During the American Civil War an estimated 194,000 Union soldiers and 214,000 Confederate soldiers became prisoners of war. No prior or subsequent American conflict has seen such numbers. During the Second World War, approximately 124,000 Americans were held captive, but the chance of being captured in that conflict was roughly one in one hundred; during the Civil War it was closer to one in five. Captivity was not a marginal experience. It was central to the war.

Indeed, the gigantic scale of prisoner-of-war camps was one of the conflict’s most consequential innovations. Every modern war since has produced successors to Andersonville, Point Lookout, Rock Island, and Florence. Yet prisoner-of-war camps remain oddly peripheral in our narratives of the Civil War, overlooked both as institutional innovations and as formative experiences for soldiers and their families. My guest, W. Fitzhugh Brundage, argues in A Fate Worse Than Hell: American Prisoners of the Civil War that captivity reshaped military policy, political rhetoric, racial attitudes, and postwar memory. Prison camps were not aberrations; they were integral to the modernizing logic of total war.

For more on the guest, show notes, sources, and related episodes, go to the Historically Thinking Substack at www.historicallythinking.org

Introduction - 0:00

Historical Treatment of POWs - 2:35

Parole System and Napoleonic Wars - 4:47

Scale and Logistics of Civil War Prisons - 7:42

Lincoln's Dilemma: Sovereignty vs Prisoner Exchange - 10:56

Andersonville: Conditions and the Deadline - 31:48

Point Lookout and Union Prisons - 47:25

Prison Society and Community - 57:45

Black Prisoners of War - 65:33

Elmira Prison and John W. Jones - 82:11

Lutherans are a strange denomination in American religious history and culture. For Catholics they are certainly Protestants. For Protestants they are crypto-Catholics. While they have been around since the Swedes established their short-lived colony on the Delaware River, they have typically received as much attention in the American imagination as the short-lived Swedish colony on the Delaware River.

But my guest Timothy D. Grundmeier has a different point of view. He argues in his new book Lutheranism and American Culture: The Making of a Distinctive Faith that Lutheranism was a central component of nineteenth-century American religion and of the era of the Civil War. This is because Lutherans were numerous, the nation’s fourth largest denomination by 1900; they were uniquely positioned in the American religious landscape; and they almost invariably expressed the opinion of the “moderate majority” in Union states outside the Northeast. And, as with every other aspect of American society, Lutheranism was reshaped by the struggle of the Civil War, and Reconstruction.

Timothy D. Grundmeier is professor of history at Martin Luther College in New Ulm, Minnesota. Lutheranism and American Culture is his first book.

Chapters

00:00:00 - Introduction

00:02:60 - What is Lutheranism?

00:06:21 - The Civil War Era Defined

00:09:01 - Three Varieties of American Lutheranism

00:19:44 - The Old Lutherans and Missouri Synod

00:27:38 - How the Civil War Fractured Lutheranism

00:39:36 - The Slavery Debate: Walter and the Norwegians

00:47:20 - Lutheran Quietism After the Civil War

00:52:38 - The Great Lutheran Realignment

01:02:35 - Ideas, Institutions, and Cultural Context

The two hundred and eighty years between the death of the philosopher Confucius and the reign of the first Emperor of China saw one of the most profound revolutions in human history. Not only did it end with the creation of an imperial rule that persisted through successive dynasties for 2,132 years, but it also saw the creation of “new traditions of thought and practice…great monuments of art, literature, and philosophy…that still inform social life in our own lifetime.” The era of the “warring states”, as scholars call it, was critical not just for China or East Asia, “but to that of humanity writ large.”

Yet this era remains almost unknown in the English-speaking world. “If one enters any bookstore…in search of a book about classical Athens, the conquestions of Alexander, or the early Roman Republic,” writes my guest Andrew Meyer, “one will have many options. But if one looks for such a book about the corresponding period in early Chinese history, there are none. I wrote this book to fill that gap.”

Andrew Seth Meyer is Professor of History at Brooklyn College. A specialist in the intellectual history of early China, he is the author of The Dao of the Military: Liu An's Art of War and co-author of The Huainanzi: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Government in Early Han China. His latest book is To Rule All under Heaven: A History of Classical China, from Confucius to the First Emperor, which is the subject of our conversation today.

Chapters

0:35 - Book Overview & Historical Context

4:47 - Dating the Warring States Period

8:42 - What Are the Warring States?

11:08 - Social Structure & Aristocracy

18:39 - Rivers & Regional Differences

24:45 - Military Power & Wealth

31:37 - Four Great Questions: State Models

40:51 - Centralization vs Regional Autonomy

51:26 - Education & Intellectuals