Teaching and Un-Teaching Civil War Mobilization

Like many Americans, young people today often learn their Civil War history from the movies. They are much more likely to have seen Gone with the Wind (1939) than to have read an historical monograph about Civil War mobilization and as a result, they often enter the classrooms thinking in easy dichotomies: soldier or civilian, North or South, patriotic or disloyal. By juxtaposing such sources with historians' analyses of Civil War mobilization and its relationship to the war's outcome, teachers can deepen their students' appreciation for the historian's craft as well as for the past's complexities. They can provide their students with tools for becoming apprentice historians, and they can guide them to become more critical consumers of the past--so that the next time they watch Gone with the Wind, they will realize that the past rarely unfolded in such neat dichotomies. Sheriff discusses teaching and un-teaching Civil War mobilization.