Conversation with June 2025 Special Problem Editors Joan E. Cashin and Alaina E. Roberts

In today’s Muster, Partner Editor Robert Bland discusses the JCWE’s June special problem on material culture with visitor editors Joan E. Cashin and Alaina E. Roberts. Dr. Cashin is a teacher of background at Ohio State College and author of War Stuff: The Battle for Human and Environmental Resources in the American Civil War (2018 and editor of Battle Matters: Material Culture in the Civil Battle Era (2018 Dr. Roberts is an associate teacher of background at the College of Pittsburgh and the writer of I have actually Been Here At the same time: Black Liberty on Country Of Origin (2021

Parts of this meeting have actually been edited for length and quality.

Robert Bland : Thank you both for making time for this meeting. In the introduction for the special problem, you mention that “the Civil Battle, like all wars, only heightened the relationship between people and product points.”

I question if you could speak about these magnified partnerships people of the Civil Battle period had with the material world and exactly how examining this worldly world offers a new lens on the battle?

Joan Cashin : Wars always involve savage battles over worldly sources, such as food, hardwood, housing Battles additionally generate powerful icons, which have usually been materialized. Flags , for example. This is type of apparent, yet there’s a significant battle throughout the war to keep the adversary from obtaining a flag, or to catch the enemy’s flag. I located referrals to men in both militaries who will certainly do virtually anything to maintain their flag in their hands. And, on the other side, obviously, soldiers who will do practically anything to wrest it away.

These material items have tremendous symbolic power After the battle, of course, there’s a quick traffic in material objects that are war artefacts. Some of them are rather regular items, and a few of them are connected with renowned people. A few of them are connected with regular men and women such as civilians, soldiers, Blacks, whites, the shackled, totally free individuals.

Robert Bland : However it looks like this is a powerful human impulse. To hold on to and preserve items that memorialize a symbolized background. It appears like the material culture concerns are often beside the method we now explore the silences in the manufacturing of the past and the methods scholars seek to “difficulty the archive.”

Alaina Roberts : Well going off that concept, of silences in the past , when I talk to my students about, you recognize, if you’re thinking about something that’s not a historical record, but rather something product regarding the Civil War age, which I teach regarding a whole lot, they’re often going to think of an uniform. Which attire, in their minds, is typically worn by a white individual, a white soldier. So I was actually delighted and appreciative that we had the ability to draw out the means material culture is important to people of color in this concern, like African Americans and Native folks, today and historically. Because as chroniclers, we understand daily individuals are engaging in the use of things and because memorialization process.

Yet it’s still requiring time to reach the day-to-day individuals, that concept that it’s greater than, for instance, just an attire. That it’s about people’s day-to-day lives and the method symbols handle much more indicating for every person.

Robert Bland : Along those lines, I question if you might mention the writers and the pieces that they have actually composed. The unique concern consists of articles concerning Civil War-era trunks and their connection to lawful society, school structures and the materiality of flexibility that those structures personified, and the procedure of accumulating items in the public history of the Cherokee country

What do the stories of objects like trunks , schoolhouses , and galleries tell us concerning the existing state of Civil War-era material culture?

Joan Cashin : I’m truly happy with the two articles that we published, one by Laura Edwards and one by Amy Murrell Taylor Both of them are reviewing objects that seem rather average, however they both make the solid case that these things imply a lot to individuals in the past. Laura Edwards discusses how possessing a trunk and filling it with items is one manner in which non-elite individuals can protect valuable product objects. And it’s a means to also work out some little step of personal privacy. What’s in the trunk comes from them and nobody else.

Amy additionally looks into what could feel like a rather normal wooden building in the countryside. However she demonstrates how that schoolhouse meant a good deal to the Black neighborhood. It is an icon of their emancipation, the reality they can currently build their very own organizations. The building also acts as a church and as a message office.

There’s also a battle around the various events on just how the structure was created and debates concerning how it need to be used.

Alaina Roberts : I really appreciated that Amy’s article enables us to get a various perspective on something I assume is really generally talked about in African American historiography , which is education It’s constantly, you understand, African Americans after the Civil War, the initial thing they want to do is obtain their children education and learning and additionally get themselves the ability to check out and write due to the fact that they watched it as the trick to status seeking.

I assume Amy’s short article is really excellent because it permits us to ask of this schoolhouse, what are the real building aspects of the structure? What are the issues of contestation with the land that this area is improved? How are the white institution teachers having discussions with Black trainees and moms and dads? Or, what’s happening with the white woman that’s interested in kind of taking control of this room for her very own functions? There are all these various contending celebrations in the essay.

Joan Cashin : To that factor, I hope we can encourage archivists to maintain product objects that usually can be found in with the manuscripts. I have actually seen this on and off throughout my occupation. There’ll be boxes and boxes of manuscripts, however in some cases there are a number of boxes of individual properties. Sometimes, nevertheless, they are discarded. I was doing research in Virginia years back and there was this was a huge manuscript collection. There were some individual objects that were had by the ladies in the family members– white and black females– things that pertained to white ladies before the Civil War, and black females during and after. And an archivist tossed them away.

I also think that there are all type of objects available secretive hands. They sometimes turn up for sale on the marketplace– there’s a massive market in Civil War artefacts, and they’re not everything about uniforms, bayonets and bullets. There are likewise things concerning the private experience and to emancipation. And I wish that galleries will take into consideration acquiring a few of those items.

Robert Bland : Along those lines, there is a continuous debate over the politics of museums and the unequal history of power ingrained in the collection acquisition process. Alaina, rotating to your roundtable, I would be interested to hear you state a bit about the conversation around the We Are Cherokee exhibit. You mounted the discussion around the exhibition as an “act of settlement.” I wonder if you can state a little bit about exactly how you recognize curatorial work and public history as component of a much longer process of reconciling historic injury.

Alaina Roberts : Well, my initially publication dealt with obtaining chroniclers and non-historians to see what’s occurring in Indian region with Indigenous Americans that are confining Black individuals as part of our broader narrative about the Civil Battle, emancipation, and Repair. I see the roundtable as component of that, but after that additionally part of attempting to make people recognize that it’s also linked to the conversations that we’re presently having– less now than a few years back– about racial reconciliation in this nation.

Therefore, there are conversations that have been had in the gallery researches world and in the scholastic world regarding telling, as an example, the American story as something that entails individuals of several races. Yet that hasn’t occurred on the planet of Native American public history and Native-focused gallery studies similarly. There are people like Amy Lonetree who have released on museum research studies and checking out how Indigenous Americans have been establishing their tribal museums and social centers. But those have been largely taking a look at tribes that did not very own slaves. And, as I have traveled throughout Oklahoma for the past decade, I have actually seen that most of these museums [of former slaveholding tribes] entirely overlook that background. They’re doing the same whitewashing that American galleries were doing, you know, years and years before.

And so, the roundtable was truly indicated to commemorate that there finally was an exhibit and a tribal country that was aiming to in fact recognize this history; not just acknowledge, but demonstrate how influential Black individuals remained in the Cherokee Country, the discrimination that they dealt with due to the activities of the government, and what steps need to remain to be required to truly integrate individuals of African descent in the country today.

Robert Bland : In closing, I intend to ask you to define the present state of Civil War-era product society background. What do scholars in other subfields of Civil War background miss by not more meticulously basing concerns of product society in their exams of the 19th century America?

Joan Cashin : I assume they’re missing out on a lot of the human experience. It’s clear when you do manuscript research study that the material globe matters a whole lot to individuals in the past. And there may not be a material artefact in the collection, but you’ll find it in the written evidence, in-depth summaries of items that individuals have, or want to have, or they have lost. They are attempting to protect points because of their connection to their lives. This is an additional means to access historic experience.

Alaina Roberts : I appreciate that product culture and the way we research, involve, house, and show material culture can be depictive of our modern-day minute, which it changes depending upon exactly how we’re considering history.

In regards to museums, I am wishing that they will be reflective of adjustments connected to addition in the USA and in tribal nations.

Joan Cashin : I’ve thought a good deal about Alaina’s factors on gallery experts and exactly how they look at all these issues. And I assume some of them are receptive. Several of them are interested in these originalities. Not every one of them. Occasionally, I talk with a person who doesn’t comprehend why the lives of common individuals are necessary– they’re still focused on the effective few. But I do not deal with individuals like that excessive and I’m hoping that the circumstance is changing. I’m really hoping that they’re mosting likely to move in action with chroniclers on all these concerns.

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