Please mark your calendars for the Humanities and World Cultures Institute Open House and First Semi-Annual Faculty Colloquium, featuring Dr. Lorien Foote (Department of History). Dr. Foote will discuss her research, Conduct Unbecoming an Officer and a Gentleman: Honor and Justice in the American Civil War (see abstract below). Dr. Jim Deitrick, Director of the Humanities and World Cultures Institute, will also briefly report on recent activities of the Institute, future plans, and opportunities for faculty involvement in its programs. Refreshments will be served.

April 18, 2008
3:00-4:30 pm
BBA 205

"Conduct Unbecoming an Officer and a Gentleman: Honor and Justice in the American Civil War"

Abstract

During the American Civil War, northerners believed that victory depended on the manhood of the volunteers and conscripts who composed the Union Army. The millions of men who lived and fought together in this vast army soon realized that there was no consensus about what it meant to be a man. Army life exposed in a very unsettling fashion the conflicts between northern men over how to define the attributes essential to manhood and how to recognize manliness in other men.

One of the contested attributes of manhood in the North was honor. While all men agreed that a man should possess honor, there was no longer a shared definition of the concept. During this presentation, I will examine the different conceptions of honor in the nineteenth-century North and demonstrate the problems that honor created for the military justice system during the Civil War.