i certainly give jim mcpherson some credit. but i also want you to know that it is really you gathering in the summer heat and studying the civil war for 30 years. i have been asked to give preliminary remarks and observations to get the ball rolling, so that i can share insights with you, and i hope we can engage in a four-way conversation, the three of us and you, the audience. my first visit to the institute was 30 years ago, courtesy of jim mcpherson. i want to say it was you, the audience that convert me, rather than the scholars of civil war history. when nina silver and i launched our counter frontal assault on civil war studies with divided houses in the last decade of the 20th century, and then with battle scars in the first decade of the 21st century, little did we realize the great waves, the mighty tide of scholarship dynamics and revisionism that would come out of that, that women in civil war history would come out of the stockyards in which they had been trapped, cap's scholars scrapping in the sandboxes. my visi