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Civil War Memory, Now

• Michele McAloon • Season 4 • Episode 155

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Connect with Michele at https://www.bookclues.com

Headlines keep tossing around the phrase “civil war,” but what are we really talking about when we invoke that history today? We sit down with historians John Kinder and Jennifer Murray, co-editors of They Are Dead and Yet They Live: Civil War Memories in a Polarized America, to unpack how memory gets made—and why it gets weaponized. From the Lost Cause to the language of conflict we see online, we explore the difference between personal remembrance and public storytelling, and how monuments, textbooks, films, and place names quietly teach us what to honor and what to forget.

We trace the often-ignored arc of Reconstruction, connecting the Fourteenth Amendment, federal power, and impeachment debates to the headlines we read now. Jennifer walks us through the Army base renaming saga—why so many installations were named for Confederate officers during the World Wars, how the recent renamings unfolded, and why the political reversal preserved surnames while changing honorees. John explains how these choices aren’t just semantics; they’re signals about national values, belonging, and who gets to define America’s usable past.

Throughout, we challenge the casual use of “civil war” as a metaphor for polarization. The real Civil War killed about 2% of the population—equivalent to nearly seven million people today. Any modern internal conflict would look less like tidy blue-gray battle lines and more like fragmented violence with devastating consequences. That’s why precision matters: before repeating incendiary language, ask who benefits, what history is being invoked, and what realities are being ignored.

If you care about how history shapes power—at courthouses, on battlefields, and across your city’s street names—this conversation will change how you see the world around you. Listen, reflect, and then take a second look at the monuments and markers you pass every day. Subscribe, share with a friend who loves history and politics, and leave a review with the one statue or site you see differently now.

Miichele McAloon:

You're listening to Crossword where cultural clues lead to the truth of the word. And my name is Michele McAloon, your host. Okay, folks, the next two podcasts, we're going to talk about Civil War and Revolution. Because if you open up the newspapers, you see these headlines, you see talk of this. It's ridiculous. So what we need to do is go back and look at what does civil war mean and what is a revolution. My first book is with John Kinder and Jen Murray. It's They Are Dead and Yet They Live, Civil War Memories in a Polarized America. And next week it'll be The Writer's Lot, Culture and Revolution in 18th Century France by none other than the famous historian Robert Darton. And these, both the Civil War as the French Revolution, are things that you need to learn about. You need to study and understand that throwing around those terms probably might not be one, the most educated or two, the brightest idea. Okay, off my soapbox. Hope you enjoy. Find me at bookclues.com. Thank you. God bless. Hello, folks. We have, I would think, a humdinger of a conversation today with two very, very esteemed historians who have written a book called They Are Dead and Yet They Live Civil War Memories in a Polarized America. So I am not sure if we could get anything more controversial at the moment, but we managed to keep ratcheting it up. I'm here with John Kinder and Jennifer Murray. John Kinder and Jennifer Murray, as I've said, are both historians. They look at war from different angles. John Kinder, and you he should be familiar to the audience because John actually was on an earlier podcast that I had, and one that has been very, very popular. And it's on his book on World War Zoos, humans, and other animals in the deadliest conflict of the modern age. It is a great book. And John, hello. I I tell you, I've been to a couple zoos that we've talked about since then.

John Kinder:

Well, I I don't know how I should feel about that, but I'm I'm glad to have you that you had us back on. So thanks.

Miichele McAloon:

Yeah, if I know you're I know you're not a zoo person, but I had to go see what you were talking about. So, and you know what, I kind of get what you're saying.

John Kinder:

So it was I I sort of hope that's everyone's takeaway. They go to the zoo and they see new things.

Miichele McAloon:

And I did see new things. John Kinder, he is director of American Studies and Professor of History at Oklahoma State University. He's the author of Paying with Their Bodies, American War and the Problem of the Disabled Veteran. He's written a couple books to include the World War Zoos book that we just talked about. And he's currently working on a book about murder and World War II, Mississippi, and a book on alligators. And John, you are on the hook for both of those. We are waiting for them with baited breath. All right. And we have Jennifer Murray. She is an assistant professor of history and the director of the George Tyler Moore Center for the Study of the Civil War at Shepherd University. She's the author of On a Great Battlefield: The Making, Management, and Memory of Gettysburg National Military Park. And she's also now working on a biography of Union General George G. Meade. And we would love to have you back for that one, Jennifer, because we like biographies here, especially Civil War biographies. So this book is actually a collection of essays. John, tell me what this book is about, or tell our audience what this book is about and why this particular collection of essays.

John Kinder:

Just to back up a little bit, it was coming right out of COVID. And Jan and I and another professor at Oklahoma State at the time, we decided to put on basically the first live kind of panel talk from our department. We both worked at OSU at the time. And we decided, given everything that was going on in 2020, we wanted to do something on Civil War memory. And it was great. You know, it was well attended. We both, I think, had pretty interesting things to say about why the Civil War seemed to be coming back at this very tumultuous, polarized moment in American history. And it was after that that I approached Jen. Wow, well, what if we do something more with this? What if we make it into a book? And she generously agreed, I should say, that when it comes to this topic, you know, the way we approached it was Jen really is the Civil War expert, right? She's the real historian of the Civil War. We sort of try to balance it out. She's the Civil War person. I'm kind of more of the contemporary America person. And what this allowed us to do was that she was able to draw upon her vast network of Civil War experts and so forth. And what we were able to do is pull in a number of scholars, writers who are also interested in this topic. And we wanted to kind of think about, you know, some of the expected and unexpected ways in which Civil War memory seems to be incredibly urgent at this moment, right? Where people are talking a lot about the Civil War. And so we wanted to kind of see how Civil War memory was working against the backdrop of American polarization. And that's kind of where it came from.

Miichele McAloon:

Jen, we talk about memory, or uh Professor Murray, excuse me. We talk about memory here. And I'm going to ask kind of a silly question. When we talk about war memory, what are we talking about? I mean, we have personal memories, we have national memories, we have state memories, we have community memories. What kind of memory are we talking about here? Is this when you talk about historical memory?

Jen Murray:

Well, I think the Civil War memory, specifically in historiography, is a really vibrant subfield. And in fact, I'm teaching a class this semester just on Civil War memory. And that's a question of how the Union and Confederate soldiers remembered the conflict in the post-war years, as did four million newly freed men and women, and thousands and thousands of civilians in the North and the South, and how they remembered the American Civil War and specifically how those memories change over time. And for the Civil War memories, specifically, a lot of that question is wrapped into the creation and the perpetuation of the lost cause. You know, this notion that the Confederacy lost due to, quote, overwhelming numbers and resources. The perversion of the lost cause really skews how Americans over time collectively and individually think about the American Civil War. And you see so many remnants of the lost cause and culture yet today, 160 years later. So what John and I wanted to do is look at the way in which the Civil War is present, as John said, in predictable and unpredictable places. Robert Penn Warren gave that famous quote, paraphrasing it, but he says the Civil War is our felt history. So we wanted to look at ways and places, obvious and some not, where the Civil War still permeates our politics, our culture, and our society some 160 years after the surrender at Appomattox.

Miichele McAloon:

Civil Wars are the roughest. They're absolutely the, I mean, they are the most detrimental. It's easy if you have an invader coming in and to identify that invader. Can say this from experience. I would lived in the Balkans for four years, and that was a civil war, and it was vicious. Also, ironically, where am I recording from? I'm recording from Germany, correct? That has a very different way. I mean, they've got terrible memories, right? They have a terrible responsibility to history and to memory. And for the most part, they have chosen to cut that out of their society completely. They do talk about it, but it's not like the United States. Oh my gosh, completely different. I don't know which one is healthier because I am an American. I do think the way we talk about it and our level of conversation in the United States is perhaps more, I don't know if healthier, but more effective in actually dealing with the memory of this. Now, uh excuse me for talking for just a minute, but I am from Alabama. And Professor Murray, I saw you graduate from Auburn. Yeah, that's right. You know what? My grandfather, my mother, my father, my sons graduated from Auburn. So worry. Oh no. I am a I'm a Southern woman that grew up upper middle class in the South, educated, parents educated, grandparents educated. The memory of the Civil War actually, I think in a lot of ways, propelled my family towards action. They broke the segregation lines very early on in the 1950s and 60s. And that the Civil War memory, like the lost cause and the stars and bars and all of that. I'm gonna say something really pejorative here, but that's mostly in the realm of the rednecks and not the South that I grew up in. What do you say to that, John? Or what I mean, because there's I it's a I I'm trying to balance the memory in this interaction. And I'm not stupid. I don't, I know there's there's racism, I know there's, you know, civil war, but I think for a lot there's a lot of people like me in the South.

John Kinder:

I think your point is right on, you know, and and I should say I too am from the South, right? I went to high school in Georgia and Alabama. I graduated from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, University of Tennessee. Okay, you know, so yeah, I grew up in the South, right? And, you know, I know exactly what you're talking about. And that's why I think the the concept of memory is so tricky, right? Because on the one hand, you have like, as you said, the individual memories, like what people remember, right? And then you have the kind of what might be called the instantiations of memory or the kind of concrete memorials, right? All of the monuments and that sort of thing, right? And that tell a story that often kind of, you know, tell a story that might be different from the one that you experienced. And then of course, there is the taught history and the films. And when we're talking about memory, what we're often talking about is not necessarily what each individual person, right? And in fact, you know, if you go to the South, you will find a diverse set of relationships to the lost cause, people critical to the lost cause. And, you know, I know a lot of people don't like to hear this, but as Jen will tell you, even during the war itself, even in the most southern of states, there were plenty of pockets of people who still clung to the Union, who were critical of the Confederacy. You know, like so the world's a complicated place. When we're talking about memory, right, what in many ways we're doing is we're talking about kind of the public construction of a usable past, or the public construction of a way to interpret the past. And that public construction might be incredibly different from how you experienced it, right? But unfortunately, what happens is that sometimes the people who shout the loudest or build the biggest monuments, or are the ones who put forward the memorial holidays and so forth and all that goes in, right? Those are the memories that do the most political work, right? And that's why we like to think about memory, is less about actually like what you remember, but memory is something that is done, something that is constructed, something that is sustained. As you mentioned, I'm doing a book on murder in Mississippi. And just the other day, someone asked me about, well, you know, what about good faith memories, right? Like, are there any good faith memorials out there? And I said, sure, right? I've gone to plenty of Confederate cemeteries where there are individual gravestones that are put out there by individual families for someone who they lost. And, you know, that's certainly good faith, right? If you go to a lot of Mississippi courthouses, to this day you'll find this monument of Johnny Reb, like the lone Confederate soldier standing there on a pedestal outside the morgue. And you could sort of look at that and say, well, that seems pretty benign. Except you remember that, wait, that that wasn't set up in the immediate aftermath of the war. Often those things came about when the story of the lost cause was under pressure, when civil rights movement was pushing towards greater. And so what you see is like at these moments when this kind of old Southern order is breaking down, as you describe, that's when you have various groups, politicians suddenly kind of reasserting this thing. Like, let's put up the monument, let's put up the general, let's side of kind of create the celebration. And so when I think about kind of memory, what I'm really talking about is, or what I hope we're talking about, is power, right? The power to kind of use these stories to push back against maybe people like your family, right? You know, push back against, and that's why I find it sometimes very frustrating when I hear people say, well, we can't tear down that memorial because we're erasing our history and we're just doing this for political reasons, right? And what I would say is that, well, like let's remember, you know, that memorials are put up often for political reasons. There are great memorials around the country and of course around the world where you're meant to honor people and felt history that Jen is talking about, the great kind of phrase, sites of memory and sites of mourning, where you go and you mourn and you feel. So often when people are talking about the Civil War, right, memories, right, they're not talking about that stuff, right? They're they're talking about sort of these the ways in which, or we're often interested in the ways in which kind of memory just becomes a way of doing politics by other means, right?

Miichele McAloon:

Um weaponized memory then is what you're talking about.

John Kinder:

Yeah, yeah, sort of exactly, right?

Miichele McAloon:

Well, Professor Murray, one of the things that is so missing in I think US history or a general knowledge of US history is the reconstruction period, right? After what, basically the 1870s through the 1920s, and how the northern states came to try to reconstruct the South, where a lot of a lot of this was born out of. And it it seems like a period of history that is minimized or not even known about in in the general public. We think the Civil War, and then we skip to World War I somehow, right?

Jen Murray:

Right. So reconstruction really begins during the war itself. Abraham Lincoln has a has a policy of wartime reconstruction, essentially trying to reconstruct areas that had fallen under Union control. Some examples of that would be the coastal parts of South Carolina in 1863. And then, of course, reconstruction really begins in earnest after the fighting ends in 1865, and then will end after the election of 1876 with what is known as the Great Compromise of 1877. So generally, I like to say Reconstruction, I mean, Civil War historians aren't really good reconstruction historians. Most, and and I'm absolutely guilty of this. Many Civil War historians focus on the war itself, and surrendered Appomattox comes in the spring of 1865, and we don't pay a lot of attention to all the problems and the unfulfilled promises and racial division and social political discord after 1865. One of the chapters in our book, though, actually looks at that question, and that's uh Brooks Simpson's chapter. Brooks is arguably the leading Grant scholar of the age. So he deals with Grant as a military commander, uh, rising to be the lieutenant general of U.S. forces in February of 1864, and then, of course, is president for eight years. And in our book, Brooks looks at some of these questions of Reconstruction, the employment of the 14th Amendment, but importantly how those questions from the Civil War and Reconstruction are relevant today, and how questions of the 14th Amendment, impeachment also play into our national conversation and political conversation in the modern era. And that's, you know, that's really what I think the great strength of the book that John and I assembled is it shows the legacy of the Civil War. I often tell my students and public groups that the Civil War is our nation's most important and defining event. And you don't have to look very far to see the legacies of the Civil War in our culture. And Reconstruction is one of them. And Brooks' chapter is a great read on the impact of Reconstruction in the modern era.

Miichele McAloon:

Actually, each of these essays are really they're well crafted, they're well written. Agree with them or don't agree with them, they have a lot of resonance. And so you write a great uh chapter on the renaming of the army bases, of the nine bases. And actually, I've been able to witness that personally. Tell us a little bit about the history of the naming, of why those bases were given the names in the first place. That's actually important to the story.

Jen Murray:

Yeah, thank you for asking that. So the U.S. Army bases, the nine of them that under the sort of current political landscape were up for renaming, largely take their naming origins during the First World War and during the Second World War. Of course, the American South, because of the climate, became a popular place for the War Department to set up these training installations, really beginning in 1917 with the U.S. involvement in the Great War. So you get places like what becomes Fort Benning in Georgia, established, I think, in 1917 or 1918. And similarly, Fort Bragg, also Fort Hood, you know, these really big iconic bases that we associate. With power today, uh, U.S. military power today, take their origins during World War I and World War II. So it shouldn't be surprising that in 1917, let's say, that Southerners and U.S. politicians writ large look towards the past, towards the American Civil War, for generals who they deem worthy to name these bases after. And consequently, the nine bases that I write about in my chapter, all named after Confederate officers. Here in Virginia, we had Fort A.P. Hill, Fort Lee, Fort Pickett, just to name three of them, beginning in 2022 and 2023, came under more intense scrutiny as to the appropriateness of naming U.S. Army bases where thousands, tens of thousands of men and women train in our U.S. military today after men who took up arms against the United States government. And the U.S. government decided to strip the names of those nine bases and rename them. There was a big naming commission established. They looked at thousands of possible names and came up with nine alternatives and renamed those original nine bases. And then the election of 2024 happens, and it is decided under the new era Trump's presidency and the new Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, to strip the renaming of the nine bases and assign them yet again new names, which now have the same surnames as the original name, but are not named after the former Confederate officer. So Fort Benning, for instance, now called Fort Benning, but not named after the enslaver and rabid secessionist Henry Benning. So it's a really interesting story, and how, again, the lost cause and how memories change over time and the appropriateness of having these Confederate tributes on our national landscape, even at places like West Point or these nine bases, which feature so prominently in my chapter.

Miichele McAloon:

One of the things, you know, because I got to see a front view of this, where with the U.S. Army, it's really interesting because the Army would have rolled with it. The Army has been the great integrator of society. They have uh, I'd say there's two places in the world that are truly integrated. And one is the Roman Catholic Church, the pew of the Roman Catholic Church. I mean, you got rainbow there, and then the U.S. Army. It really is not a battle. It's real race, it's not a battle in the Army. It really isn't. So I heard people talking about this, and some people were for it, some people were against it. The two places that they that people were really, really for was because of what they were going to be named. And that was Hal and Betty Moore in Fort Benning, because that was after people that they remembered, people that they knew, and the fact that it was after both of them, Hal and Betty Moore. And this was a Vietnam era couple. And then people liked Fort Liberty. But to tell you the truth, when Fort Liberty went back to, and that was Fort Liberty was Fort Bragg. So when it went back to Fort Bragg, people were really happy it went back to Fort Bragg. It had nothing to do, absolutely nothing to do with it being an enslaver, or it was just that was their built-in memory of it. And uh Fort Benning, though, people lamented that it went back to Fort Benning because they really liked the name Fort Halmore. And the other ones nobody else could pronounce, so it all worked out. Anyway, they called it Seduco for older soldiers, but to try to remember the names. Wasn't a political memory for these people. It was just a memory that they had their association with. But like I said, they would have integration has gone well in the Army. This they would have adapted to it. It would not have been an issue because unfortunately, most people don't know their Southern history and had no idea these names were even came from Confederate war. So it was interesting to watch.

Jen Murray:

Yeah, just a quick follow-up on that. And I don't want to monopolize the conversation. The question about Confederate monuments that we started with moments ago, it always struck me that we should look at the U.S. Army bases. I mean, and any way you want to frame this, Robert E. Lee abdicated his oath to protect the United States government when he took up arms against the U.S. government in the spring of 1861. So having men and women train in the U.S. military at bases named for men who fought against the U.S. Army always struck me as the most hypocryphal token or gesture imaginable in Las Cause memory. Yeah, you're actually right. Yeah. But you know, and you're right. And, you know, the U.S. military is the largest integrated workforce in our country. And I get the pride I served at, not me specifically, but you know, this I served at this base when it was called this. And even though the names went back, like now Corporal Fred G. Benning is who Fort Benning is named after, not Hal and Julia Moore, even though those names were reverted back in the spring of 2025, even the current political officials, Pete Heggseth and the Trump administration, recognize that you cannot name U.S. Army bases after Confederates. So while they found a loophole to what was in the appropriation for the National Defense Authority, they found the loophole and they threaded it. They still recognize that naming U.S. Army bases after former Confederates is absolutely inconsistent with what the men and women our military should be fighting for. It's a fascinating story.

Miichele McAloon:

It is a fascinating story.

John Kinder:

I I think you're like getting onto something that's so important and what makes the uh topic of memory so tricky, right? Because on the one hand, you could sort of say that, well, if I never knew who Henry Benning was in the first place, I just kind of grew up, I was born in 2000. I have no idea then, like, am I actually remembering? No, of course not. Sometimes like I love the idea of when we're thinking about actually memorials both that we might like and both we don't like. How many times have you seen people walk by them, glance up at them, and then just like walk? And so in that moment, right, that statue, that name is not doing anything, right? It's not meaning anything, right? And so when we think about how memory works, it's not an all-or-nothing thing, and it's not something that works all the time, right? Memory has to be, as you said, weaponized. Memory has to be done. It has to be sustained. And maybe in the case of the Fort Bennings of the world, like that kind of Confederate side of it is not being sustained. And you could, I can see an argument that would say, like, well, then like, what's the big deal, right? It's just a name at a certain point. And yet I think Jen makes like such a great point, right? Which is that if all of these decisions at some level, maybe not to you, maybe not to me, maybe not to everyone, but at some level are trying to tell a story about who we are, what we name things after, the people we celebrate, the people we build statues to, the people we don't build statues to, doesn't it make sense to use all of our opportunities to put forward a vision of what we are and what we stand for? The one thing about this, and this is where you said civil wars, civil wars are tricky. Civil wars are strange because you would never say that, okay, like let's go to Hermann Goering Air Force Base in Colorado. Like you could never do that. The idea of uh having a Air Force base named after an enemy general is just something that's anathema. And yet, when it comes to the United States, we sort of do that all the time. There's a kind of a sense of like, you know, what we hope in a conversation like this is like, let's just pause and ask, is that weird? Is that strange? And what does that tell us, A, about the Civil War and about how we think about it? Like, it do we just treat it as something kind of that doesn't play by the rules of our other wars? And and if so, you know, like what does that mean? Right? So ultimately with books like this, what at least I hope, and I hope sure Jen feels the same way too, is that you know, we want people to come out of a book like this ready to have a conversation, ready to think, huh, that's strange. I've never thought about it that way. Now, what they do with that, that can be on their own, that can be part of a broader conversation. But but yeah, it's it's just one of these things where once you start down that road, you think, yeah, why do we do that? That's so strange. And yet that tells us the power of how good plenty of people in the South have been able to kind of turn what this kind of secession from the Union and you know, the constitution turn that into something else, such that they were able to sort of sustain that without too much uh having these kinds of conversations.

Miichele McAloon:

And I tell you, one thing that I really noticed is our geography is changing too. So I'm in Fairhope, Alabama, and our our not geography, but our demographics are changing. I live in this cute little Fairhope town. It's a little artist town, used to be a sleepy southern town. It's not anymore. It is filled with Californians and Arizona people, people from the north that are coming down in droves. It's changing. The South has changed. And it's not Southerners anymore. It is people that are displacing to the South. We call them, we call them um escrow refugees. They sell some expensive house up in California or Arizona, and then they move to Alabama, Georgia, even Northern Florida. So, I mean, our our memories are volatile also as with as we change, demographics change. Also, I I mean, you see a more, much more integrated society than you did 10 years ago or 20 years ago. You just, dude, it's not an isolated society. And believe me, boy, live in Europe and then get on a plane and head to the United States and get off in the airport. It's completely different. Absolutely. For the difference between Germany and the United States, it's we are the most integrated country in the world. There's no question about it. Can we do better? Yes, all the time. Do and you know what? I think our anti-Semitism that we've seen shows that we have to do better. We have to keep work on incorporating the other, correct? And so, I mean, and that that's just I think part of human nature. Let me ask you a question, and this one's more I don't see it, but I know you guys are probably more attuned to it. How do you think the Civil War narrative is playing into our political narrative without going down a partisan road? All right, if we can do that. Of how that is because that is important, and that's one of the lasting memories of Civil War, because Civil War was partisan. How how is that playing into partisan politics now?

John Kinder:

Jen, you want to take that or do you want me to?

Jen Murray:

Well, I'll I'll I'll start with maybe just kind of a broad comment, John, and then I'll let you handle that. We write about this in the introduction and also in the epilogue, in the way in which politicians of all political stripes and commentators and pundits employ the phrase civil war. We we hear this a lot in the national rhetoric and the discourse now, that America has never been as divided since the 1860s, that we live in this current landscape, that we haven't seen this kind of division since the Civil War. Is our nation heading to another civil war? Is the civil war looming? So that's something that John and I were aware of and wanted to address and actually not only make people aware about this, but also think about the dangers of using those kinds of comparisons. Like we're heading for a civil war and the way in which that people almost romanticize it or actually lust for it, like anticipatory, we're heading for a civil war. And, you know, I I said in the beginning, I I live in Maryland, and the United States in the 1860s, the Civil War cost the lives of 2% of the population. 2% of the American population, 700 some thousand men died in the American Civil War. 2%. Were the United States to fight a war today, and we would see 2% fatalities, that would take us to about 7 million dead. 7 million. Yeah. And I use Maryland as the example where I live now, because that's basically the state population of Maryland. Everybody today dead would be the equivalency of what the 1861 to 1865 conflict cost. So when we use that phrase and we toss it around kind of callously or whimsically to speak about our politics today, I just really wish as a Civil War historian that we would kind of pause and reset and think about the horrors and the impact and the legacy and the trauma that the 1860s generation experienced, because it it absolutely is not something that we want to repeat for our country or for the people who currently live in it.

John Kinder:

Absolutely agree with you. Amen. One thing that we sort of looked at and we kind of saw is this tension between what we might call Big Sea Civil War and Little Sea Civil War. So the Big Sea Civil War of the 1860s versus this invocation. What we saw is this, and again, you know, go down the dive into the nether world of the internet. You don't have to go that far to find this sign me up. We're on the verge of the Civil War. Finally, we're going to be able to do this. And what you see is this kind of blurring of a civil war that might look something more like the Balkans, you know, where basically people sort of talking about civil war, civil war, civil war, without really kind of like grappling with what that means. And as Americans, you know, they're not looking around and saying, like, okay, would it look like the Balkans? Would it look like Sudan, right? Would it look like the Congo? Like, what would this civil war look like? And invariably, because we're pretty self-interested, you know, we turn back to the 19th century. But of course, for all sorts of reasons, right? Were we to have a civil war, it would look nothing like the 19th century, right? In part for the exact reason that you talked about. All of those kind of hippies down there in Alabama, like retirees, are they gonna fight for Alabama? Like what exactly does that mean, right? This idea that suddenly a block of Republican states versus Democratic states? Would it be individuals, militia groups? There's almost this kind of unwillingness to really grapple with A, how horrific it would be, right? And B, just how little it would resemble any sort of romantic kind of idea they have about the Civil War. And so on the one hand, you could sort of say that so much of this lusting or this sort of like hyping up of Civil War talk comes from a profound ignorance of the Civil War as it actually happened, right? But you could also say it comes from a profound knowledge of a romanticized understanding of the Civil War, right? If from the Civil War what you get are these stories of heroism on the battlefield and noble deaths and letters home, and it seems like it has so much stability and weight and chivalry and all, you know, so you can see how like this talk comes from this place of both ignorance and kind of poor knowledge. Right, right. The one thing we sort of pointed out was that people have been making Civil War talk since the end of the Civil War. Every big kind of controversy, uh, reconstruction, well, we're gonna have another civil war, coming back the 1920s, the the 1960s, civil war. So Civil War talk has never been absent from our national conversation, but it seems to be very urgent and very loud right now. We really are a pretty polarized nation right now. And so it's not at all surprising when people are looking around for how to make sense of it, they flip back to this earlier period. But what we're afraid is that what they don't really think about is like actually, as Jen said, what would this really mean? Right. Right.

Miichele McAloon:

We're a conflictual nation. We were born out of conflict. We, I mean, we are the loudest people in the world. We love to talk, we love to be in conflict, we love, I mean, we are different from the rest of the world. We are not Europe. We have nothing in common with Europe on this one. We really don't. I've lived here for so many years. And maybe our polarization isn't so politically based, maybe it's gender-based. We've always been polarized to a certain degree. And Professor Murray, I really, really agree with you that, you know, you don't want careless talk about civil war. I think maybe I'm wrong. I think our country's too big to actually go to civil war and we're too fractured to actually even come together for civil war. We have these little civil wars. We see things happening in Minnesota now. We've seen it happen in LA, we've seen it happen in a lot of the states. We're around the riots in the 2020s. So I don't know, maybe these are release valves, but the the Civil War and its long cast over our history is is really important. And I tell people all the time that we still live that Civil War memory. We really do, because civil wars are horrible. They don't go away because when it's brother against brother or sister against sister, it's not a good thing. And I I do, I my experience with the Balkans, it will be centuries before they heal from that. But the work that you're doing to one to educate on the Civil War and for us to understand the context of the Civil War is so important to our modern politics now and where not to go, right?

John Kinder:

We hope so.

Jen Murray:

Yeah, and hopefully that that's the biggest takeaway from our book. Individually, the chapters and collectively, what John and I assembled shows the relevancy of. The civil war in our present day and and hopefully beyond. And I hope that readers will think about that and reflect on that when they pick up the book that John and I wrote together.

Miichele McAloon:

I do too. It's and readers out there, it is well worth the read. Again, they some of the uh essays are challenging and maybe the way you think, but that's not a bad thing. If we can have some serious thought and learn the history of the Civil War, this is a serious discussion about the Civil War and how it is playing out in politics today. That is well worth the conversation. It is well worth the read. And I think you or both of you professors have been very responsible in bringing this book forward to allow for a space and conversation that is not emotional, it's not heated, but it it is it's so important in our understanding of the Civil War, in our memory of the Civil War.

John Kinder:

You know, as you mentioned, going to zoos and seeing them in a new way. Uh we hope after this you go to battlefield, see them in a new way. If you're in the United States, go to your courthouse, go to your museums, go to the movies and see what you see, right? And you know, maybe it will help you kind of recognize things that you hadn't paid much attention to before, but also like help you really sort of think about when you encounter those people, politicians appeared in the media talking about civil war, at the very least, press pause and ask, like, what are they actually talking about, right? And what am I missing from this conversation? Right.

Miichele McAloon:

I mean, that is so good. You know what? I had a conversation with a former superintendent for West Point, and he was telling me about a lot of the stitch statues around the academy were actually put up during the Jim Crow era, right? So you look at it differently and you think, oh, that's not a nice statue, you know. That's not that's not nice. Talk to people of of different uh walks of life about the civil war and what their memories are of the civil war, too. Thank you so much. I really appreciate taking time out of your busy academic schedules and uh keep keep on this subject. It's a good one.

Jen Murray:

Okay, thank you.

Miichele McAloon:

Thank you. Appreciate it.

Jen Murray:

Thanks for having us.

Speaker:

The stars above in heaven are looking kindly down. The stars above in heaven are looking kindly down. The stars above in heaven are looking kindly down on the grave of old John Brown, glory hallelujah, glory hallelujah, glory, his own march.