By: W. Joseph Campbell
The 2022-23 Joseph McKerns grant of $1,250 helped me gain momentum on an emergent research project that examines the aftermath of the battle of Gettysburg from varying perspectives, including that of erroneous and exaggerated news reporting. My papers delivered at AJHA conferences in 2022 and 2023, respectively, addressed elements of this research. I was deeply honored that both received the David Sloan award for best faculty paper.
More specifically, the McKerns grant helped finance research trips from my home in suburban Washington, DC, to Columbia University in New York, where I examined a collection of papers of Peter Wellington Alexander, a leading Confederate reporter. Alexander's dispatches after the Battle of Gettysburg figure prominently in the emergent project. In fact, my 2022 AJHA paper, “Proto-pack Journalism in Gettysburg’s Aftermath: Parsing the Extravagant Claims of the Confederacy’s ‘Greatest’ War Correspondent,” focused on Alexander's erroneous reporting. The paper also won the AJHA Eberhard award.
In addition, the McKerns grant helped cover expenses related to my separate trip to Philadelphia and the Pennsylvania Historical Society, which has an extensive collection of the papers of George Gordon Meade, commander of the Federal Army of the Potomac at Gettysburg and afterward. .jpg "Image of letter written by George Gordon Meade in 1864")
The image below shows a letter that Meade wrote in 1864. The Meade papers were useful, primary-source material for my 2023 AJHA paper, which debunked the notion that Northern war correspondents organized and pursued a news boycott of Meade after he ordered the humiliation and expulsion of a Philadelphia Inquirer journalist who reporting angered the general. The paper, “Interrogating A Conspiracy: About That Civil War Press Boycott of General Meade,” also won the Eberhard award.
Additionally, the grant was helpful in covering local transportation costs related to a visit to the Library of Congress, where I examined microfilm holdings of Civil War era newspapers, some content of which was incorporated in the “Interrogating A Conspiracy" paper.
