Civil War Era Center
By Laura J. Bernhard
holds
institute for middle
and high school teachers
Becoming a War for Freedom: The Decision to Emancipate, a graduate course
for middle and high school teachers was held on the University Park campus
in 2000. This pilot program brought together faculty from Penn State’s
Civil War Era Center and other Civil War scholars and 10 participants
for a week of in-depth discussion and analysis. The curriculum focused
on 1862, the critical year emancipation took shape, and the program aimed
to provide educators with experiences and expertise to take back to their
own students.
“The
Civil War has been misinterpreted, misunderstood and the subject
of much debate, especially over the causes of the war and the motivations
of both sides concerning slavery. There is a need for knowledgeable
teachers to teach young people what the Civil War was really about.”
Dr. William Blair
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Civil War Era Center Director Dr. William Blair served as the conference
organizer. According to Blair, the goal of the course was to “get
scholarship in the hands of people who shape young people today.”
He noted, “The Civil War has been misinterpreted, misunderstood and
the subject of much debate, especially over the causes of the war and
the motivations of both sides concerning slavery. There is a need for
knowledgeable teachers to teach young people what the Civil War was really
about. Consequently, instructors stressed how to translate the content
from the course into classroom techniques.”
Participants had the opportunity to interact with Civil War scholars who
have a wide array of interests and expertise. The collaboration led to
a week of experiences consisting of classroom discussions, analysis of
primary documents, a screening of the movie Glory and a driving
tour of Centre County. It concluded with a tour of Antietam National Military
Park led by Dr. Peter Carmichael, assistant professor of history
at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
Dr. Mark E. Neely Jr., McCabe Greer Professor of the Civil War
Era and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his book The Fate of Liberty:
Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties, is the Civil War Era Center’s
scholar-in-residence. He led classroom analysis of the Emancipation Proclamation
and discussions of political parties and politics in Pennsylvania.
Dr. Sally McMurry, Penn State professor of U.S. history and expert
in vernacular architecture, conducted a tour of the Centre County towns
and communities of Boalsburg, Linden Hall, Centre Hall and Bellefonte.
Participants examined the architecture of each area and learned to interpret
the past from present-day structures. They also learned to analyze the
forms and functions of buildings, the connections of home and work and
the relationships of buildings to their landscapes. Skills gained during
the conference could enable institute participants to lead tours for their
own students in their own communities.
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McMurry noted
that Boalsburg is an example of an artisan town established in the 1830s
to 1850s. In such towns, the way space is organized indicates its connection
to work. Households were work units, rather than emotional units, and
workers, apprentices and hired hands lived under the same roof as the
family.
A stop at an old church cemetery in Linden Hall provided the springboard
for a discussion of the war’s devastating effect on the nation’s
small towns. A company of 100 soldiers might come from a single town.
As that company reached the battle line, the losses could be tremendous.
In one battle, nearly all of the young men from a town could have perished.
Dr. Thavolia Glymph, assistant professor of African and African-American
Studies at Duke University and former editor of the Freedom Project, an
effort to compile National Archive sources on African Americans’
interpretations of the Civil War, discussed “Women’s Work in
the War for Freedom: Slavery, Race, Gender in the War for Freedom and
Citizenship.”
Different perceptions of the war and why it was fought abounded both during
and after the war. Through presentations of primary documents, Glymph
asserted that for African American women, from the very beginning, the
war was about freedom. According to Glymph, African American women inserted
themselves into the political arena of the time by writing letters to
officers in the field, commanders and President Lincoln. From the moment
the war began, women began to move toward the battle lines, setting up
camps on the outskirts of the Union camps.
Other Penn State faculty members involved in the conference were Dr.
Amy S. Greenberg, assistant professor of U.S. history, and Dr.
Gregory Smits, assistant professor of East Asian studies. Greenberg
led a discussion on expansionism, violence and the coming of the Civil
War. Smits showed participants how classroom aids and audiovisuals can
be created easily and inexpensively using common computer software programs
and the World Wide Web. 
An outreach program of the College of the Liberal Arts and the Department
of History
Dr.
William Blair (standing), associate professor of U.S. history
and director of Penn State's Civil War Era Center, organized the
center's institute for middle and high school teachers. Becoming
a War for Freedom: The Decision to Emancipate brought together
Civil War scholars and participants for a weeklong intensive graduate
course at the University Park campus.
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Recognizing exemplary outreach teaching, research and service
This Penn State faculty member is sharing research with individuals,
organizations and communities to make life better:
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 Dr.
Carol A. Reardon
Associate Professor of History
College of the Liberal Arts
Penn State University Park
Dr. Carol A. Reardon takes her expertise of history and the Civil War out of the history books and into the battlefields. She is one of the foremost scholars of Civil War history and conducts battlefield tours for the Penn State Alumni Education Civil War series and for the U.S. military as a consultant of historical Civil War battles. She extends the latest scholarship of American history through the Civil War Era Center in Penn State's History Department. Her battlefield tours, which attract alumni and historians to sites at Gettysburg, offer a knowledgeable and engaging look at Pennsylvania's history and the Civil War. She also conducts military staff rides through battlefields that offer insight into maneuvers and strategies of Civil War commanders. She has worked with the military through such professional activities as serving as the chairperson for the board of visitors at the Marine Corps University and as a visiting professor of history at the U.S. Military Academy. In addition to her outreach efforts through Civil War history, she also is an award-winning and best-selling author.
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Recognizing exemplary outreach teaching, research and service
This Penn State faculty member is sharing research with individuals,
organizations and communities to make life better:
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 Dr.
Margaret M. Lyday
Associate Professor of English and Women’s Studies
College of the Liberal Arts
Penn State University Park
Dr.
Margaret M. Lyday’s outreach initiatives have focused on
enhancing writing and reading for elementary and secondary students
and teachers. Before she came to University Park, she taught
at the Penn State Lehigh Valley campus and was the first director
of the Lehigh Valley National Writing Project, which she founded
in 1988. She introduced and directed summer youth writing programs
for students in grades four to 10, conducted in-service programs
for local intermediate units and created opportunities for local
teachers who were awarded stipends to attend a 6-credit graduate
seminar on writing theories and pedagogy. She is responsible
for training 200 teachers in this intensive summer writing institute.
The teachers, in turn, took the knowledge gained through this
outreach program and passed it along to their students. Lyday
has remained involved with outreach as the director of the Central
Pennsylvania Writing Project, and she was co-chair of the 1999
Penn State Conference on Rhetoric and Composition, an international
conference.
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