Quick Facts
Title: Director of the Richards Civil War Era Center and Professor of American History
Primary focus: Reconstruction, the home front, and commemorations of war
Current projects: Two book-length studies, one on treason during the Civil War and one on Confederate and Union home fronts.
Duties as Director of the Civil War Center: works with student interns, leads an annual tour for the History Club, and works with public school teachers as part of a UNESCO program to interpret the African slave trade and the struggle for freedom in the United States.
He is also the editor of Civil War History, the journal for the field.
You can contact
William Blair here:
Phone: 814-863-6356
wab120@psu.edu
Catching up with William Blair
If you could solve a single mystery in your field, what would it be?
Why the public has such a difficult time understanding slavery as a cause of the Civil War.
When you're not on campus working, where can you most often be found?
On the tennis courts
Where is the most interesting place you've traveled?
Paris
Selected Publications by William Blair
Cities of the Dead: Contesting the Memory of the Civil War in the South, 1865-1914
Exploring the history of Civil War commemorations from both sides of the color line, William Blair places the development of memorial holidays, Emancipation Day celebrations, and other remembrances in the context of Reconstruction politics and race relations in the South. His grassroots examination of these civic rituals demonstrates that the politics of commemoration remained far more contentious than has been previously acknowledged.
Commemorations by ex-Confederates were intended at first to maintain a separate identity from the U.S. government, Blair argues, not as a vehicle for promoting sectional healing. The burial grounds of fallen heroes, known as Cities of the Dead, often became contested ground, especially for Confederate women who were opposed to Reconstruction. And until the turn of the century, African Americans used freedom celebrations to lobby for greater political power and tried to create a national holiday to recognize emancipation.
Blair's analysis shows that some festive occasions that we celebrate even today have a divisive and sometimes violent past as various groups with conflicting political agendas attempted to define the meaning of the Civil War.
Virginia's Private War: Feeding Body and Soul in the Confederacy, 1861-1865
This book tells the story of how Confederate civilians in the Old Dominion struggled to feed not only their stomachs but also their souls. Although demonstrating the ways in which the war created many problems within southern communities, Virginia's Private War: Feeding Body and Soul in the Confederacy, 1861-1865 does not support scholars who claim that internal dissent caused the Confederacy's downfall. Instead, it offers a study of the Virginia home front that depicts how the Union army's continued pressure created destruction, hardship, and shortages that left the Confederate public spent and demoralized with the surrender of the army under Robert E. Lee.