James M. McPherson | |
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Born | James Munro McPherson October 11, 1936 |
Occupation | Historian |
Spouse | Patricia McPherson |
Children | 1 |
Awards |
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Academic background | |
Alma mater | |
Academic work | |
Institutions | Princeton University |
Main interests | American Civil War |
Notable works |
James Munro McPherson (born October 11,1936) is an American historian specializing in the American Civil War. He is the George Henry Davis '86 Professor Emeritus of United States History at Princeton University. He received the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for Battle Cry of Freedom:The Civil War Era . McPherson was the president of the American Historical Association in 2003.
Born in Valley City,North Dakota,McPherson graduated from St. Peter High School,and he received his Bachelor of Arts at Gustavus Adolphus College (St. Peter,Minnesota) in 1958 (from which he graduated magna cum laude),and his Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins University in 1963 where he studied under C. Vann Woodward. [1]
McPherson joined the faculty of Princeton in 1962. [1] His works include The Struggle for Equality:Abolitionists and the Negro in the Civil War and Reconstruction,awarded the Anisfield-Wolf Award in 1965. In 1988,he published his Pulitzer-winning book,Battle Cry of Freedom:The Civil War Era. His 1990 book,Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution argues that the emancipation of slaves amounts to a second American Revolution. McPherson's 1998 book, For Cause and Comrades:Why Men Fought in the Civil War ,received the Lincoln Prize. [2] In 2002,he published both a scholarly book,Crossroads of Freedom:Antietam 1862,and a history of the American Civil War for children,Fields of Fury.
In 2007,McPherson published This Mighty Scourge:Perspectives on the Civil War,a series of essays about the American Civil War. One essay describes the huge difficulty of negotiation when regime change is a war aim on either side of a conflict. "For at least the past two centuries,nations have usually found it harder to end a war than to start one. Americans learned that bitter lesson in Vietnam,and apparently having forgotten it,we're forced to learn it all over again in Iraq." One of McPherson's examples is the American Civil War,in which both the Union and the Confederacy sought regime change. It took four years to end the war. [3]
There are all kinds of myths that a people has about itself, some positive, some negative, some healthy and some not healthy. I think that one job of the historian is to try to cut through some of those myths and get closer to some kind of reality. So that people can face their current situation realistically, rather than mythically. I guess that's my sense of what a historian ought to do.
— James M. McPherson, in an exchange with a Civil War historian [4]
Among McPherson's other books are The Negro's Civil War: How American Blacks Felt and Acted During the War for the Union (1965), The Abolitionist Legacy: From Reconstruction to the NAACP (1975), and Drawn with the Sword: Reflections on the American Civil War (1996).
McPherson was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1991. [5] In 1995, he received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement presented by Awards Council member David McCullough. [6]
McPherson was named the 2000 Jefferson Lecturer in the humanities by the National Endowment for the Humanities. [1] [7] [8] In making the announcement of McPherson's selection, NEH Chairman William R. Ferris said:
James M. McPherson has helped millions of Americans better understand the meaning and legacy of the American Civil War. By establishing the highest standards for scholarship and public education about the Civil War and by providing leadership in the movement to protect the nation's battlefields, he has made an exceptional contribution to historical awareness in America. [9]
In 2002, McPherson received The Lincoln Forum's Richard Nelson Current Award of Achievement. [10] In 2007, he was awarded the $100,000 Pritzker Military Library Literature Award for lifetime achievement in military history and was the first recipient of the prize. [11] In 2007, he was awarded the Samuel Eliot Morison Prize for lifetime achievement in military history given by the Society for Military History. [12] He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009. [13]
In 2009, he was the co-winner of the Lincoln Prize for Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief. [14]
McPherson is known for his outspokenness on contemporary issues and for his activism, such as his work on behalf of the preservation of Civil War battlefields. As president in 1993–1994 of Protect Historic America, he lobbied against the construction of a Disney theme park near Manassas battlefield. [15] He has also served on the boards of the Civil War Trust as well as the Association for the Preservation of Civil War Sites, a predecessor to the Civil War Trust. From 1990 to 1993, he sat on the Civil War Sites Advisory Commission. [16]
Along with several other historians, McPherson signed a May 2009 petition asking U.S. President Barack Obama not to lay a wreath at the Confederate Monument Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery. The petition stated:
The Arlington Confederate Monument is a denial of the wrong committed against African Americans by slave owners, Confederates, and neo-Confederates, through the monument's denial of slavery as the cause of secession and its holding up of Confederates as heroes. This implies that the humanity of Africans and African Americans is of no significance. Today, the monument gives encouragement to the modern neo-Confederate movement and provides a rallying point for them. The modern neo-Confederate movement interprets it as vindicating the Confederacy and the principles and ideas of the Confederacy and their neo-Confederate ideas. The presidential wreath enhances the prestige of these neo-Confederate events. [17]
President Obama himself never addressed the issue. Instead, he sent a wreath not only to the Confederate Memorial but also instituted a new tradition of sending a presidential wreath to the African American Civil War Memorial in Washington, D.C. He also won the praise of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. [18]
McPherson is married and has one child. [1]
Year | Film | Role | Notes |
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1994 | Civil War Journal | Himself | |
2003 | National Geographic: Beyond the Movie - The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King | Himself | |
2011 | The Conspirator: Mary Surratt and the Plot to Kill Lincoln | Himself | |
2015 | The Gettysburg Address | Himself |
The American Civil War was a civil war in the United States between the Union and the Confederacy, which had been formed by states that had seceded from the Union. The central cause of the war was the dispute over whether slavery would be permitted to expand into the western territories, leading to more slave states, or be prevented from doing so, which many believed would place slavery on a course of ultimate extinction.
The Emancipation Proclamation, officially Proclamation 95, was a presidential proclamation and executive order issued by United States President Abraham Lincoln on January 1, 1863, during the American Civil War. The Proclamation had the effect of changing the legal status of more than 3.5 million enslaved African Americans in the secessionist Confederate states from enslaved to free. As soon as slaves escaped the control of their enslavers, either by fleeing to Union lines or through the advance of federal troops, they were permanently free. In addition, the Proclamation allowed for former slaves to "be received into the armed service of the United States". The Emancipation Proclamation played a significant part in the end of slavery in the United States.
The United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) is an American neo-Confederate hereditary association for female descendants of Confederate Civil War soldiers engaging in the commemoration of these ancestors, the funding of monuments to them, and the promotion of the pseudohistorical Lost Cause ideology and corresponding white supremacy.
The Confederate States Army, also called the Confederate Army or the Southern Army, was the military land force of the Confederate States of America during the American Civil War (1861–1865), fighting against the United States forces to win the independence of the Southern states and uphold and expand the institution of slavery. On February 28, 1861, the Provisional Confederate Congress established a provisional volunteer army and gave control over military operations and authority for mustering state forces and volunteers to the newly chosen Confederate president, Jefferson Davis. Davis was a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy, and colonel of a volunteer regiment during the Mexican–American War. He had also been a United States senator from Mississippi and U.S. Secretary of War under President Franklin Pierce. On March 1, 1861, on behalf of the Confederate government, Davis assumed control of the military situation at Charleston, South Carolina, where South Carolina state militia besieged Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor, held by a small U.S. Army garrison. By March 1861, the Provisional Confederate Congress expanded the provisional forces and established a more permanent Confederate States Army.
The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is an independent federal agency of the U.S. government, established by the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965, dedicated to supporting research, education, preservation, and public programs in the humanities. The NEH is housed at 400 7th St SW, Washington, D.C. From 1979 to 2014, NEH was at 1100 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W., Washington, D.C., in the Nancy Hanks Center at the Old Post Office.
Neo-Confederates are groups and individuals who portray the Confederate States of America and its actions during the American Civil War in a positive light. The League of the South, the Sons of Confederate Veterans and other neo-Confederate organizations continue to defend the secession of the former Confederate States.
Lawrence Rush "Rick" Atkinson IV is an American author, most recently of The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775–1777, the first volume in the Revolution Trilogy. He has won Pulitzer Prizes in history and journalism.
There is widespread disagreement among historians about the turning point of the American Civil War. A turning point in this context is an event that occurred during the conflict after which most modern scholars would agree that the eventual outcome was inevitable. The Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863 is the battle most widely cited as the military climax of the American Civil War. Several other decisive battles and events throughout the war have been proposed as turning points. The events are presented here in chronological order with only the positive arguments for each given.
The most common name for the American Civil War in modern American usage is simply "The Civil War". Although rarely used during the war, the term "War Between the States" became widespread afterward in the Southern United States. During and immediately after the war, Northern historians often used the terms "War of the Rebellion" and "Great Rebellion", and the Confederate term was "War for Southern Independence", which regained some currency in the 20th century but has again fallen out of use. The name "Slaveholders' Rebellion" was used by Frederick Douglass and appears in newspaper articles. "Freedom War" is used to celebrate the war's effect of ending slavery.
Edwin Cole Bearss was a historian of the American Civil War, tour guide, and United States Marine Corps veteran of World War II.
Gabor S. Boritt is an American historian. He was the Robert Fluhrer Professor of Civil War Studies and Director of the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College. Born and raised in Hungary, he participated as a teenager in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 against the Soviet Union before escaping to America, where he received his higher education and became a scholar of Abraham Lincoln and the American Civil War. He is the author, co-author, or editor of 16 books about Lincoln or the War. Boritt received the National Humanities Medal in 2008 from President George W. Bush.
Brooks Donohue Simpson is an American historian and an ASU Foundation Professor of History at Arizona State University, specializing in American political and military history, especially the American Civil War and Reconstruction eras and the American presidency.
The Pritzker Military Museum & Library is a non-profit museum and a research library for the study of military history on Michigan Avenue in Chicago, Illinois. The institution was founded in 2003, and its specialist collections include material relating to Winston Churchill and war-related sheet music.
William Charles "Jack" Davis is an American historian who was a professor of history at Virginia Tech and the former director of programs at that school's Virginia Center for Civil War Studies. Specializing in the American Civil War, Davis has written more than 40 books on that subject and other aspects of early southern U.S. history, such as the Texas Revolution. He is the only three-time winner of the Jefferson Davis Prize for Confederate history and was awarded the Jules and Frances Landry Award for Southern History. His book Lone Star Rising has been called "the best one-volume history of the Texas revolution yet written".
Mark E. Neely Jr. is an American historian best known as an authority on the U.S. Civil War in general and Abraham Lincoln in particular.
Harold Holzer is a scholar of Abraham Lincoln and the political culture of the American Civil War Era. He serves as director of Hunter College's Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute. Holzer previously spent twenty-three years as senior vice president for public affairs at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York before retiring in 2015.
Craig Lee Symonds was the Distinguished Visiting Ernest J. King Professor of Maritime History for the academic years 2017–2020 at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. He is also Professor Emeritus at the U. S. Naval Academy, where he served as chairman of the history department. He is a distinguished historian of the American Civil War and maritime history. His book Lincoln and His Admirals received the Lincoln Prize. His book Neptune: The Allied Invasion of Europe and the D-Day Landings was the 2015 recipient of the Samuel Eliot Morison Award for Naval Literature.
The Pritzker Literature Award for Lifetime Achievement in Military Writing is a literary award given annually by the Pritzker Military Museum & Library. First awarded in 2007, it is a lifetime achievement award for military writing, sponsored by the Tawani Foundation of Chicago. The prize is valued at $100,000, making it one of the richest literary prizes in the world.
The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery is a historical non-fiction book written by American historian Eric Foner. Published in 2010 by W. W. Norton & Company, the book serves as a biographical portrait of United States President Abraham Lincoln, discussing the evolution of his stance on slavery in the United States over the course of his life. The Fiery Trial, which derives its title from Lincoln's Annual Message to Congress of December 1, 1862, was the 22nd book written by Foner, the DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University. It was praised by critics and won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for History, the Bancroft Prize, and the Lincoln Prize.
The following is a list of the published works of James M. McPherson, an American Civil War historian.