Emancipation in the United States was vast, distended, and chaotic.Shifting boundaries surrounded the struggle, unfolding unevenly over years and an expanse the size of Continental Europe.Some enslaved people were able to escape to Union lines within months of the beginning of the war, yet millions remained fi rmly bound by slavery in 1865.The president, legislatures, judges, and generals played crucial roles in ending slavery, as did enslaved people, who seized freedom at every opportunity.Military and political struggle were inextricably interwoven with the struggles of individuals held in slavery; thus Abraham Lincoln kept a map of the distribution of slavery-the fi rst map of its kind in the United States-close at hand.Trying to make sense of this complexity, historians of emancipation have tended to focus on agency, on the ways actors in diff erent spheres and places strove for freedom.In its simplest form, that inquiry has turned around the question of who freed the slaves.Thanks to innovative work since the 1980s, we now see that freedom came as a result of many struggles-in cataclysmic battles and in protracted debates, on farms and in bureaucracies, in political parties and on lonely roads.Freedom demanded action on many fronts because slavery was entrenched throughout American society.A full understanding of emancipation requires that we put the pieces together.To do that-to comprehend the patterns, proportions, and timing of emancipation, to see multiple forms of power in interaction in space and time-we need an analytical framework that is inclusive, self-aware, and disciplined. 1uch of the debate over emancipation has, knowingly or not, turned on the issue of scale.Those who emphasize the role of Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans focus on the national scale; those who emphasize the role of the enslaved people focus on the scale of individual struggle and the cumulative eff ects of that struggle.Other historians focus on intermediate scales of armies, states, or regions.The debate to this point

Some words have kept coming up in the conversations we’ve had over the last several days at this meeting. We have talked of outcomes, competencies, and partnerships, developed through undergraduate research, service learning, and global citizenship, bringing about community-based, student-centered, and high-impact learning, fostering the values of engagement, responsibility, leadership, and accountability. It’s certainly clear what we’ve been up to here: building the structures for constructive and forward-looking higher education.

Serving both as home to the Confederacy's capital, Richmond, and as the war's primary battlefield, Virginia held a unique place in the American Civil War, while also witnessing the privations and hardships that marked life in all corners of the Confederacy. Yet despite an overwhelming literature on the battles that raged across the state and the armies and military leaders involved, few works have examined Virginia as a distinctive region during the conflict. In Crucible of the Civil War: Virginia from Secession to Commemoration, Edward L. Ayers, Gary W. Gallagher, and Andrew J. Torget together with other scholars, offer an illuminating portrait of the state's wartime economic, political, and social institutions. Weighing in on contentious issues within established scholarship while also breaking ground in areas long neglected by scholars, several of the essays examine such concerns as the war's effect on slavery in the state, the wartime intersection of race and religion, and the development of Confederate social networks. Other contributions shed light on topics long disputed by historians, such as Virginia's decision to secede from the Union, the development of Confederate nationalism, and how Virginians chose to remember the war after its close. For anyone interested in Virginia during the Civil War, Crucible of the Civil War offers new ways to approach the study of the most important state in the Confederacy during the bloodiest war in American history.

Since 1991 the Valley of the Shadow Project at the University of Virginia has experimented to see what possibilities new technologies might present for the understanding of history. The project has been quite successful in reaching a broad audience. But few similar projects are emerging, and we need to reconsider many aspects of institutional organization and priorities to foster new works of digital scholarship.

ESSAY When the North is the South Life in the Netherlands by Edward L Ayers fter years ofwatching colleagues fly to Paris,Johannesburg, Beijing , or Bogotá for research trips and speaking engagements, I decided to apply for a posting abroad. Holding only die vaguest and most stereotyped visions, I chose die Netherlands. My application stressed, perhaps impolitely, the direct Dutch involvement in the slave trade and their indirect connection to South African apartheid. Such commonalities widi white southerners, I suggested, might serve as the basis for interesting discussions of race and region. The Fulbright Commission accepted the application and told our family we would be stationed in the city of Groningen. Though on the map it looked a bit far removed from Amsterdam and Leiden, tucked away near the North Sea, the former Fulbright scholar in Groningen allayed our worries with his enthusiasm for the place and the people. Driving to Groningen in early March we predictably commented on the tidiness of the small towns we passed dirough and admired the stone churches that dominated tiieir centers. No tulips yet, and no one wearing wooden shoes, but it was early in the visit. Things were satisfyingly different but not alien or forbidding. We were pleased and relieved. As we neared Groningen at sundown we studied die map: Anna Paulownastraat , our appointed address, lay near the center oftown in the narrow streets of what had begun as a medieval city. We needed to gain our bearings and, to our surprise, the first convenient place to stop turned out to be a brand new McDonald 's restaurant, glowing with a familiar fluorescent sheen. Though it stood alone in an undeveloped area along the highway, the restaurant's parking lot was filled widi cars and lounging teenagers. Inside, we confronted a museum of American icons: a Harley, the rear end ofa pink Caddy, a life-size Marilyn, posters of Chuck, Buddy, and the King. Early rock music played on a jukebox. We had been in our adopted city for only a few minutes and we already heard familiar accents and reassuring backbeats. Maybe this wouldn't be so hard after all—though, to the astonishment of our children, the fries came covered widi mayonnaise. As we setded in we discovered that not everything had been McDonalds-ized. 45 Our apartment resided at the top ofsome satisfyingly European stairs, steep and narrow. Wal-Mart-like hours certainly did not rule in the Netherlands. The stores were shuttered all Saturday afternoon, all day Sunday, and Monday morning as well, with no 7-Elevens to offer a quart of milk or a loaf of bread. If you didn't have what you needed by Saturday at noon, you would do widiout for the entire weekend. Even the Southern Baptists of our east Tennessee youth had not been so strict. We loved the Dutchness of the tilings we saw but reveled in the flashes of the familiar. The television proved a big help in finding the comforts of home, since we could watch alf and die A-Team every day, along with episodes of die Cosby Show and Family Ties. We could also see die Dukes of Hazzard careening around the California landscape that masqueraded, poorly as ever, as north Georgia . Even with Dutch subtities across the bottom of the screen, the fake South appeared before us with a comforting regularity and with fewer commercial interruptions. Despite such touches ofhome, I entered class the first day with some trepidation . What would the students know about the United States? I gained some insight when I was introduced as a visitor from the University ofVirginia and heard a male voice in the back ofthe room stage-whisper, "They're in the final eight this year," referring to our men's basketball team, which had just defeated Kansas in the NCAA tournament. It turned out diat a number of the students had lived in die States during high school, though none in the South, and they spoke widi easy familiarity and unshakable opinions. They felt certain that the United States was 40 percent African American and diat the great majority ofblack Americans, the Cosbys notwithstanding, lived in urban ghettoes. It...

A House Divided... If we surrender, it is the end of us.--Abraham Lincoln We are fighting for independence, and that, or extermination, we will have.--Jefferson Davis Union and Confederate, soldier and civilian, white, black, men, women--over one thousand voices bring all the fire and fury, the passion and power of the Civil War to unforgettable life. Those who lived it are joined by key figures of the twentieth century, adding a thoughtful, contemporary perspective to America's defining experience.

Journal Article The Edge of the South: Life in Nineteenth-Century Virginia. Ed. by Edward L. Ayers and John C. Willis. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991. xii + 256 pp. Cloth, $35.00, ISBN 0-8139-1298-9. Paper, $14.95, ISBN 0-8139-1322-5.) Get access Richard Lowe Richard Lowe University of North Texas Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 79, Issue 4, March 1993, Pages 1599–1600, https://doi.org/10.2307/2080255 Published: 01 March 1993