You're A Civil War Historian (with Aaron Astor)

What parts of today’s world would freak out folks who lived during the U.S. Civil War? In this first-ever interview-based episode* of the You Are A Weirdo history podcast, we ask a real-life U.S. Civil War historian that exact question! Join host Doug Sofer as he chats with Aaron Astor about such topics as today’s professional military, the size and scope of government, air conditioning, sports betting, and college football.

Doug and Aaron also play the inaugural version of a new history game called “Clionic Connections.” Sure, it's a good way to foster a fascinating conversation about history, but it's also an excuse for Doug to play unnecessary sound effects.

Check it out!

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* Technically speaking, this one is actually the second overall interview-based episode. The first one from Season One involved someone who's been dead for 124 years or so. You'll have to listen to the intro for details.

Learn more about this rogue, underdog, Hail Mary pass of a project at findyourselfinhistory.com !

Transcript

You Are A Weirdo (with Doug Sofer, Ph.D.)

Season 2, Episode 6: “You’re a Civil War Historian (with Aaron Astor)”

[Music]

Doug Sofer: Welcome back to yet another glorious episode of this podcast about how history helps you understand the strangeness of now. Hey listeners, today I'm taking my usual highly scripted format and tossing it into the dustbin of history. [Rustling] Well that's not exactly true. I'm actually putting it just next to the dustbin into the cardboard box of history that used to contain a jumbo shipment of binder clips and on which I scrawled in Sharpie the words "Save for later." The point is that today's episode is not my usual one historian show. Instead it's based on an interview with an actual other historian. Yes, you heard that right. Today I'm interviewing Civil War historian Aaron Astor and he is going to say stuff like this. 

AA: I'm thinking of the wide awakes of a paramilitary group backing Lincoln and the people that they're going to see marching around today are going to be fans of SEC College football teams.

DS: All that and much much more coming up. And sure, I get it that sometimes it's hard to grant yourself leeway when it comes to understanding this tricky period in US history. But it's going to be okay. I'm a professional historian just like my guest today. And we've both been trained to talk you through exactly these kinds of situations. My name is Doug Sofer and I'm a weirdo. Just like you.

[Music]

DS: Browse on over to findyourselfinhistory.com/sponsors to find out how you could become a certified historical weirdo, earn a plastic medallion and a certificate made from actual paper that will make you the talk of the wherever you are. [Music]

DS: Listeners, it is my sincere pleasure to introduce you to Aaron Astor. Aaron Astor PhD is a professor of history at Maryville College in Maryville, Tennessee. And he's authored a couple of excellent books. His first one's called "Rebels on the Border, Civil War, Emancipation and the Reconstruction of Kentucky and Missouri, 1860-1872." And he's got this other one called "The Civil War Along Tennessee's Cumberland Plateau." He's also co-editor of yet another historical collection called "Slavery, Interpreting American History." Aaron wrote 11 articles for the award-winning New York Times Disunion series. And this guy's still going. He's currently working on a book project that explores the 1860 presidential election, not as this national-level event, but as a grassroots phenomenon from the perspectives of four different U.S. communities. And speaking of communities, Aaron's office is next to mine here at Lovely Maryville College in East Tennessee, meaning his travel time to my office was only about three seconds and consumed about .07 calories, thereby leaving one of the smallest-ever carbon footprints in the history of guests traveling to interviews. You're welcome, Planet Earth. So here we go. Let me just move my mic about, I don't know, 25% over to the right, and we'll get started. Aaron Astor, you are a weirdo— [guitar divebomb] is the name of this podcast. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode entitled "You're a Civil War Historian, Parentheses," with Aaron Astor and Parentheses.

AA: Thank you for having me on your podcast. I am indeed a weirdo.

DS: Yes, and so is everyone alive today in our strange era. And speaking of being alive, you're actually my first-ever living guest, but my second overall guest. The first one was Sir Arthur Sullivan in season one, though he's technically speaking, been dead for a century and a quarter.

AA: I'm thrilled that I'm not dead yet.

Excellent. So I can't speak for all of the listeners out there. I mean, generally speaking, my listeners are a pretty generous bunch. And alive. And mostly alive, as far as we can tell. There may be a few bots here and there. I'm very happy that you're still alive. Thank you for being with me. Thank you for having me. So the big question I'll be asking all of my living guests is this. Thinking about the people that you study, what would those folks think is the strangest aspect of the present-day world? And why?

AA: I'm going to avoid an obvious technology answer because those would be too expected. Instead, I'm going to talk about how the army is organized and what role it plays in society. Today, we have military bases around the world. We have what used to be called a standing army with a very large number of people, over a million, I believe.

DS: Yeah, a recent US military website shows about two and a half million military personnel, plus another, it looks like a million civilians.

AA: Yeah, and the point being, though, is that it is standing during peacetime. And that would have been impossible to imagine in the mid-19th century, a time when Americans were adamant that we would never have a standing army at all. And this was true from the time of the American Revolution through the 19th century. That would basically mean that when the war or emergency comes along, we would raise large volunteer forces to meet whatever emergency was necessary, whether it was the War of 1812 or Mexico or obviously the Civil War or the Spanish-American War, even the First World War, that once those hostilities had ended, the United States military would contract again to a tiny fraction of what it was.

DS: Right, the standing army is even mentioned right in the Declaration of Independence as one of their big gripes against King George III and his government. Here it is. It says he has kept among us in times of peace standing armies without the consent of our legislatures. 

AA: Correct. So it was something that has been embraced and repeated many, many generations over since the Revolution that a large standing army is an affront to liberty, it's an affront to republicanism, it is a sign of imperialism, it is a sign of the kind of government that Americans have always prided themselves on rejecting. And it was the case right up until World War II that if we were not currently in a hot war, that we would not, in fact, hold on to a very large standing army that obviously changed with the Cold War, but has never really gone back, even with the end of the Cold War, we still have a large standing army with obligations and responsibilities around the world.

DS: Yeah, and I think a big part of that is the fact that the United States is playing a very different role in leadership. Maybe one that the founders didn't fully envision. For a very long time in US history, I'm fascinated by how often I see Americans talking about Europe as sort of the center of the political arena when it comes to geopolitics, but that the United States was always sort of a way, I mean literally across an ocean. And there was this idea that we just had this very different path from the sort of great powers as they were known in the 19th century.

AA: Correct. So even though Americans would correctly point to the legal sort of roots of America with the British tradition, the fact that we had a large ocean separating us really viewed our sort of national project in different ways than France or England ever did. Even when the United States sort of came upon the world seen as a legitimate imperial power at the end of the 19th century, there were a lot of misgivings about it. And those were felt across the spectrum. They were not necessarily all the way on the left or the right. There was what you know [would] later on be called isolationism, but was actually a real skepticism about America having any kind of ongoing military adventures or military obligations far afield from the actual United States. Something that people just simply did not really fully embrace.

DS: Right. George Washington's farewell address mentions that point explicitly. I think it gets remembered as something about “avoiding foreign entanglements,” though I don't think Washington phrased it exactly that way.

AA: Yeah. And there's really two things there. I mean, one, there's the foreign entanglements that don't get involved in the affairs of, you know, the latest of a war of alliances across Europe, but also getting into permanent alliances with something that they looked skeptically upon. And that's, of course, another thing that obviously changed with NATO and the end of the World War Two and the rise of the Cold War.

DS: Right. So you're saying that there has been so much institutional and cultural change in the U.S. military since the end of the Civil War in 1865, that the people that you study would find today almost unrecognizable. Is that about right?

AA: Correct.

DS: That's a fascinating insight. And I think you've gotten that point across pretty clearly here. So let's try another topic. Sure. Bring it.

[Music]

DS: So, hey, Aaron, I know that you said you wanted to emphasize non-technological changes today, but you did bring up a technology off-mic in our pre-interview interview. You said specifically that you think another major part of Southern U.S. life today that Civil War-era folks would find bizarre is air conditioning. How much of a difference has AC really made in the U.S. South

AA: Massive, but what's ironic is that air conditioning was first designed for the Northeast. Huh. Carrier who creates it out of New York, they're first used in both commercial and residential environments in places like New York in the early 20th century. Eventually, you have industrial-scale air conditioning that spreads into the South after World War Two. What actually makes the biggest difference is automobile air conditioning, because when you added air conditioning into cars, that made it much more comfortable for people, because these cities are going to be designed around the automobile, the Sun Belt cities. And so you had to have that as well. Air conditioning was a massive force. I mean, it's impossible to imagine many of the cities of the South developing anything like the size they did without air conditioning. And remember, Washington, D.C. has the climate of a Southern city. And there's a reason why you have these long summer recesses, because for so long, it was just extremely hot and uncomfortable for many, many months of the summer. And so therefore you'd have a recess.

DS: Oh, sure. That makes sense. You know, when I first moved down to Tennessee from Yankeeland a quarter century ago, I remember someone telling me that Massachusetts folks walk really quickly, but that Southerners walk slowly. The idea being that if you Olympic power walk everywhere, you become this hot, sweaty, stinky mess.

AA: That would make sense. I mean, there's a lot of things you have to do just as a point of comfort.

DS: Oh, I get it. So you're saying that once you have air conditioned cars, you're saying those same kinds of comfort questions in a hot climate just don't matter that much. Is that right? So is it cars with air conditioning that allows big Southern cities to even develop in the first place? I think about Knoxville up the road. It's basically developed on a big East-West corridor called the Kingston Pike. Could Southern cities have developed without air conditioned cars?

AA: Yeah. I mean, there are several factors that come together to explain why the South develops so much since the 1960s. And I think before you get to air conditioning or for that matter, DEET bug control is just a long pent up demand. I mean, for 100 years, it was undeveloped after the Civil War. That left land prices very low, labor prices very low. It was almost like a quote unquote undeveloped country in many ways. I mean, people saw it as like a frontier, a place that could be developed from practically from scratch. There have been a few efforts to grow cities like in Atlanta or Memphis in the early 20th, late 19th century, and what was originally called the New South or Birmingham. And the obvious thing that got in the way was race and Jim Crow. They also never got large immigrant populations from Europe in the way Northern, Midwestern and Northeastern cities did. They were also still, to a large extent, dominated by agricultural monoculture cotton. There were a few places they would try to diversify. Georgia tried to get into things like peanuts, peaches, trying to get away from cotton. Even building the Dixie Highway System in early 20th century, Georgia was designed to get away from the railroad dominated cotton bill. But it just never really all came together for the South until after World War II. You have military bases that are placed in the South during World War II. You have a Democratic congressional base in the South that uses sort of pork barrel power to make sure that military bases in the South continue to get funding. You have people who are moving to the South in order to work in and around some of these military bases, including some research, things like Research Triangle or Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama. Because of this military industrial complex it develops in the post-war period. You're going to have this permanent growth of the South and the Southwest. I mean, Southern California grows tremendously because of a lot of this as well. And so on top of that, you have things like air conditioning and bug control. And of course, you eventually have the end of the Jim Crow system, which begins to encourage, beginning around 1970, your first sort of reversed Great Migration, both black and white, coming back to the South.

DS: Got it. So, hey, that sounds like a lot of reasons for urban development in the post-Civil War South. And it sounds like a lot of the reasons you discussed have nothing whatsoever to do with technology at all, not air conditioning or cars.

AA: That's right.

DS: Very nice. Well, I think that gives us a lot to think about. Let's end this part of the conversation here. Hang in there with me, Aaron, and listeners, and we're going to try a little history experiment in just a couple of seconds. [music]

DS: So, Aaron, as you know, you've been an impressive colleague over the years. And one of the things that impresses me the most is how you've been able to take pretty much any conversation we've ever had and change it over into a conversation about the US Civil War. No, I'm totally serious. We could be having a conversation about the NFL playoffs, hiking in the Smokies, marshmallow freaking peeps, and you'll always find a way to bring our chat back around to the Civil War. So rather than just complain about it, I thought it would be great to turn that into a game that I'm going to play with you and pretty much all of my guests from now on. I'm calling it "Clionic Connections," and it's named after Clio, the ancient Greek muse or inspirational goddess of history. All right, so here's what we're going to do. I'm going to pick a seemingly unrelated topic, some kind of event or phenomenon that I find in recent headlines, and I want you to connect it to the historical people you study, in your case, folks in and around the Civil War. And then because I know you can do that really easily, in order to up the challenge a bit, I'm going to ask you to do it in a randomly generated number of steps. So I have a little random number generator over here, and we'll just fire it up right now. [sound FX]

DS: And we got the number four.

AA: Four.

DS: Four is correct.

AA: Four steps.

DS: Four steps. And what I want you to do is make connections through time and/or space between the people of the Civil War era and today on the following topic, legalized sports gambling. Yes, this was ripped through the headlines. I just did a quick random news search, and I tried to find something that looked pretty random.

AA: That seems pretty random.

DS: Can you make a connection? Dr. Astor, you have exactly 18 seconds to prepare.

[Music]

AA: Okay, I think I can do this. Let's start with legalized sports gambling today and in four steps make our way to the middle of the 19th century and the Civil War era. Excellent. And the one thing that's part of this segment is I will always name the steps. Okay.

DS: Step one.

AA: Step one is connection to legalized gambling in general in places like Las Vegas and Atlantic City in the 1960s and 70s. Excellent.

DS: Step two.

AA: Step two, we will go back to illegal large-scale gambling on professional sports, most famously or infamously the 1919 Chicago Black Sox scandal.

DS: Yeah, that was a big deal at the time.

AA: Most certainly was.

DS: That was an example of players throwing the games.

AA: Throwing the games. Correct.

DS: Right. You’re supposed to throw in the games, but not the games themselves.

AA: Correct.

DS: Step number three.

AA: Step three, we will go back to the creation of professional sports in the first place, particularly professional sports leagues like baseball in the 1870s, also professional boxing, but well, baseball is a kind of an obvious one.

DS: Hey, this is pretty cool because we're now just five years away

AA: We're getting closer.

DS: When we're talking 1870s, that's five years after the end of the U.S. Civil War. Go on; one more step

AA: All right, one more step.

DS: Do it. Number four. One more step. Our fourth and final step.

AA: Our fourth and final step will be to the culture of gambling that was illegal on things like horse racing and other amateur events or random events, things like faro banks and various card games that civil war soldiers would play and bet upon in the civil war era.

DS: Dang! So if you are a historian and are excited about being interviewed on the You Are a Weirdo podcast, think about what you would want to do. I'll be throwing a curveball your way for sure with whatever the event is, but I know that you all out there, you're listening and thinking, "Yeah, I could do this."

AA: You have to think creatively though, and you have to think about multiple parts of the equation here. You mentioned legalized sports gambling, and so there was the gambling part, there was a legalized part, and there was the sports part. And each of those pieces had to come into existence in a meaningfully new way over the course of the last 160 years or so.

DS: That's great advice, Aaron, and congratulations for winning and also for inspiring the first ever edition of Clionic Connections.

Now comes the aftermath part of the game that I just made up right now, where we use the topic from the game to talk about something related. You know, I thought when I threw that at you that you were going to talk about the Progressive Era. I am always fascinated when I teach about the progressive era, because it is simultaneously something that looks a little bit like today's progressivism, in that it's about an activist movement about changing society, progress, progressing forward. At the same time, it is also very much a religiously based movement. The temperance movement was a huge part of that, and connected to temperance was prohibitions on things like gambling, other immoral activity. A lot of it was about policing morality.

AA: Yeah, I think that the best way to think of the progressive era is to use Robert Wiebe’s book title. This is a case where I think you can judge a book by its title, called A Search for Order, and that the progressive era, more than anything else, was a search for order in the economic sense, the political sense, and the moral sense, and probably a few other ways, maybe even ethno-racial. And what they saw was this decades of chaos in various ways in the late 19th century and sought new mechanisms, particularly the power of the federal government, but also large-scale new bureaucratic entities to try and solve these large problems. So things like prohibition, at that point, was not purely religious-based. It was drawing from the sense of that it was leading to disorder, leading to corruption. It connected it to corruption in voting, and of course connected to women's suffrage, which the 19th Amendment comes, obviously, right after the 18th Amendment.

DS: And groups like the Women's Christian Temporal Union, which is so important in the temperance movement.

AA: That's right.

DS: And so that was not...

AA: This was one of those movements that joined together the sort of fundamentalist movement, which also was kind of emerging, but also with the more mainline, I guess if you want to call it that, religious movements that were not necessarily on the fundamentalist end of things, and certainly were involved in social gospel, trying to improve society. But also there was, again, this sense of disorder, and that's really what a lot of them were fixated on. They saw whether it was disorder in meatpacking plants, or disorder in the consolidation of the oil industry, under John D. Rockefeller, whether it was disorder in environmental degradation, whether it was disorder in immorality, and what they called white slavery, which was prostitution, rings, and obviously alcohol. So these were all kinds of disorder that self-described progressives set a task to correct in some way or another. 

DS: Yeah, and the progressives' search for order includes their reassessment of the role of the people in government, but also of the role of government in society.

AA: Yeah.

DS: I think that's a perfect transition to the next big question that I have for you, and let's get to that in just a second after this separator.

[music]

DS: Let's talk a little bit more about government.

AA: Yes.

DS: You mentioned that you thought that the size of the US government would surprise people both north and south during the Civil War. Can you elaborate on that a little bit? 

AA: Yeah. So the government, up to—it's a sort of a cliche. People say that before the Civil War, we spoke of the United States are, and then after the Civil War, we speak of the United States is. I mean, it's sort of a cliche. And you can certainly look to major constitutional reforms like the 14th Amendment, which does in fact structurally alter the relationship between the federal and the state governments. It uses words like “no state shall,” and thus becomes a mechanism to apply, for example, the rest of the Bill of Rights to state and local law. But the reality is that when it comes to sort of everyday life, things are still expected to be primarily done through the state level. The integration of an economy across the country, and it's particularly things like railroads, are going to affect this, are going to alter this because you have people who are thinking economically much farther afield than within a particular state, and in ways that the federal government has to involve itself much more. The Interstate Commerce Clause is going to sort of almost naturally elongate itself in order to cover the new technologies of production and distribution of goods that certainly emerged before the Civil War, but really, really takes off after the Civil War. Now, the ideology of the time, by and large, certainly of those who were promoting this, was the only thing the federal government should be doing is establishing a process through which land can just be seized and then given to railroads. They're not exactly thinking about reforms of any sense, but it's not long after this that you start to see, first the populace and later the progressives that are starting to look at the federal government as the only tool that has the power to rein in trust's monopolies, that has the power to address safety, workplace safety, and food and drugs, things like that, and the increasing consumer economy. But it's a very halting process, and you get to the progressive era. There's a lot of a few steps forward and a few steps back. The Supreme Court, it looks very dubiously upon this, certainly at first, and it takes a lot of fits and starts before you get anything like a modern federal behemoth that you'll eventually have. You have a moment of it in the populace, really in the progressive era in the early 20th century, then you have a much larger growth of it during the New Deal era of the 1930s. And that's really when you start to see something resembling a federal government with a set of responsibilities that we associate with today.

DS: Right. One of the things that fascinates me about the distinction between the progressive era and the present day is how much it connects back to volunteerism, which now lets me connect it back to the Civil War, and I'm thinking of the Gettysburg Address doubling down on this idea of by, for, and of the people.

AA: Sure.

DS: And the idea was that the people have to be the government.

AA: Yeah.

DS: It can't be this extra separate kind of entity.

AA: Yeah.

DS: And so, and my understanding of the New Deal under Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the Roosevelt coalition was big government, big labor, big companies.

AA: Right. Right. Right.

DS: And the idea was that the big government was supposed to be made up of the people and was supposed to be the tool of the people to basically keep those other two entities in check …

AA: Correct. And I think here is where the timing between the Civil War era and even as early as the 1870s becomes important. Eric Foner once wrote a long time ago in his book, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, about the ideology of the early Republican Party, that there was kind of a sweet spot in the economic development of American capitalism in the 1840s and 50s, where it was reasonable to expect to be able to save up one's wages and then either go into business oneself or get land in the West. And that was one big reason why the prospect of shutting off, say, Kansas to the free sons of Ohio in Indiana was so galling. And it was a reason why so many of them were adamant about preventing the slave power from grabbing up the best land in the West.

DS: Bleeding Kansas.

AA: Leading up to bleeding Kansas. And then really leading right to the Civil War. And the Republican Party was ultimately about the future, about the West and about getting land in the West and about how free sons of toil, free people, free farmers should be able to have land in the West. Because what they saw as the great thing preventing that was not necessarily indigenous people who they figured they could just kick around somewhere or another, but rather that slaveholders would bring their armies of slaves out there and would thus occupy the best land. That's sort of how they saw the barrier to it. But the real point here is that this was a time when it was somewhat reasonable to hope for this early Horatio Alger, I guess, where one could actually earn enough, save enough and maybe get ahead. But by the 1870s, that already starts to look a little stale for a lot of people as factories become so much more mechanized as in many cities wages become increasingly depressed. And then in particular, when you have the depression of 1873 breaks out. And it's really sort of a shock to a lot of people that my goodness, we were promised the prospect of either land out in the Dakotas or a chance for success in a factory in Chicago. And none of this is now possible. That was the moment when newer, more radical ideas about labor, they were certainly present before that. But this is when they really start to take hold in the 1870s. And you start leading to the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 or the St. Louis General Strike, for example. And you start seeing this much more class consciousness and this increasing call that maybe the federal government should now become the arm of the people, as you're saying before, whether that people are defined here as the farmers who have a more populist bit or workers and perhaps a more socialist beat. And either way, that the federal government needs to be rested away from the railroad executives who are dominating the country after that point. And that's the decades long fight up until the 1930s when finally you sort of piece together the populist idea about agriculture and progressive ideas about better control over wealth distribution with the progressives in the FDR Liberal Coalition of the 1930s.

DS: Right. That makes a lot of sense. And of all of those pieces, it was the federal government that I think even the early progressives understood would be this tool of the people.

AA: It could be. It was a prospect that it could be the tool of the people.

DS: But aspirational.

AA: Aspirational. And as they often discovered, things like the Sherman Antitrust Act could very quickly be turned against them and used to crack down on labor unions instead. The worry was that, yes, the federal government has the scale in order to rein in some of these large corporations, but those same tools could backfire. So progressives would try all sorts of different mechanisms. For example, on the 16th and the 17th Amendment of how the direct election of senators, the idea was that state legislatures have been bought out by corporations. And so senators would be beholden, even more beholden to interests. And so instead, you circumvent that all these governmental mechanisms.

DS: Interests was sort of a code word. I mean, we still use this word. You hear in every political season, some concept about the “special interests.”

AA: That's right.

DS: And this is similar to the concept of the “powers” that was used during the revolutionary generation and beyond this fear that there would be some kind of cabal or conspiracy, but also some kind of aggregation of powerful people who would overthrow this res publica, this thing of the people, the republic.

AA: And there is a clear line back to Jefferson's, you know, Jefferson's promoting the yeoman farmer to Jackson's view of this. It's not so much that they opposed industrial capitalism. It's more that they were skeptical that its benefits would flow to everybody so easily that they were they were mostly skeptical of any attempt to try to centralize power economically, like, for example, the fights over the first and second Bank of the United States or, you know, or the Whig parties, various American plans for infrastructure development. They basically saw these as, you know, corrupt, connected Eastern insider urban attempts to place common ordinary farmers into debt. They would even say they were enslaving them by it.

DS: So this is, I think, a pretty consistent thread throughout US history and maybe in any government that has a lot of representation, there's a belief that on one hand there's the people, and on one hand there's all of these kinds of things that are going to interfere with the people and having a government that is by of and for the people. Now, that said, what does that mean? The people is not a single thing.

AA: Well, that's right. It's not. And in fact, ironically, what happens as you get into the post New Deal era, as you get into, say, the 1960s and you look at the language of people like Barry Goldwater, the conservative movement was actually reframing who the interests were and saying the interests were not necessarily, you know, big corporations, but rather were big government that were imposing upon honest, small businessmen. Maybe their intentions were different, perhaps, than an earlier group. But again, it was a very much the ordinary honest people who are being put upon by these corrupt interests of various kinds. It's just they've reversed sort of who many of them are. And I think you still see that, you know, with the Trump era. I mean, that there's this notion that there's this establishment interest, whether it's cultural in nature, or whether it's through technology, modern big tech, they are these powerful interests that the people are sort of hamstrung by they cannot seem to free themselves from. And so you need somebody to stand up for the people against them. The actors change places many, many times. But that thread of sort of the people against the interest is nothing new.

DS: No, I guess it's not. Hey, let's end this section. And then I want to come back and ask you about history itself and how it can help us understand our present day world.

[music]

DS: Welcome back, Aaron and listeners, to what I think has been a really fascinating conversation. It occurs to me that this conversation tells us something about history itself. I think one of the exciting things about being a historian, one of the things that I think we all understand is that when you have a bigger picture of time, and you can zoom back a little bit and look at the big “landscape of history” in the words of John Lewis Gaddis, diplomatic historian, you can see change over time in ways that when you're stuck in the present, that is much harder to see.

AA: Absolutely.

DS: And so one of my own kind of refrains is that “history is the study of human possibilities”; we’re too stuck in the present to really understand some of what's going on in the big picture. And we also can't see the future—though if anyone out there is listening and can see the future, I have some questions for you about some sports gambling possibilities. So please get in touch with me ASAP. So the past is really the only place in time where we can understand the human species. It's one of the reasons that history is so essential for the survival of this Republic.

AA: Yeah.

DS: And really for civil society in general is that this is how you understand the world. And I imagine I'm preaching to the choir when I say that we abandon history at our [pause] peril. 

AA: Yeah. And I would even add to this that this is where history is actually—it's important to view it in the context of the humanities and liberal arts rather than simply as a social science because it doesn't have the predictive value. We shouldn't pretend and we usually don't pretend it has some sort of predictive value that the future patterns will exactly resemble the past patterns, because there are contingencies. There's human agency, individual choices that may seem to go against the grain. The human complexity of how people imagine the past, not just how they've lived through the past and different imaginations of the future, not just different orientations towards it. Historians, I think when we do our job well, we ground it in the humanities. We have to sort of humble ourselves to the fact that this is a messy story. And very importantly, it doesn't necessarily have pure predictive value. And so things like voting, we can't... People often say, "What do you think is going to happen next?" I'm like, "I'm not a fortune teller."

DS: Right. So one of the things that I talk about sometimes in my classes is that the social scientist's job is to simplify the human species, try to put it in lovely theories and elegant charts, trying to simplify the human species. I think that that's not a bad thing. I think we need people who do that. I think we also need history and the humanities, because we complicate things. In history, when we use the verb to complicate, it's a good thing. On your social media platform, when you say your relationship has become complicated

AA: “it’s complicated”

DS: Generally speaking, something has gone awry.

AA: That's right.

DS: But in history, it's actually a good word, because what we do is we take these social scientists' theories and we say, "Okay, but what about this case? Under these circumstances, it didn't work at all the way you predicted."

AA: There's an amount of uncertainty that people have to embrace. A good social scientist will say [that]. I don't want to straw man the social sciences.

DS: We will acknowledge that sometimes human theories are predictable.

AA: Yes, sometimes there are predictable patterns. Again, I don't want to go too far and straw man it, but I do think it's important to acknowledge that at the end of the day, we don't actually know what's going to come next. Especially when it comes close to an election, when everybody's sure that this or that model predicts exactly what's going to happen, it's like, "No, it doesn't work." No

DS:  The historical record, the evidence of the historical record, that makes that very clear. We are as consistent with the evidence as our people in the sciences in that sense. It's messier in history because a lot of our evidence disappears. A lot of, for example, very important documents in Europe got blown up in multiple world wars.

AA: But we also focus on narrative more. I think that's the other piece about history is that we tell it in terms of narrative story that people can relate to, rather than simply the statistics will present an argument. I mean, we have an argument, but the argument is much more inflected through the narrative of human experiences in terms of how we write and how we research, that I think automatically puts the humility of the human experience and the human foibles right in front as we read and write what we do.

DS: Very cool. Yeah. Aaron, I want to thank you so much for being with me here today. Let's end this section here and then we'll conclude with one more final and thrilling challenge. And yes, I said thrilling.

[Music]

DS: All right, Aaron, let me ask you one final question.

AA: Yes.

DS: I want you to close your eyes. I want you to—he really is closing his eyes.

AA: My eyes are closed. I want you to take about 30 seconds. Imagine some individual or group of individuals who you study, who you know pretty well—doesn't have to be someone famous, just someone from the Civil War era. They suddenly show up outside of the door over here or maybe on the streets of Atlanta or somewhere in the present day. What is the first thing that is going to freak them out? You have 30 seconds. [Music]

DS: That was 30 seconds. Go.

AA: I'm thinking of the Wide Awakes—a sort of a paramilitary group backing Lincoln and the people that they're going to see marching around today are going to be fans of SEC College football teams and not anything to do with the military. That is where they're going to see that kind of highly choreographed public with martial language.

DS: Literally military bands.

AA: Literally military bands, but they will see it channeled through large scale college athletic football, which of course is a sport that's just emerging right after their time. They would be fascinated by, they would freak them out because it would look like watching people the walk at before University of Tennessee games, for example, or many, you know, the Grove of the University of Mississippi. They would be fascinated. They would say this resembles a political rally right before, you know, they would see Lincoln, but instead it's marching off to support their local football team.

DS: You know, that is a fascinating point. And it's one that I think about sometimes, for example, in NFL games: there's constantly a tribute to the military. That is a major part of what NFL games do. So there is a connection between football and the military is almost like a deliberate kind of diversion to allow people to express that sort of martial feeling without doing it in a way that is potentially harmful to society with people talking about shooting each other. And then in the worst case scenario, actually shooting one another.

AA: When I talk about X's and O's, when I talk about particular Civil War battles, I mean, you know, and I talk about flanking maneuvers and various things. I inevitably have students who play football and can relate it right away to the collapsing pocket around the quarterback. There's not, of course, exact parallels, but there's a lot of parallels. You can see it just, it just, you know, the physics of human movement. You're trying to move a ball down the field rather than annihilate the enemy. But there's always been some connections there. But the patriotic side is even more than that. If you go back to World War One in particular, and baseball president throwing out the first ball, that these large scale professional sports become this sort of symbol, this sort of rallying, unifying symbol, seeing in the national anthem at sports. I mean, these rituals are done because we're all Americans. We disagree if we support the Mets of the Braves or the Yankees or the Red Sox or whatever, but at least we're all Americans. And we have to ritually remind ourselves of that. People from other countries are often puzzled by that. But it becomes, we can viciously attack each other, but we will remember at the end of the day, we're all still American. Yes. And if you think about in the SEC, the number of teams that have cannons, yeah, literal cannons, rifle squads, and some like Texas A&M are, you know, there's an actual quasi military element to it. Yeah, many of them have roots in military academies. Louisiana State University was originally a Louisiana military institute. Ironically, the first president was a guy named William Tecumseh Sherman. But they, but yeah, it's a lot of these places that have this military origin to it. So it's not surprising.

DS: I noticed you managed to bring it back to the Civil War again. That was pretty good. 

AA: Can't help it.

DS: I think that covers a lot of what we're trying to do here today. Aaron, thank you so much for being with me today. As my second-ever guest and my first living guest, you did a spectacular job. I really appreciate your insights. And I'm looking forward to seeing what you come up with next. Speaking of which, what are you working on these days?

AA: Well, first of all, thank you for having me on here. This has been a lot of fun to talk about this. What I'm working on right now, actually, is a book called—the working title is, Electing Civil War, Constitutional Democracy and the Long Election of 1860. So I'm looking at the election that produced Abraham Lincoln and then secession and civil war from middle of 1859 to the middle of 1861. But from the perspective of four different places, so I have Burlington, Vermont, Cincinnati, Ohio, Clarksville, Tennessee, Madison County, Mississippi, as sort of a ground-up look at the relationship between democracy and civil war and how people adjust. I mean, this issue interestingly about martial imagery and cannons, they're using that in the context of democracy. That's why I was thinking of the Wide Awakes. I mean, you have these paramilitary groups that are blurring the lines between peaceful democratic action and enrolling huge numbers of volunteers into a war with each other. The book is exploring that relationship between essentially democracy and civil war.

DS: Spectacular. I think a lot of my listeners will really want a copy of that when it comes out.

AA: I'll be excited for it to be available and done.

DS: Thank you so much, Aaron. I expect I'll see you around since, again, your office is right next to mine.

AA: We're both alive and neighbors.

DS: To the best of our knowledge, both of those things are true. Thanks again, Aaron. Thank you.

AA: Thank you.

[musical vamp]

DS: On our next episode, we're going from today's first ever living interview guest to an entire conference full of actual living human historians. Yes, listeners, I took my show on the road to Cape Girardeau, Missouri, where I gathered up everybody attending the Southeast World History Association's annual meeting, and then I told them that they're all a bunch of weirdos. You know, you do that with most industries, and they'll pelt you with blueberry muffins left over from the catered snack break. But with historians, it somehow ended up leading to a really good conversation. What happens when you ask a whole ballroom full of historians about the strangeness of now? Find out next time as interview fever continues to run its course, and no amount of chicken soup or Vicks Vaporub smeared all over your face can make it go away. Coming soon to a podcast playing device near you. So that's it. Hey, how did my first interview episode go? Post your thoughts at findyourselfinhistory.com, or send me an email at doug@findyourselfinhistory.com. And if you do history professionally and want to be a guest on my show, drop me a line at that same address. You may find works referenced and other information from this and other episodes at findyourselfinhistory.com. You can also check out my blog and subscribe to my email newsletter right at that same place. Want to support this program and also get certified as an official historical weirdo? Head over to findyourselfinhistory.com/sponsors to find out how. And since both Aaron and I are in the History Department at Maryville College, there's no need to make yet another unsolicited plug for my institution, except to say that you can find out more at maryvillecollege.edu. This podcast is researched, written, edited, narrated, recorded, and mixed by Doug Sofer, except all of the parts where my guest Aaron Aster was talking; that was all him. All other relevant materials are copyright 2024 Doug Sofer. The theme song was written and performed by Doug Sofer with Matt Trimboli on rhythm guitar. Learn more about Matt at trimboli.com. Thank you for listening. [Music]