| BY SALLY ACHARYA
During the Civil War, the infantry of Confederate general Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson covered so many miles so quickly that it got to be known as Jackson’s Foot Cavalry. Barbara Price knows how it feels. Her pedometer for a single day showed that she and her fellow students in AU’s week-long Civil War Institute had marched their way through 4.5 miles of history. Each summer for the past 10 years, AU history professors Ed Smith and Alan Kraut have led an intensive weeklong class in which students go from morning lectures that challenge their minds to afternoon learning tours that challenge their shoes. They stroll the same hills of Antietam that, on a single day in 1862, were covered with the fallen bodies of 23,000 men. They follow the footsteps of Abraham Lincoln to the telegraph office where he waited for war news. They stand in the room where, in 1861, Robert E. Lee accepted his post in the Confederate Army, and sit in the pews of the Richmond church where, only weeks after surrendering in 1865, Lee astonished parishioners by taking communion with a black man—his way, says Professor Ed Smith, of acknowledging the changed world. The institute is designed to question assumptions, deepen knowledge, and spark the historical imagination. “I want the experience to wash over them,” says Kraut. “I want them to put everything else aside and just bathe themselves in the Civil War for a week.” In past years, the course has drawn students as diverse as instructors from the Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, who were well versed in the war’s strategy but wanted to enhance their knowledge of the war’s social background, and history buffs ranging from the director of the National Labor Relations Board to a Midwestern banker and his golfing buddies. This year, there was even a 10-year-old girl. Jocelyn Collins of College Park, Maryland, a precise note-taker and voracious reader, was attending the course (and writing a 15-page paper and two book reviews) for pleasure. Jocelyn is precisely as old as the institute itself. The Civil War Institute began in 1994 and has been taught since its inception by Kraut, of AU’s history department, and Smith, chair of American studies and a frequent writer on the Civil War whose knowledge of Washington and its environs is nearly legendary on campus. It began as part of an effort to develop summer courses that would, in Kraut’s words, “have an intense experience connected to them, but do something different from regular seven-week summer classes. We wanted to do something a little outside the box.” Kraut was a Civil War specialist. Smith was also interested in the war and had in-depth knowledge of Washington, D.C. “Ed has a very, very strong sense of place. Washington is his town . . . It seemed like an interesting marriage,” Kraut said. “The chemistry was good right from the beginning.” Another thing that helped from the start: They’re both morning people. The morning lectures may start at 9 a.m., but the institute really begins at 8 a.m. with an hour of coffee, bagels, and pastry, when students mingle with the professors to discuss everything from the toll of diseases to the choices faced by blacks in the South.
A day at the summer institute begins with a two- to three-hour lecture by Kraut or Smith. Smith’s outspokenness—“a lot of people are convinced Sherman’s crazy. If you look at photos of him, he does look sort of off the wall”—sometimes sends 10-year-old Jocelyn into stifled fits of giggles. But she keeps up with the class, taking careful notes. The afternoons are spent on field trips. “I think it helps the imagination,” Kraut says. “So much of the appreciation of history requires that you use your imagination and put yourself back in the past and look through other eyes.” continued next page
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