• Roundtable Discussion on Deborah Willis’s The Black Civil War SoldierThe Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship
• Jim Downs, Moderator (bio),
  Participants: David W. Blight, Cheryl Finley, Matthew Fox-Amato, Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, Nell Painter, Ann M. Shumard, and Deborah Willis

DAVID BLIGHT: Welcome everybody. I’m David Blight. I’m the director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery and Abolition at Yale University. We’re helping host this extraordinary event today on Black soldiers in Civil War photography. The panel, which I will introduce in a moment, is a star-studded and I should say a large panel, whose members I will introduce in a moment. This is built around the work of Deborah Willis and particularly her book, which I will show here—this book, just out last year, The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship.¹

This is also sponsored by the two new editors of the Civil War History journal, Jim Downs and Crystal Feimster. Jim is editor, Crystal, associate editor, having just taken over the journal a year or so ago. I must say that I go back with that journal further than I’d care to even admit. When I came into this profession in graduate school, that was a very important journal in my field. Everybody wanted to get published in it, do a book review in it, and so on. It had already been around then, I think, for a decade or two, so it’s a venerable old journal and it, over the years, has published some extremely important articles in this field, and not all about military history, I must say.

But under the new editorship, it is reaching out to an ever wider interdisciplinary kind of scholarship on the Civil War era. It is often said, virtually all of [End Page 397] us in this field now say, that the American Civil War period is a kind of second American Revolution. It was, and arguably one of its most, if not the most, revolutionary aspects were those Black Civil War soldiers, Black men, around 80 percent of them before the war was over, who were former slaves, with blue uniforms and muskets on their shoulders and cartridge boxes on their belts, who went to war for their own freedom, the freedom of their families, their people, and for the reinvention and transformation of the United States.

Roundtable participants, beginning in upper left corner: row 1 (left to right): Matthew Fox-Amato, Jim Downs, and Deborah Willis; row 2 (left to right): Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, GLC staff, and Cheryl Finley; row 3 (left to right): Ann M. Shumard, Nell Painter, and David Blight; row 4 (left to right): Daniel Vieria and Crystal Feimster.

It’s an extraordinary story, of course, and it has been documented over time by another revolution—and that’s the revolution of photography, and we’ve got a group of scholars of photography and art, and art history and of history, gathered here to discuss Deborah Willis’s book, but also this phenomenon of the Black Civil War soldier and the photographs of that era. Let me get right at it as quick as I can do these introductions. This is an extraordinary group of people. I could talk all day about them, but I won’t. Promise.

First is Deborah Willis, around whose book we built this. She’s a University Professor of photography and imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. She’s been a MacArthur Fellow, received all kinds of other fellowships over time. She’s the author of this book, The Black Civil War Soldier, and also the book Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present, and a host of other written works and exhibitions she has curated over time. Deborah, thank you for submitting your book to this collective review.² [End Page 398]

Then Jim Downs, who put this panel together with his colleague, Crystal Feimster. Jim is currently the Gilder Lehrman–NEH Professor of Civil War...

• 黛博拉·威利斯 (Deborah Willis) 的《黑人内战士兵》( The Black Civil War Soldier ) 冲突与公民的视觉历史圆桌讨论
• Jim Downs，主持人（简历），
  参与者：David W. Blight、Cheryl Finley、Matthew Fox-Amato、Sarah Elizabeth Lewis、Nell Painter、Ann M. Shumard 和 Deborah Willis

大卫布莱特：欢迎大家。我是大卫·布莱特。我是耶鲁大学 Gilder Lehrman 奴隶制和废除研究中心的主任。我们今天正在帮助举办这场关于内战摄影中黑人士兵的非凡活动。我稍后将介绍的小组是一个星光熠熠的小组，我应该说是一个大型小组，我稍后将介绍其成员。这是围绕黛博拉·威利斯的作品，特别是她的书，我将在这里展示的——这本书，去年刚出版，黑人内战士兵：冲突和公民的视觉历史。¹

这也是由内战历史杂志的两位新编辑吉姆唐斯和水晶费姆斯特赞助的。Jim 是编辑，Crystal，副主编，大约一年前刚刚接手该期刊。我必须说我回到那本杂志的时间比我愿意承认的还要远。当我在研究生院进入这个行业时，那是我所在领域非常重要的期刊。每个人都想在里面发表文章，在里面做书评，等等。我想，它当时已经存在一两年了，所以它是一本受人尊敬的老期刊，多年来，它在这个领域发表了一些极其重要的文章，而且我必须说，不仅仅是关于军事历史的文章。

但在新的编辑下，它正在向更广泛的内战时代跨学科学术研究。人们常说，现在这个领域的几乎所有[End Page 397]我们都说，美国内战时期是一种第二次美国革命。它是，可以说是它最具革命性的方面之一，即那些黑人内战士兵，黑人男子，其中大约 80% 在战争结束前是前奴隶，身穿蓝色制服和步枪他们肩负重担，腰带上挂着子弹盒，他们为自己的自由、家人和人民的自由以及美国的重塑和转型而战。

圆桌会议参与者，从左上角开始：第 1 行（从左到右）：Matthew Fox-Amato、Jim Downs 和 Deborah Willis；第 2 行（从左到右）：GLC 工作人员 Sarah Elizabeth Lewis 和 Cheryl Finley；第 3 行（从左到右）：Ann M. Shumard、Nell Painter 和 David Blight；第 4 行（从左到右）：Daniel Vieria 和 Crystal Feimster。

当然，这是一个非凡的故事，随着时间的推移，另一场革命已经记录了它——这就是摄影革命，我们有一群摄影和艺术、艺术史和历史学者聚集在这里讨论黛博拉威利斯的书，还有黑人内战士兵的这种现象和那个时代的照片。让我尽快做这些介绍。这是一群非凡的人。我可以整天谈论他们，但我不会。承诺。

首先是黛博拉·威利斯，我们围绕她的书制作了这本书。她是纽约大学蒂施艺术学院摄影和成像的大学教授。她一直是麦克阿瑟研究员，随着时间的推移获得了各种其他奖学金。她是《黑人内战士兵》这本书的作者，也是《摆美：从 1890 年代至今的非裔美国人形象》一书的作者，以及随着时间的推移她策划的许多其他书面作品和展览。黛博拉，感谢您将您的书提交给这次集体审查。² [结束第 398 页]

然后是 Jim Downs，他和他的同事 Crystal Feimster 一起制作了这个小组。吉姆目前是 Gilder Lehrman-NEH 内战教授……