center ofthe brigades and they are doing so in piecemeal fashion primarily lone brigades making these assaults. and succession. in some instances over the course of the midday and through the afternoon. there were dead center, pretty much dead center on the battlefield. and confederates attacked

through what they described as a dense underbrush, heavy thick eted zone they they called it impenetrable thicket of young growth, which is different from the normal vegetation on the battlefield which was open. because it provided cover. it provided some semblance of protection as they tried to maneuver and get into a position to confront the federal's holding the line here. besides that, if they moved any further to the north they passed through a wide open field which would brighten the line from fire to the federals and to the south there was another open field. and the thicket provided cover. it provided some sense 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, they saw the smoke. they rarely saw the 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 death. 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 6th, 1862. not a letter, a battle report or a diary entry that selects on the fact that there's an old

wagon cut here. there's 6200 federal troops positioned 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 and that's important because this wagon cut later on becomes an iconic sunken road. and 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 descriptions. then somebody applied the term partially sunken and the word stuck. and from that point on, it's known as the sunken road. i refer to it as just a wagon

trace. and one of these days, you know, maybe the term sunken will be dropped from the usage. but it's there. it's a close battle term. and it's stayed and been applied to the road. what it does do is delinuate the federal position. a position from the troops will hold under will wallace's command. they'll occupy it around 9:00. prentice goes into position around 10:00. he will reorganize his command in the rear of these two divisions. at least 5400 men he began to battle with. he gets 500 to 600 of his men rallied. he'll be joined by the 23rd reserve, 575 souls. he will come forward with about 1200 men. he'll take the position in the center of the union position.

wallace's troops on the north to the red of prentice and the other troops to the south. there's 6200 men online and enough troops in reserve to constitute about 3,000 more. there's a large number of troops on this sector. you start out, we know that throughout the course of the morning, and early afternoon jox is getting 1/3 of his command engamged at sar bell farm, the river road and the peach orchard sector. he starts saying that's almost the entire confederate army, what does that leave here in the center? that leaves piecemeal brigades.

a repetitive series of assaults by individual lone brigades for the most part. those brigades were heavily outnumbered. the largest attack that con fred rates throw against this position is no more than about 3500 souls. they were outnumbered two to one. the average attack confederates would throw is about 2,000 personnel. so at any point in time they're clearly outnumbered by their federal opponent and then they have to negotiate the thicket and try to attempt to storm and breast the federal fire. the federal fire coming off this position must have been horrendous because confederates afterwards would style that fire and the sound of the wizzing mini balls as the sound of angry hornets. thus the position forever after will be labeled the hornets' nest. so the federals seem to be holding their own quite well here rat the hornets' nest.

what dooms this position? the demise of the hornets' nest will be what is happening on the extreme right flank and left flank of the union army. we know the right has been engaged with the greater propulsion of confederate force. that right flank driven back to jones field before noon counterattacks amazingly it counterattacks at noon driving mack almost 2/3 of a mile and engaging confederate forces again. it will ache the better part of the afternoon for those confederates to halt, stop, and neutralize that federal counterattack and drive it again back into jones field. by now it's 3:00 and the federals growing concerned about whether they can hold that frank will decide to retire across tillman ranch. so now you could begin to see that the right flank of the hornets' nest is exposed to

confederate forces north of the position. then after johnston falls confederates will reignite the effort on the extreme confederate right. and we know that stewart retires. we know the union left flank is beginning to track amateur. he attempts to hold the line and up until 4:00 he's quite successful in holding the line in a successive series of positions on into wicker field stretching over towards the river. but by 4:00, he realizes he's unable to hold that front so he retires. he tells prentice and will wallace that he has to do so. they have to roll their flank back to pick up what hurl burt is retiring from. unbenongst to them sherman has moved again. in this move they completely step back and away from will wallace' right flank and a gap

develops. before the confederates know it, the federals have worked their way through the gap. they're cut off around 5:00. they 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 one time the confederate left and right flank were over three miles apart. they will meet in the rear of the hornets' nest here at the junction of the hamburg, savannah and corinth road no more than a half mile oour north and east. they will slam the door shut and trap roughly 2250 federal defenders and capture them en masse. about 5:30 this fight is over. during the course of the late afternoon confederates used artillery on this position to try to silence the federal guns and drive them away into large concentration of artillery as many as 11 to 12 batteries

participate. it receives a lot of writing in the reports. it's known as rugles line. it pins down the union infintry. it does force the federal artillery to leaf the field. they've used up their available ammunition and have to retire to find more. it isolates the position, pins the union troops down and allows the two wings of the confederate force to envelope the position. that's the demise of the hornets' nest. that's what crushes it from existence. throughout the entire day the federal troops here have been masters of all they aur va. they've been hit by piecemeal fragments of the confederate army. they've been able to check those easily. when they're left here isolated by the retraction of the union right and retirement of the union left and not able t