Field trip to Gettysburg

The legacies and tensions of the American Civil War (1861-65) continue to undergird current US society. The fundamental issues that saw eleven Southern states attempt to separate from the union – about race, slavery, the ideas of liberty, equality, government, and more – still haunt the American nation. This research trip grant will allow me to conduct follow-up ethnographic fieldwork to supplement and complete a larger study on the present-day meanings of the civil war I have been working on since 2010. This visit, placed in the weeks surrounding the crucial US mid-term elections in November, will round off my on-site data collection and form the basis of a book on how the conflicts of the past inform the conflicts of the present in contemporary America.