Here, have a soldier
February 6, 2014
George Karn. Who are you? Where are you from, when did you live and how did you die? Is there anyone alive today who calls you a relative? Or are you one of the many names of the many people who have walked this Earth and then pass, leaving little mark upon it? I will find you. I will recount your story of service and injury if possible, I will trace your ancestry to a modern man and tell him of your heroism.
The files provided will open some doors to your life story. I hope to find others as well. But is this merely Genealogy? Where I trace your lineage through a family tree and account for names and names and names? Will I discover the people and places you called family and home? Or will I uncover your Biography; where I walk in your shoes and take years of my own life writing about yours? Were you significant? Did you cross paths with anyone who was? In which case I will write a Micro-history and write of your impact upon a bigger part of our Nation’s past based on the the accounts of your travels, service, combat injury, and origination. I will not fall into the traps of Taxonomy when I speak of you Mr. Karn. You are not just a hero, or a villain, victim or citizen at war. You are all of those things and a farmer too. A boy from Michigan. A young man who agreed to fight for what he believed in.
Robert Kohn says we need more of a “social history of American soldiers”, we need to abandon stereotypes or else every soldier “will remain as anonymous as the unknown soldier at Arlington National Cemetery”. And Jason Phillips states,
“Civil War soldiers were more than heroes, victims, villains, race warriors, and citizens. They were individuals from diverse places who formed enormous armies bursting with local colors and scents, myriad accents, and internal rivalries”.
I think this is a beautiful statement. Generalizing pasteurizes our knowledge of individuals and therefore erases their uniqueness and individuality. And who am I without that?
One more note on the reading, I especially liked Jill Lapore’s comparison of biographers and micro historians: the former treat its subject with love and admiration while the latter treats those they study unsympathetically as devices.