On May 7, 2010, I spoke before the United States Capitol Historical Society. The title of that talk was “War Planning in 1861.” C-SPAN was there to record it, and here it is.
The fact that the USCHS was fortunate enough to have C-SPAN cover the conference suggests that perhaps it would be a good idea if more conferences began concentrating on making sure that their proceeding were taped for subsequent broadcast. Over the next several weeks, I’ll be posting links to various talks and programs where I have participated (eventually I’ll make those links into a separate page in the blog).
Recently Kevin Levin at Civil War Memory posted some video of several historians who had gathered in Charleston: the video was little more than the historians answering a few questions. Several people wondered why the same faces were showing up again and again, and others were hinting that perhaps other people should be given a chance. Kevin’s response was that these folks could make their own chance given current technology (and that’s what I’d take away from that exchange). If the objective here is to have more voices offer more opinions and insight, well, that can be done, and, as I’ll suggest, there are ways to do that.
Crossroads 