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Associate Professor Bridget Ford

• April 4, 2016

裸聊直播 Associate Professor Bridget Ford hopes to inspire people to look to the past in approaching the current unrest in the United States. Her book, “Bonds of Union,” explores the unselfish efforts of many during the Civil War to bridge divides despite their differences. According to Ford and other historians, many of the lessons from that era could be relevant, useful strategies in dealing with the issues that plague society today.

Ford focused her study on an unusually divided region of the country at the time — the Ohio and Kentucky borderlands — where religious, racial, and political violence was pervasive.

“Bridget Ford’s new book offers an account of struggles for community in the face of diversity,” said Robert Gross, American historian and professor of early American history at the University of Connecticut. “In the crucial borderland of the Ohio River Valley during the decades leading up to the Civil War, settlers of the new cities of Louisville and Cincinnati managed to accommodate differences of origin, faith, and race, to learn from and imitate one another, and to forge precarious ‘bonds of union.’”

Ford, who studies 19th century United States history and teaches about the Civil War, said her classroom discussions at 裸聊直播 made it clear many people don’t have an understanding of what the term, “union” meant during the Civil War era. Recovering the meaning of this idea is the inspiration behind “Bonds of Union.”

“‘Union’ has a strange air to it to people today,” Ford said. “People don’t necessarily recognize that it did represent something about national identity and the country. It meant much more to people of that era. ‘Union’ was a really rich term and we’ve completely lost the sense of what it means.”

To reclaim what the word implied more than 150 years ago and what we can learn from it today, Ford spent years researching original sources — including newspapers, manuscript church records, speeches, and antislavery literature — produced between 1830 and 1865.

Ford visited churches in Ohio and Kentucky to examine archives of African-American history from the Civil War era. Until recently, such sources often were not collected in local or state libraries. According to Ford, black churches have carefully preserved their critical histories, and these sources offer entirely different perspectives on our national history. Ford said she came away from her research with an admiration for the people of the 19th century — Americans of different faiths, ethnicities and politics who worked incredibly hard to find common ground and solutions to the issues vexing the country.

“They wrote. They talked. They went to meetings with an energy that we will never match, even with our social media,” Ford said. “In this world of ‘union,’ government and community were combined into one — they weren’t seen as antithetical entities always opposed to each other.” 

“This is a story remarkably pertinent to the present,” Gross added. “In the polarized atmosphere of the United States today, with Americans rapidly retreating into communities of the like-minded, speaking only to one another and demonizing others outside their circles, it is well-worth looking back at the world of the mid-nineteenth century and reflecting on how previous generations found ways to coexist and to share connections as fellow citizens.”

While Ford doesn’t think “union” will ever again be popular as a word, she hopes readers can learn from what it meant and find value in it today, as the country remains divided in many ways.

“Americans have the capacity to discover and study and figure out where they overlap, where they connect, where they feel a common bond,” Ford said. “I think often we get very scared that we are slipping apart from one another and need to remember the United States has a long history of figuring out how to work against divisive forces and hold things together.”