Podcast appearances and mentions of stephen cushman

In the decades following the American Civil War, several of the generals who had laid down their swords picked up their pens and published accounts of their service in the conflict. In The Generals' Civil War: What Their Memoirs Can Teach Us Today (University of North Carolina Press, 2021), Stephen Cushman analyzes a half-dozen of these works to discern the perspectives they provided on the era and the insights they offered about their authors. The publication of the service memoirs proliferated during the Gilded Age, thanks to the increases in literacy and the market for books that this created. Beginning in the 1870s several generals took advantage of the opportunity created by this emergence to recount for profit their time in uniform and justify the decisions they made. As Cushman details, several of these books, such as those of the Confederate general Joseph E. Johnston and Union commander William T. Sherman, contained contrasting views of similar events that, when read together, reflect the process of postwar reconciliation between the former foes. For others, such as Richard Taylor and George McClellan, their accounts served as an opportunity to present themselves as wagers of a more gentlemanly and “humane” war than that subsequently conducted by Sherman and Ulysses Grant. Grant's own memoir proved the greatest successes of the genre, a testament both to his wartime stature and the skills as a writer he developed over the course of his life. The success of Grant's posthumously published book was such that it overshadowed the subsequent release of both McClellan's and Philip Sheridan's memoirs, both of which proved a disappointment for their publisher, Charles L. Webster and Company. Cushman shows how the firm's founder, Mark Twain, exerted an outsized influence on the genre, not only as a publisher but more famously as the editor of Grant's memoirs and as a writer about the war in his own right.

In the decades following the American Civil War, several of the generals who had laid down their swords picked up their pens and published accounts of their service in the conflict. In The Generals' Civil War: What Their Memoirs Can Teach Us Today (University of North Carolina Press, 2021), Stephen Cushman analyzes a half-dozen of these works to discern the perspectives they provided on the era and the insights they offered about their authors. The publication of the service memoirs proliferated during the Gilded Age, thanks to the increases in literacy and the market for books that this created. Beginning in the 1870s several generals took advantage of the opportunity created by this emergence to recount for profit their time in uniform and justify the decisions they made. As Cushman details, several of these books, such as those of the Confederate general Joseph E. Johnston and Union commander William T. Sherman, contained contrasting views of similar events that, when read together, reflect the process of postwar reconciliation between the former foes. For others, such as Richard Taylor and George McClellan, their accounts served as an opportunity to present themselves as wagers of a more gentlemanly and “humane” war than that subsequently conducted by Sherman and Ulysses Grant. Grant's own memoir proved the greatest successes of the genre, a testament both to his wartime stature and the skills as a writer he developed over the course of his life. The success of Grant's posthumously published book was such that it overshadowed the subsequent release of both McClellan's and Philip Sheridan's memoirs, both of which proved a disappointment for their publisher, Charles L. Webster and Company. Cushman shows how the firm's founder, Mark Twain, exerted an outsized influence on the genre, not only as a publisher but more famously as the editor of Grant's memoirs and as a writer about the war in his own right. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In the decades following the American Civil War, several of the generals who had laid down their swords picked up their pens and published accounts of their service in the conflict. In The Generals' Civil War: What Their Memoirs Can Teach Us Today (University of North Carolina Press, 2021), Stephen Cushman analyzes a half-dozen of these works to discern the perspectives they provided on the era and the insights they offered about their authors. The publication of the service memoirs proliferated during the Gilded Age, thanks to the increases in literacy and the market for books that this created. Beginning in the 1870s several generals took advantage of the opportunity created by this emergence to recount for profit their time in uniform and justify the decisions they made. As Cushman details, several of these books, such as those of the Confederate general Joseph E. Johnston and Union commander William T. Sherman, contained contrasting views of similar events that, when read together, reflect the process of postwar reconciliation between the former foes. For others, such as Richard Taylor and George McClellan, their accounts served as an opportunity to present themselves as wagers of a more gentlemanly and “humane” war than that subsequently conducted by Sherman and Ulysses Grant. Grant's own memoir proved the greatest successes of the genre, a testament both to his wartime stature and the skills as a writer he developed over the course of his life. The success of Grant's posthumously published book was such that it overshadowed the subsequent release of both McClellan's and Philip Sheridan's memoirs, both of which proved a disappointment for their publisher, Charles L. Webster and Company. Cushman shows how the firm's founder, Mark Twain, exerted an outsized influence on the genre, not only as a publisher but more famously as the editor of Grant's memoirs and as a writer about the war in his own right. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

In the decades following the American Civil War, several of the generals who had laid down their swords picked up their pens and published accounts of their service in the conflict. In The Generals' Civil War: What Their Memoirs Can Teach Us Today (University of North Carolina Press, 2021), Stephen Cushman analyzes a half-dozen of these works to discern the perspectives they provided on the era and the insights they offered about their authors. The publication of the service memoirs proliferated during the Gilded Age, thanks to the increases in literacy and the market for books that this created. Beginning in the 1870s several generals took advantage of the opportunity created by this emergence to recount for profit their time in uniform and justify the decisions they made. As Cushman details, several of these books, such as those of the Confederate general Joseph E. Johnston and Union commander William T. Sherman, contained contrasting views of similar events that, when read together, reflect the process of postwar reconciliation between the former foes. For others, such as Richard Taylor and George McClellan, their accounts served as an opportunity to present themselves as wagers of a more gentlemanly and “humane” war than that subsequently conducted by Sherman and Ulysses Grant. Grant's own memoir proved the greatest successes of the genre, a testament both to his wartime stature and the skills as a writer he developed over the course of his life. The success of Grant's posthumously published book was such that it overshadowed the subsequent release of both McClellan's and Philip Sheridan's memoirs, both of which proved a disappointment for their publisher, Charles L. Webster and Company. Cushman shows how the firm's founder, Mark Twain, exerted an outsized influence on the genre, not only as a publisher but more famously as the editor of Grant's memoirs and as a writer about the war in his own right. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south

In the decades following the American Civil War, several of the generals who had laid down their swords picked up their pens and published accounts of their service in the conflict. In The Generals' Civil War: What Their Memoirs Can Teach Us Today (University of North Carolina Press, 2021), Stephen Cushman analyzes a half-dozen of these works to discern the perspectives they provided on the era and the insights they offered about their authors. The publication of the service memoirs proliferated during the Gilded Age, thanks to the increases in literacy and the market for books that this created. Beginning in the 1870s several generals took advantage of the opportunity created by this emergence to recount for profit their time in uniform and justify the decisions they made. As Cushman details, several of these books, such as those of the Confederate general Joseph E. Johnston and Union commander William T. Sherman, contained contrasting views of similar events that, when read together, reflect the process of postwar reconciliation between the former foes. For others, such as Richard Taylor and George McClellan, their accounts served as an opportunity to present themselves as wagers of a more gentlemanly and “humane” war than that subsequently conducted by Sherman and Ulysses Grant. Grant's own memoir proved the greatest successes of the genre, a testament both to his wartime stature and the skills as a writer he developed over the course of his life. The success of Grant's posthumously published book was such that it overshadowed the subsequent release of both McClellan's and Philip Sheridan's memoirs, both of which proved a disappointment for their publisher, Charles L. Webster and Company. Cushman shows how the firm's founder, Mark Twain, exerted an outsized influence on the genre, not only as a publisher but more famously as the editor of Grant's memoirs and as a writer about the war in his own right. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

In the decades following the American Civil War, several of the generals who had laid down their swords picked up their pens and published accounts of their service in the conflict. In The Generals' Civil War: What Their Memoirs Can Teach Us Today (University of North Carolina Press, 2021), Stephen Cushman analyzes a half-dozen of these works to discern the perspectives they provided on the era and the insights they offered about their authors. The publication of the service memoirs proliferated during the Gilded Age, thanks to the increases in literacy and the market for books that this created. Beginning in the 1870s several generals took advantage of the opportunity created by this emergence to recount for profit their time in uniform and justify the decisions they made. As Cushman details, several of these books, such as those of the Confederate general Joseph E. Johnston and Union commander William T. Sherman, contained contrasting views of similar events that, when read together, reflect the process of postwar reconciliation between the former foes. For others, such as Richard Taylor and George McClellan, their accounts served as an opportunity to present themselves as wagers of a more gentlemanly and “humane” war than that subsequently conducted by Sherman and Ulysses Grant. Grant's own memoir proved the greatest successes of the genre, a testament both to his wartime stature and the skills as a writer he developed over the course of his life. The success of Grant's posthumously published book was such that it overshadowed the subsequent release of both McClellan's and Philip Sheridan's memoirs, both of which proved a disappointment for their publisher, Charles L. Webster and Company. Cushman shows how the firm's founder, Mark Twain, exerted an outsized influence on the genre, not only as a publisher but more famously as the editor of Grant's memoirs and as a writer about the war in his own right. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In the decades following the American Civil War, several of the generals who had laid down their swords picked up their pens and published accounts of their service in the conflict. In The Generals' Civil War: What Their Memoirs Can Teach Us Today (University of North Carolina Press, 2021), Stephen Cushman analyzes a half-dozen of these works to discern the perspectives they provided on the era and the insights they offered about their authors. The publication of the service memoirs proliferated during the Gilded Age, thanks to the increases in literacy and the market for books that this created. Beginning in the 1870s several generals took advantage of the opportunity created by this emergence to recount for profit their time in uniform and justify the decisions they made. As Cushman details, several of these books, such as those of the Confederate general Joseph E. Johnston and Union commander William T. Sherman, contained contrasting views of similar events that, when read together, reflect the process of postwar reconciliation between the former foes. For others, such as Richard Taylor and George McClellan, their accounts served as an opportunity to present themselves as wagers of a more gentlemanly and “humane” war than that subsequently conducted by Sherman and Ulysses Grant. Grant's own memoir proved the greatest successes of the genre, a testament both to his wartime stature and the skills as a writer he developed over the course of his life. The success of Grant's posthumously published book was such that it overshadowed the subsequent release of both McClellan's and Philip Sheridan's memoirs, both of which proved a disappointment for their publisher, Charles L. Webster and Company. Cushman shows how the firm's founder, Mark Twain, exerted an outsized influence on the genre, not only as a publisher but more famously as the editor of Grant's memoirs and as a writer about the war in his own right. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

In the decades following the American Civil War, several of the generals who had laid down their swords picked up their pens and published accounts of their service in the conflict. In The Generals' Civil War: What Their Memoirs Can Teach Us Today (University of North Carolina Press, 2021), Stephen Cushman analyzes a half-dozen of these works to discern the perspectives they provided on the era and the insights they offered about their authors. The publication of the service memoirs proliferated during the Gilded Age, thanks to the increases in literacy and the market for books that this created. Beginning in the 1870s several generals took advantage of the opportunity created by this emergence to recount for profit their time in uniform and justify the decisions they made. As Cushman details, several of these books, such as those of the Confederate general Joseph E. Johnston and Union commander William T. Sherman, contained contrasting views of similar events that, when read together, reflect the process of postwar reconciliation between the former foes. For others, such as Richard Taylor and George McClellan, their accounts served as an opportunity to present themselves as wagers of a more gentlemanly and “humane” war than that subsequently conducted by Sherman and Ulysses Grant. Grant's own memoir proved the greatest successes of the genre, a testament both to his wartime stature and the skills as a writer he developed over the course of his life. The success of Grant's posthumously published book was such that it overshadowed the subsequent release of both McClellan's and Philip Sheridan's memoirs, both of which proved a disappointment for their publisher, Charles L. Webster and Company. Cushman shows how the firm's founder, Mark Twain, exerted an outsized influence on the genre, not only as a publisher but more famously as the editor of Grant's memoirs and as a writer about the war in his own right. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Stephen Cushman, author of "The Generals Civil War: What Their Memoirs Can Teach Us Today"

Stephen Cushman, author of "The Generals Civil War: What Their Memoirs Can Teach Us Today"

Stephen Cushman, author of "The Generals Civil War: What Their Memoirs Can Teach Us Today"

Stephen Cushman, author of "The Generals Civil War: What Their Memoirs Can Teach Us Today"

Stephen Cushman, author of The Generals Civil War: What Their Memoirs Can Teach Us Today

How do we use words to tease out the “real” that history strives to capture? Listen to my conversation with Stephen Cushman, as we consider the historian's art through Cushman's book, Belligerent Muse: Five Northern Writers and How They Shaped Our Understanding of the Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 2014). Stephen Cushman is Robert C. Taylor Professor of English at the University of Virginia. In addition to critical scholarly work on poetics and form, he has published five collections of poetry, and another book on the Civil War, Bloody Promenade: Reflections on a Civil War Battle. That is the Battle of the Wilderness, the bloody field of which Cushman lives in close proximity, where it has prodded him over the years to reflect on the history that flows unheeded through our lives, until, at moments, it erupts. In Belligerent Muse, Cushman is interested, and points us with gentle precision, to the act of writing: thinking, deliberating, trying out words and phrases, composing the scene—as the main event of the text, and perhaps the main event of history itself. How do we get the world into words? That is the underlying provocation of our hour-long conversation. Along the way, we ask about the stakes and challenges of such a feat, as well as what constitutes a success and what a failure in the terms of “history.” In citing Walt Whitman's famous assessment that “the real war will never get in the books,” Cushman places stress on the books. Surely something has gotten in the books. And so, during our conversation, we ask how the “real” of experience, if not representable in a positive, delimited sense, is made real through how exactly it leaves its imprint in our words. We reference examples Cushman uses in his book—which include the well-known speeches of Lincoln, the prose and poetry of Whitman, and the short stories of Ambrose Bierce, as well as the largely forgotten memoirs of Union Generals William Tecumseh Sherman and Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain—and touch on themes such as the individual as representational, the effects of a literary culture in writing history (and reading history as something other than fiction), and the place of ambivalence, or the unknown at the core of the historical methods search for truth. “The real” is, finally, not fully containable by any one writer or work. Eventually, words are all that remain. As Cushman so deftly demonstrates, we can all strive to discern how they drag along the material traces of the past, and better attune ourselves to the real with which those words stand aquiver. Michael Amico holds a PhD in American Studies from Yale University. His dissertation, The Forgotten Union of the Two Henrys: The True Story of the Peculiar and Rarest Intimacy of the American Civil War, is about the romance between Henry Clay Trumbull and Henry Ward Camp of the Tenth Connecticut Regiment. He is the author, with Michael Bronski and Ann Pellegrini, of“You Can Tell Just by Looking: And 20 Other Myths about LGBT Life and People (Beacon, 2013), a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Nonfiction. He can be reached at

How do we use words to tease out the “real” that history strives to capture? Listen to my conversation with Stephen Cushman, as we consider the historian’s art through Cushman’s book, Belligerent Muse: Five Northern Writers and How They Shaped Our Understanding of the Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 2014). Stephen Cushman is Robert C. Taylor Professor of English at the University of Virginia. In addition to critical scholarly work on poetics and form, he has published five collections of poetry, and another book on the Civil War, Bloody Promenade: Reflections on a Civil War Battle. That is the Battle of the Wilderness, the bloody field of which Cushman lives in close proximity, where it has prodded him over the years to reflect on the history that flows unheeded through our lives, until, at moments, it erupts. In Belligerent Muse, Cushman is interested, and points us with gentle precision, to the act of writing: thinking, deliberating, trying out words and phrases, composing the scene—as the main event of the text, and perhaps the main event of history itself. How do we get the world into words? That is the underlying provocation of our hour-long conversation. Along the way, we ask about the stakes and challenges of such a feat, as well as what constitutes a success and what a failure in the terms of “history.” In citing Walt Whitman’s famous assessment that “the real war will never get in the books,” Cushman places stress on the books. Surely something has gotten in the books. And so, during our conversation, we ask how the “real” of experience, if not representable in a positive, delimited sense, is made real through how exactly it leaves its imprint in our words. We reference examples Cushman uses in his book—which include the well-known speeches of Lincoln, the prose and poetry of Whitman, and the short stories of Ambrose Bierce, as well as the largely forgotten memoirs of Union Generals William Tecumseh Sherman and Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain—and touch on themes such as the individual as representational, the effects of a literary culture in writing history (and reading history as something other than fiction), and the place of ambivalence, or the unknown at the core of the historical methods search for truth. “The real” is, finally, not fully containable by any one writer or work. Eventually, words are all that remain. As Cushman so deftly demonstrates, we can all strive to discern how they drag along the material traces of the past, and better attune ourselves to the real with which those words stand aquiver. Michael Amico holds a PhD in American Studies from Yale University. His dissertation, The Forgotten Union of the Two Henrys: The True Story of the Peculiar and Rarest Intimacy of the American Civil War, is about the romance between Henry Clay Trumbull and Henry Ward Camp of the Tenth Connecticut Regiment. He is the author, with Michael Bronski and Ann Pellegrini, of“You Can Tell Just by Looking: And 20 Other Myths about LGBT Life and People (Beacon, 2013), a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Nonfiction. He can be reached at Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How do we use words to tease out the “real” that history strives to capture? Listen to my conversation with Stephen Cushman, as we consider the historian’s art through Cushman’s book, Belligerent Muse: Five Northern Writers and How They Shaped Our Understanding of the Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 2014). Stephen Cushman is Robert C. Taylor Professor of English at the University of Virginia. In addition to critical scholarly work on poetics and form, he has published five collections of poetry, and another book on the Civil War, Bloody Promenade: Reflections on a Civil War Battle. That is the Battle of the Wilderness, the bloody field of which Cushman lives in close proximity, where it has prodded him over the years to reflect on the history that flows unheeded through our lives, until, at moments, it erupts. In Belligerent Muse, Cushman is interested, and points us with gentle precision, to the act of writing: thinking, deliberating, trying out words and phrases, composing the scene—as the main event of the text, and perhaps the main event of history itself. How do we get the world into words? That is the underlying provocation of our hour-long conversation. Along the way, we ask about the stakes and challenges of such a feat, as well as what constitutes a success and what a failure in the terms of “history.” In citing Walt Whitman’s famous assessment that “the real war will never get in the books,” Cushman places stress on the books. Surely something has gotten in the books. And so, during our conversation, we ask how the “real” of experience, if not representable in a positive, delimited sense, is made real through how exactly it leaves its imprint in our words. We reference examples Cushman uses in his book—which include the well-known speeches of Lincoln, the prose and poetry of Whitman, and the short stories of Ambrose Bierce, as well as the largely forgotten memoirs of Union Generals William Tecumseh Sherman and Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain—and touch on themes such as the individual as representational, the effects of a literary culture in writing history (and reading history as something other than fiction), and the place of ambivalence, or the unknown at the core of the historical methods search for truth. “The real” is, finally, not fully containable by any one writer or work. Eventually, words are all that remain. As Cushman so deftly demonstrates, we can all strive to discern how they drag along the material traces of the past, and better attune ourselves to the real with which those words stand aquiver. Michael Amico holds a PhD in American Studies from Yale University. His dissertation, The Forgotten Union of the Two Henrys: The True Story of the Peculiar and Rarest Intimacy of the American Civil War, is about the romance between Henry Clay Trumbull and Henry Ward Camp of the Tenth Connecticut Regiment. He is the author, with Michael Bronski and Ann Pellegrini, of“You Can Tell Just by Looking: And 20 Other Myths about LGBT Life and People (Beacon, 2013), a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Nonfiction. He can be reached at Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How do we use words to tease out the “real” that history strives to capture? Listen to my conversation with Stephen Cushman, as we consider the historian’s art through Cushman’s book, Belligerent Muse: Five Northern Writers and How They Shaped Our Understanding of the Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 2014). Stephen Cushman is Robert C. Taylor Professor of English at the University of Virginia. In addition to critical scholarly work on poetics and form, he has published five collections of poetry, and another book on the Civil War, Bloody Promenade: Reflections on a Civil War Battle. That is the Battle of the Wilderness, the bloody field of which Cushman lives in close proximity, where it has prodded him over the years to reflect on the history that flows unheeded through our lives, until, at moments, it erupts. In Belligerent Muse, Cushman is interested, and points us with gentle precision, to the act of writing: thinking, deliberating, trying out words and phrases, composing the scene—as the main event of the text, and perhaps the main event of history itself. How do we get the world into words? That is the underlying provocation of our hour-long conversation. Along the way, we ask about the stakes and challenges of such a feat, as well as what constitutes a success and what a failure in the terms of “history.” In citing Walt Whitman’s famous assessment that “the real war will never get in the books,” Cushman places stress on the books. Surely something has gotten in the books. And so, during our conversation, we ask how the “real” of experience, if not representable in a positive, delimited sense, is made real through how exactly it leaves its imprint in our words. We reference examples Cushman uses in his book—which include the well-known speeches of Lincoln, the prose and poetry of Whitman, and the short stories of Ambrose Bierce, as well as the largely forgotten memoirs of Union Generals William Tecumseh Sherman and Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain—and touch on themes such as the individual as representational, the effects of a literary culture in writing history (and reading history as something other than fiction), and the place of ambivalence, or the unknown at the core of the historical methods search for truth. “The real” is, finally, not fully containable by any one writer or work. Eventually, words are all that remain. As Cushman so deftly demonstrates, we can all strive to discern how they drag along the material traces of the past, and better attune ourselves to the real with which those words stand aquiver. Michael Amico holds a PhD in American Studies from Yale University. His dissertation, The Forgotten Union of the Two Henrys: The True Story of the Peculiar and Rarest Intimacy of the American Civil War, is about the romance between Henry Clay Trumbull and Henry Ward Camp of the Tenth Connecticut Regiment. He is the author, with Michael Bronski and Ann Pellegrini, of“You Can Tell Just by Looking: And 20 Other Myths about LGBT Life and People (Beacon, 2013), a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Nonfiction. He can be reached at Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How do we use words to tease out the “real” that history strives to capture? Listen to my conversation with Stephen Cushman, as we consider the historian’s art through Cushman’s book, Belligerent Muse: Five Northern Writers and How They Shaped Our Understanding of the Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 2014). Stephen Cushman is Robert C. Taylor Professor of English at the University of Virginia. In addition to critical scholarly work on poetics and form, he has published five collections of poetry, and another book on the Civil War, Bloody Promenade: Reflections on a Civil War Battle. That is the Battle of the Wilderness, the bloody field of which Cushman lives in close proximity, where it has prodded him over the years to reflect on the history that flows unheeded through our lives, until, at moments, it erupts. In Belligerent Muse, Cushman is interested, and points us with gentle precision, to the act of writing: thinking, deliberating, trying out words and phrases, composing the scene—as the main event of the text, and perhaps the main event of history itself. How do we get the world into words? That is the underlying provocation of our hour-long conversation. Along the way, we ask about the stakes and challenges of such a feat, as well as what constitutes a success and what a failure in the terms of “history.” In citing Walt Whitman’s famous assessment that “the real war will never get in the books,” Cushman places stress on the books. Surely something has gotten in the books. And so, during our conversation, we ask how the “real” of experience, if not representable in a positive, delimited sense, is made real through how exactly it leaves its imprint in our words. We reference examples Cushman uses in his book—which include the well-known speeches of Lincoln, the prose and poetry of Whitman, and the short stories of Ambrose Bierce, as well as the largely forgotten memoirs of Union Generals William Tecumseh Sherman and Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain—and touch on themes such as the individual as representational, the effects of a literary culture in writing history (and reading history as something other than fiction), and the place of ambivalence, or the unknown at the core of the historical methods search for truth. “The real” is, finally, not fully containable by any one writer or work. Eventually, words are all that remain. As Cushman so deftly demonstrates, we can all strive to discern how they drag along the material traces of the past, and better attune ourselves to the real with which those words stand aquiver. Michael Amico holds a PhD in American Studies from Yale University. His dissertation, The Forgotten Union of the Two Henrys: The True Story of the Peculiar and Rarest Intimacy of the American Civil War, is about the romance between Henry Clay Trumbull and Henry Ward Camp of the Tenth Connecticut Regiment. He is the author, with Michael Bronski and Ann Pellegrini, of“You Can Tell Just by Looking: And 20 Other Myths about LGBT Life and People (Beacon, 2013), a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Nonfiction. He can be reached at Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How do we use words to tease out the “real” that history strives to capture? Listen to my conversation with Stephen Cushman, as we consider the historian’s art through Cushman’s book, Belligerent Muse: Five Northern Writers and How They Shaped Our Understanding of the Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 2014). Stephen Cushman is Robert C. Taylor Professor of English at the University of Virginia. In addition to critical scholarly work on poetics and form, he has published five collections of poetry, and another book on the Civil War, Bloody Promenade: Reflections on a Civil War Battle. That is the Battle of the Wilderness, the bloody field of which Cushman lives in close proximity, where it has prodded him over the years to reflect on the history that flows unheeded through our lives, until, at moments, it erupts. In Belligerent Muse, Cushman is interested, and points us with gentle precision, to the act of writing: thinking, deliberating, trying out words and phrases, composing the scene—as the main event of the text, and perhaps the main event of history itself. How do we get the world into words? That is the underlying provocation of our hour-long conversation. Along the way, we ask about the stakes and challenges of such a feat, as well as what constitutes a success and what a failure in the terms of “history.” In citing Walt Whitman’s famous assessment that “the real war will never get in the books,” Cushman places stress on the books. Surely something has gotten in the books. And so, during our conversation, we ask how the “real” of experience, if not representable in a positive, delimited sense, is made real through how exactly it leaves its imprint in our words. We reference examples Cushman uses in his book—which include the well-known speeches of Lincoln, the prose and poetry of Whitman, and the short stories of Ambrose Bierce, as well as the largely forgotten memoirs of Union Generals William Tecumseh Sherman and Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain—and touch on themes such as the individual as representational, the effects of a literary culture in writing history (and reading history as something other than fiction), and the place of ambivalence, or the unknown at the core of the historical methods search for truth. “The real” is, finally, not fully containable by any one writer or work. Eventually, words are all that remain. As Cushman so deftly demonstrates, we can all strive to discern how they drag along the material traces of the past, and better attune ourselves to the real with which those words stand aquiver. Michael Amico holds a PhD in American Studies from Yale University. His dissertation, The Forgotten Union of the Two Henrys: The True Story of the Peculiar and Rarest Intimacy of the American Civil War, is about the romance between Henry Clay Trumbull and Henry Ward Camp of the Tenth Connecticut Regiment. He is the author, with Michael Bronski and Ann Pellegrini, of“You Can Tell Just by Looking: And 20 Other Myths about LGBT Life and People (Beacon, 2013), a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Nonfiction. He can be reached at Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Stephen Cushman discusses “Surrender According to Johnston and Sherman”. Cushman is the Robert C. Taylor Professor of English at the University of Virginia.

Stephen Cushman, author of "Belligerent Muse: Five Northern Writers and How They Shaped Our Understanding of the Civil War" (Lincoln, Whitman, Sherman, Bierce, Chamberlain)

Stephen Cushman, author of "Belligerent Muse: Five Northern Writers and How They Shaped Our Understanding of the Civil War" (Lincoln, Whitman, Sherman, Bierce, Chamberlain)

Stephen Cushman, author of "Belligerent Muse: Five Northern Writers and How They Shaped Our Understanding of the Civil War" (Lincoln, Whitman, Sherman, Bierce, Chamberlain)

Stephen Cushman, author of "Belligerent Muse: Five Northern Writers and How They Shaped Our Understanding of the Civil War" (Lincoln, Whitman, Sherman, Bierce, Chamberlain)

Stephen Cushman, author of Belligerent Muse: Five Northern Writers and How They Shaped Our Understanding of the Civil War (Lincoln, Whitman, Sherman, Bierce, Chamberlain)

Stephen Cushman spoke about Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain and his numerous accounts about Appomattox at the conference “Civil War Lives,” held at the Huntington Library in October 2011. Cushman is Robert C. Taylor Professor of American Literature and Poetry at the University of Virginia.