Dr Andrew Zimmerman Speaks "On Radicalism and the American Civil War" To End the 2013-1014 MOCH Season

 On April 17th, Dr. Andrew Zimmerman, professor of history and international affairs at George Washington University, spoke at the final Marcus W. Orr Center for the Humanities lecture of the year, delivering a lecture titled “Radical Life on the Mississippi: A Global History of the American Civil War.” Dr. Zimmerman, an historian of German intellectual history, examined the Civil War with a transnational perspective, focusing on the impact German émigrés had on social radicalism, particularly in the Union army. Taking several unique approaches, Dr. Zimmerman reimagined the history of the Civil War through Marxism, socialism, radicalism, and transnational events. For example, rather than examining the Civil War as an east-to-west war, or a war focused in the East, Dr. Zimmerman's work focuses on the Mississippi River Valley and the gradual move southward of ideas and Union forces, particularly in the “Little Dixie” area of Missouri; Helena, Arkansas; and the Davis Bend Plantation in Mississippi.

Tying together the ideology of the Civil War and the arrival of German émigrés after the 1848 revolutions in Europe, both in Germany and France, is an innovative approach. As Dr. Zimmerman noted, the “story is more complicated” than previously understood. German émigrés brought a unique viewpoint and intellectual culture that manifested in German-language newspapers, large numbers of German soldiers fighting in the Civil War, German generals, and the spread of very diverse and radical social and economic ideas. For example, when discussing “Socialism and Slavery on Davis Bend,” Dr. Zimmerman discussed the case of the Davis Bend Plantation, where slaves conducted a socialist experiment after the plantation owners and overseers fled.

This exploration of the impact Marxism, the 1848 revolutions, and German language press had on the Civil War is very important new scholarship, as it revisits and reimagines the history of the Civil War, the Union stance on slavery, the global impact of revolution and rebellion, and the history of German-Americans and German intellectual history. Dr. Zimmerman also examined the use of the words “transnational,” “global,” “revolution,” and “rebellion,” challenging historians and other scholars to think more carefully about the ways in which we discuss the Civil War and historical categories.

After his talk, Dr. Zimmerman took a series of questions, expanding and elaborating on his work. He noted that part of the Confederate plan was also transnational, involving France and a Confederate alliance with Mexico. This new geography of space and power is directly related to French sympathies for the Confederate cause, making it a global issue.

Dr. Catherine Phipps, of the Department of History, asked Dr. Zimmerman about his methodology and choice of sites of focus. Dr. Zimmerman noted that it is important in global history to focus on places that stand out in some way, in this case, as points of conflict among Union leadership between radicalism and conservatism.

Dr. Zimmerman was also asked about the origins of the German soldiers and officers. He stated that their origins and places of birth in Germany were diverse, and that while the number of Germans in the Union armies may seem high, it was not disproportionate; there had been a large number of German immigrants in the United States, particularly around the Mississippi River Valley. The German-language press was very large, and quite radical, and, for Dr. Zimmerman, serves as an important source in bridging the gap between the military and social history of war. German newspapers, gymnastic societies, and social groups all made comment on and participated, in a variety of ways, in the Civil War and the spreading of German intellectual thought.

On Friday, Dr. Zimmerman met with graduate students and faculty to discuss his article, “A German Alabama in Africa: The Tuskegee Expedition to German Togo and the Transnational Origins of West African Cotton Growers,” American Historical Review 110:5 (2005), over pizza. The discussion ranged from methodology questions to using theory in publications and research, to teaching methods and writing processes, and served as an introduction to the theoretical questions behind Dr. Zimmerman's work and his book, Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South (Princeton, 2010).

Dr. Zimmerman was brought to the university by the Department of History, the Marcus W. Orr Center for the Humanities, the Department of Foreign Languages, and the student group Transcending Boundaries.

Amber Colvin

 from Transcending Boundaries

Hampton Sides Offers Advice to U of M students

During his recent visit to the University of Memphis, author Hampton Sides took  some time to meet with students to share his insights and answer questions. Journalism Students Brooke Watson and Jake Armstrong offer these insights -

Hampton Sides: Freelance Novelist offers advice to U of M students

Striding into a classroom in the Meeman journalism building at the University of Memphis, not many would suspect Hampton Sides of having the elite professional life. His wispy, dark and just slightly thinning hair paired with his crisp blazer and slightly frayed blue jeans, tell nothing of his more than 20 years in freelance journalism and of the five successful books he has authored.

Originally from Memphis, the 52-year-old Sides has worked for magazines, television, radio, documentaries and various other journalism mediums before finally

starting a journey in writing historical narratives, a venture he credits to the late Memphis author Shelby Foote.  "Shelby planted some deep seeds in me as far as how I wanted history to be perceived," Sides said.

Sides was the U of M on April 3 as part of a lecture series sponsored by the Marcus Orr Center for the Humanities along with the River City Writer’s series, the English department and the journalism department.

Sides talked with students before his presentation and said that he does not like how some historians write history. He said to write his books he had to lose the academic mindset and become more of a narrative writer, a technique that novelists use far more often than do historians.

 "A lot of academic historians have a jaundiced view of narrative history," Sides said. "They view it as going up in the stacks and communing with dead people. I had never heard the word pleasure associated with history."

Sides most recent book was “Hellhound on the Tail,” which was about the manhunt for James Earl Ray. His next book called  “In the Kindgom of Ice” comes out this summer, and it is a book about an expedition in the late 1800s to the North Pole.

Sides graduated from Yale University with a history degree, but his first jobs were all in journalism as a magazine writer and reporter. Transferring over from journalism to novel writing was a slow and arduous task. Fortunately, some of the skills he learned from his career in journalism assisted in the process. 

"Deadlines helped me a lot. I would use that fear, energy, and adrenaline to fuel my chapters. I would just look at each one as a mini deadline that I had to get done by the end of the day."

Interviewing is also really important. I'm just someone who learned to ask nosy questions and even like it a little bit."

It has paid off in the long run. Sides credits luck and his children when it comes to finding inspiration for his novels. With an average of three years of research done before writing each book, Sides admits, "Writing is really hard. There's a certain amount of pain there, and it doesn't get any easier. There are a million decisions to make with each sentence."

Brooke Watson

April 3, 2014

Author Spices up Nonfiction with Good Storytelling

Born and raised in Memphis, 52-year-old Hampton Sides is a popular narrative history writer who has written five books in total and will release his sixth book in August.

Sides was the featured speaker at the University of Memphis’ Marcus Orr Center for Humanities presentation on April 3 called “Telling Stories: The Art and Craft of Narrative History.” At the presentation, Sides discussed his next book titled “In the Kingdom of Ice,” a story about America’s first attempt to discover the dangerous, unexplored land of the North Pole. “They went north but everything went south” Sides said.

        
Sides was a history major at Yale University who later tried his hand in journalism after college. He has worked at the Memphis Flyer and free-lanced at The Washington Post, and most recently he was an editor at Outside Magazine. “I wanted to be a writer since I was 6, 7 or 8,” Sides said.  Sides said he remembers getting his start as a writer and having to type stories on his old Smith Corona Typewriter. He had to use whiteout and endure the terrible fumes that were produced.

He began writing narrative history books, his first being “Ghost Soldiers,” which tells the story of a World War 2 rescue mission. “Narrative history is sometimes treated as the red-headed stepchild,” said Sides. “It takes dramatic techniques and applies them to nonfiction material.”

Sides estimates that it takes him about three years to finish each book he writes. One year of extensive research, one year for structuring the story  and a final year for writing in what he calls “the pain cave.” The pain cave is all the exhausting time he spends buried in his work and writing the book.  “I emerge from the pain cave with my book,” Sides said.

He said that writing is always a challenging endeavor. Writing requires patience and determination. Through the writing process he’ll go though many rewrites and long months of research. His stories deal with history, requiring him to travel to new places and meet new people.

“I kind of view it as history morphing into journalism and journalism morphing into history,” said Sides. “If people get to the end (book), I’ve done my job.”

 Sides’ presentation was at the University Center Theater. Afterwards, he spent time signing copies of his books.

 Jake Armstrong

April 3, 2014

Hampton Sides Speaks On The Art and Craft of Narrative History - A Historian's Perspective

Hampton Sides lectured this evening on “Telling Stories: The Art and Craft of Narrative History.” He explained that although that at an early age he met one of the most famous narrative historians (he was in a rock band with Shelby Foote’s son) and took a BA in history at Yale, he did not at first think he was a historian. He does not recall that the words “narrative” or “pleasure” were part of his historical education at Yale, and in the question-and-answer session that followed his lecture he said that in college we learn to use an unnatural voice in our writing and that history books tend to be topical and boring.

But after spending some twenty years as a journalist in Santa Fe, he became a historian with the writing of Ghost Soldiers, the story of a raid behind enemy lines in the Philippines to rescue prisoners of war, including the survivors of the Bataan Death March. Then followed Blood and Thunder, about the life and times of controversial frontiersman Kit Carson.

Mr Sides spoke on the eve of the anniversary of the assassination of
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and it was natural that he spoke briefly about Hellhound on His Trail, the story of the assassination and the international search for James Earl Ray. He explained how much he benefited from the collection of materials assembled by Vince Hughes, who was working as a dispatcher at the Memphis Police Department the day Ray killed King.

Much of the lecture was devoted to the way Mr Sides went about researching his latest book, In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette, to be published in August 2014. He began by asking how many persons in the audience had ever heard of the vessel; only two responded. He made it clear that although the voyage is virtually unknown today, it was one of the biggest events of the late 19th century.

It was an American attempt to reach the North Pole. Mr Sides explained that because the area was unknown at the time, there were all sorts of theories as to what would be found there, including the idea of Symme’s Hole — that there was a hole down into the earth (and a similar hole at the South Pole) with a civilization inside (see Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth), and another that Saint Nicholas had a workshop there.

Editor James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald was working on the theory that the Bermuda Current in the Atlantic and a similar current in the Pacific through the Bering Strait merged at the North Pole to create a central lake. Bennett was eccentric in many ways, the most famous episode being his sponsoring the quest of Henry Morton Stanley to locate David Livingston, who was known to be in Africa but had not been heard from in some time. The polar expedition was similarly calculated to create a good story for the newspaper.

With a crew led by George W. DeLong and George W. Melville (a relative of Herman Melville), theUSS Jeannette in 1879 sailed through the Bering Strait and was soon caught in the ice pack near Wrangel Island. After drifting to the northwest for the next 21 months, it was finally crushed by the ice and sank. The men dragged supplies on three boats over the ice to be used if they could find any open water to reach the Siberian coast. One boat and crew capsized, but the other two, commanded by DeLong and Melville, managed to reach the Lena River delta, but at widely separated spots. Most of DeLong’s group eventually perished, but Melville’s managed to survive, giving the newspaper its big story.


In the question-and-answer session, Mr Sides was asked how a writer could create suspense in an account of what everyone already knows. He explained that we often know what happened, but not how it happened. He spends a great deal of time mapping out a book before writing and creates several threads of narrative. In the writing, he follows one thread all the way through, then another, until all have been described (some literary critics identify four threads in Hellhound on His Trail).  His guiding motif is “. . . and then what happened?” He had earlier told of someone asking Shelby Foote what the thesis of his volumes on the Civil War was, and Foote had said in effect that there was no thesis — it was just a good story. Mr Sides indicated that was the way to write narrative history.

Mr Sides searches for stories that were consequential and that have much primary material available, but which are obscure today. He stressed the importance of primary materials, such as newspaper accounts, letters, and diaries written at the time of the events. Interviews are very important, he said; we need to lose our fear of getting into people’s lives. He likes to visit the places where the events described in his book took place, even long after the fact.

He is an editor-at-large for Outside Magazine and has written for such periodicals as National Geographic (his interest in the story of the USS Jeannette grew out of an article on Wrangel Island, published in May 2013), The New Yorker, Esquire, Preservation, and Men’s Journal. His work has been twice nominated for national magazine awards for feature writing.

The lecture was an event of the Marcus W. Orr Center for the Humanities, co-sponsored by the River City Writers Series, the Department of History, and the Department of Journalism.

Maurice Crouse

Professor Emeritus of History



damali ayo - A Studnet's Perspective

damali ayo is a woman defines herself as an African-American artist and author.  ayo came to the University of Memphis Thursday, February 20, and discussed how she felt toward tackling the issue of race and how it has affected her everyday life.  Her theme was that she doesn’t let race identify who she is and what she stands for. 
     
“I feel like I’m a pet—like here’s my pet black friend,” ayo joked.   While attending a predominantly white high school in Portland, she was subject to a variety of different racial comments and slanders.  She said that she would be the only black person within her group of friends and felt exploited every time they went out.  In response to her friends treating her as a pet, she made art that reflected how she felt.  One example of her artistic expression that she described and showed was the experience shared by  a lot of African-Americans have had been asked by others if they could touch their hair.   As a result, she showcased a cutting of her hair in her art piece entitled “Petting Zoo,” allowing people to touch the lock.
       
ayo expressed, “art should make you think and feel. It doesn’t have to match your couch.” She proclaims that’s “my motto.”  The artist has “grown to live by that” and she showed examples of her art work highlighting this motto and her perspective.

ayo views the world as something we can fix to make better with time.  She defined Americans as people who say that “we want you to join in this world but we don’t want you to join in.” She noted that sometimes America deceives us into thinking that everything is equal.  Ayo stated, “We’ve pigeon-holed people of color. That’s the world we’ve created.”  She said that Americans haven’t moved much in regard to our level of understanding about racism, “we have just graduated from a third grade level to a fifth grade level.

”At the peak of ayo’s career, she created a a website entitled “Rent-a-Negro.com.”   The site took the cyber-world by storm since at the time there were “only three people playing with race on the Internet, ayo noted.  She went on to observe that the internet  is a “very interesting place to play with satire.”  On the site, she offered things such as dance lessons, compare your skin tone, and “you’re so” comments for use.   Even though the website has been deactivated  ayo referred to the experience as  “changing her career” and “painting the chronicles of her life story.”

ayo went on to discuss how she spent years not knowing what was wrong with her physically. She found that she continued to get very ill because “I couldn’t just be myself.” ayo  stated, “While being in this business, you have to have three or four jobs.” This pace  became very tiring and it started to affect her psychological mind-set.   She started noticing that “people were looking at the content of my work versus the quality of my work.”  She began to question if the “race girl” was all America knew her as.

ayo wants to be known as “an artist who appreciates the rights of her culture” rather than simply  “the woman behind all those racial issues.”

Britney McGhee

February 20, 2014