the mike, sir, if you would. >> i really wonder and i do 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 crock 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. even the idea of the black

history month, that doesn't tie to the civil war because they don't want to upset the little darlings. and i really think there something that ought to be coming out of higher academics and tell the school administrators, mayors, whoever makes the decisions that history is important. >> we try. >> we're not in charge of school administrators. >> i'm well aware. >> sir, this is a good news/bad news story. >> i've heard a lot of people say on the panel today about how many books they've written and how many things they've written -- >> i said how many books i've written. it's all my fault. >> i'm sorry if i disrupted you. >> 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. this never happened until about 15 years ago. the gilroy minister is responsible for much of it. on the other hand, the impact we're having is a hard thing to measure. it's a hard thing to measure. 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 seeing these 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 discipline which in my mind includes history, at 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 second grade schools and middle schools together was the grant

program, which was defunded. >> it's about to die. >> it's about to die. 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 schoolteacher in texas. >> i teach tenth grade world history to tenth grade students. >> what are you doing here? >> escaping. >> escaping is a polite way of saying it. i have two parts. first, looking back on that past question, i've talked to the u.s. history -- our u.s. history department trying to work through, how do we teach the civil war? what are the narratives, what 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, a 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. >> good luck. where are you teaching in texas? >> in houston. >> houston. good luck, man. okay. what's got the next question? this side of the room. yes. >> 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 fairkym? 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 fairkym. 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. 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. is ron pauline a southerner? he is a southerner. but is he from texas? >> he is from texas. >> he's originally from texas, okay. 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 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. >> i actually have a question referring to what professor mccurry mentioned a little bit earlier about how it's kind of exceptional -- >> a little louder. >> i have a question of what professor mccurry mentioned a little bit ago how america is limited 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 third year war? i said, no, most americans don't know about the third year war. >> 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. they are very prominent, including winston churchill. there are a lot of serious interests in sort of classic texts coming from british authors, 19th century down to the mid 20th. >> 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 conflicts are

non-armed conflicts. 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 way 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. 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 ] >> let's try to move over to the books that we can. 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, go to cspan.org/history and follow us on twitter. we're at twitter.com/cspanhistory. the civil war battle of shiloh took place in hearten county, tennessee and resulted in a union victory over confederate forces, the figing producing almost 24,000 casualties, making it the bloodiest battle to that point in u.s. history. american history tv visited the military park where stacey gave us a tour. in this portion, he talked about the fighting in a sector of the

battlefield called the hornet's nest. >> we've moved to the center of the >> 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? because it provided cover. it provided some semblance of 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. there are 6200 federal troops positioned on this wagon cut, and not one of them in april

1862 mentioned 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. 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. 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 hey, yeah, there was a road there, that's the initial description. then somebody applied the term "partially sunken" and the words stuck. and from that point on it's 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 the usage, but it's there, it's a post-battle term, and it stayed and it's 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. they'll occupy it about 9:00 and be joined by the remnants of the markers to the south. note 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. so prentiss will come forward with about 1200 men. and he'll take a position here 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 troops in reserve 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 afternoon, johnson is getting about a third of his command engaged over at sarah bell farm, the river road and the peach orchard sector. and he starts saying, well, that's almost the entire confederate army. what does that leaf here in the center? that leaves piecemeal brigades in the center and that's the story at the nest is that the confederates attacked this position held and enforced by the federals with a repetitive series of assaults by individual lone brigades for the most part,

and those brigade 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 the confederates would throw against this position is around 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 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 quite well here at the hornet's nest. so what dooms this position? well, the demise of the hornet's nest will be what is 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, it counterattacks 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 tillman branch. so now you can begin to see that the right flank of the hornet's nest is becoming somewhat exposed to confederate forces now which are 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 that union left flank now is beginning to fracture. they attempt to hold the line and up until 4:00 he is quite successful in holding the line in a successive series of positions back across bloody pond and on into wicker field stretching over toward the river. but by 4:00 he realizes he is unable to hold that front. so he retires. and he tells prentiss and will wallace that hazy to do so. they'll have to roll their flank back to pick up what he 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 on this position to try to silence the federal guns and drive them away. it's a 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 ruggles line, or ruggles concentration of artillery.