The first few months of the new year tend to be a time when people worldwide focus on reflection and renewal. Americans spend millions of dollars on gym memberships and organic foods to assist them in fulfilling their New Year’s resolutions. Chinese New Year’s traditions, which often fall in late January or early February, emphasize reconciliation and letting go of grudges in order to begin the new year peacefully.
Even we, as students, begin our new semesters with reflection and renewal when we adjust our study habits from the past semester, actually buy a few textbooks instead of relying solely on Wikipedia articles, and pledge that we will (hopefully) not get any grades below a B minus. The winter months of the new year provide an opportune time to think back and look forward, especially since there isn’t much else to do when the weather is as dreary as it has been for the past few days.
In my field, though, the focus on reflection is constant, regardless of the season. History might often seem like a vast collection of people’s names and particular dates, but when you get beyond what they teach you in your high school American history classes, history becomes more about the stories of the people living through events than the events themselves. An individual’s reminiscences often give a more enlightening description of the event than mere facts and dates can. While working in our library’s Special Collections department, I recently encountered the personal reflections of Thomas J. Walker, a native of Haywood County, Tenn. His “Reminiscences of the Civil War” is a 100-page handwritten narrative of his experiences fighting with the Confederate Army across the South, including in the famous Atlanta campaign that prompted Gen. William T. Sherman to burn the city to the ground. Walker’s writing, which covers several loose-leaf notebook pages and half of an old legal notepad in a loopy penciled scrawl, lends a voice to the famous war that is so often reduced to simply the dates of particular battles.
Throughout the narrative, he gives his often blunt opinions on soldiers fighting for the enemy and describes the everyday life of a Confederate soldier as well as how it felt to be actually engaged in battle. Without these personal descriptions of events like the Civil War, historians would be left with an incredibly weak understanding of the war aside from when and where specific battles were fought. We are able, through narratives like Walker’s, to understand why these soldiers fought in the war, what it felt like to be on the battlefield, and what happened to these individuals after the war was over. Without these individuals’ ability to reflect upon their experiences and articulate them for future audiences, our understanding of history would be very bare indeed.
My great-grandfather, Carlton Parrish Russell, was a colonel in World War II, and he, like Walker, wrote an autobiography detailing his experiences fighting with the Allies. He fought in the Battle of the Bulge, a battle that appeared briefly on my World War II timeline in my European history class. I knew little about the events surrounding the battle until I read his reflections and learned that his regiment was fighting SS troops, and many of the German soldiers were wearing Allied uniforms and driving Allied vehicles, making it difficult to determine who to shoot.
Furthermore, my great-grandfather emphasized in his writing the incredible difficulties experienced by the Belgian civilians, who faced “death and deprivation” from both the Germans and the Allies. We are often taught that the Battle of the Bulge was the largest and most deadly battle fought in World War II; what narratives like that of my great-grandfather’s teach us is that battles have profound effects on both soldiers and civilians, and that war is not always as black-and-white as it may appear in history books.
My great-grandfather’s autobiography, which is also in Special Collections, is of great personal value to myself and my family, as T. J. Walker’s narrative also was and is. It is fitting, in these months of reflection and renewal, to pay attention to the words of family members, famous men and women, or even ordinary individuals who feel the need to tell their stories. It is said that those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it, but through the stories of those who have gone before us, we are able to learn from their reflections and start a new story ourselves.
— Sarah Russell is a senior in history. She can be reached srusse22@utk.edu.
