Air Date: 102805
Subject: Gary Gallagher: Causes Lost and Won
Books: The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History
Guest: Gary Gallagher
Summary: Prolific Civil War author Dr. Gary Gallagher discusses why the South lost, black Confederates, how battlefields should be interpreted, and other controversial topics.
Brett’s Summary: The basic summary pretty much nails this interview. Dr. Gallagher answers quite a few questions from Gerry concerning many of the topics he has written about in the past. One item not listed above which I find very interesting was the discussion about the way academics tend to shun the military aspects of the war. Gerry often brings this point up on his shows, and it is encouraging to hear academics talk about the importance of military topics and the need to include these in some way. The dismissal of military history topics among academics is in vogue currently, but this does not mean it has to always stay that way. Gallagher also goes into a great bit of detail about “Black Confederates”, African-Americans who took up arms for the Confederacy. Some “neo-Lost Cause” groups claim as many as 100,000 African-Americans were actual soldiers in the Confederate armies. Dr. Gallagher rightly calls this assertion a “hallucination”. The refusal of the Confederate government to free some slaves if they agreed to fight for the Confederacy is quite telling, in my opinion, as far as what that government was really fighting for in the first place.
Civil War Talk Radio airs most Fridays at 12 PM Pacific on World Talk Radio Studio A. Host Gerry Prokopowicz, the History Chair at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina, interviews a guest each week and discusses their interest in the Civil War. Most interviews center around a book or books if the guest is an author. Other guests over the years have included public Historians such as park rangers and museum curators,wargamers, bloggers, and even a member of an American Civil War Round Table located in London, England.
In this series of blog entries, I will be posting air dates, subjects, and guests, and if I have time, I’ll provide a brief summary of the program. You can find all of the past episodes I’ve entered into the blog by clicking on the Civil War Talk Radio category. Each program should appear either on or near the date it was first broadcast.
Check out Brett’s list of the Top 10 Civil War Blogs!
Read many Civil War Book Reviews here at TOCWOC – A Civil War Blog!
Check out Beyond the Crater: The Petersburg Campaign Online for the latest on the Siege of Petersburg!
Leave a Reply