Campus Battlefield takes that fight to our nation’s college campuses, where the left’s decades-long campaign to transform our universities into radical re-education camps is working, and now we are seeing the disastrous results. Free speech, intellectually rigorous debate, and the simple concepts of tolerance and fairness are routinely being corrupted and weaponized to promote radical leftist ideologies, enforce groupthink, and marginalize or eliminate any student, professor, and dean who gets in their way. All the while, these hothouses of close-mindedness are staffed by blame-America, anti-free market, victimology professors who are twisting the minds of tomorrow’s leaders.

This document describes and analyzes alternatives for the management and use of Palo Alto Battlefield National Historic Site, in order to assess the impacts of implementing each alternative, and to provide the public with an opportunity to comment.

An incisive examination of how pundits and politicians manufactured the campus free speech crisis--and created a genuine challenge to academic freedom in the process. If we listen to the politicians and pundits, college campuses have become fiercely ideological spaces where students unthinkingly endorse a liberal orthodoxy and forcibly silence anyone who dares to disagree. These commentators lament the demise of free speech and academic freedom. But what is really happening on college campuses? Campus Misinformation shows how misinformation about colleges and universities has proliferated in recent years, with potentially dangerous results. Popular but highly misleading claims about a so-called free speech crisis and a lack of intellectual diversity on college campuses emerged in the mid-2010s and continue to shape public discourse about higher education across party lines. Such disingenuous claims impede constructive deliberation about higher learning while normalizing suspect ideas about First Amendment freedoms and democratic participation. Taking a non-partisan approach, Bradford Vivian argues that reporting on campus culture has grossly exaggerated the importance and representativeness of a small number of isolated events; misleadingly advocated for an artificial parity between liberals and conservatives as true viewpoint diversity; mischaracterized the use of trigger warnings and safe spaces; and purposefully confused critique and protest with censorship and "cancel culture." Organizations and think tanks generate pseudoscientific data to support this discourse, then advocate for free speech in highly specific ways that actually limit speech in general. In the name of free speech and viewpoint diversity, we now see restrictions on the right to protest and laws banning certain books, theories, and subjects from schools. By deconstructing the political and rhetorical development of the free speech crisis, Vivian not only provides a powerful corrective to contemporary views of higher education, but provides a blueprint for readers to identify and challenge misleading language--and to understand the true threats to our freedoms.

Of the more than seventy sites associated with the Civil War era that the National Park Service manages, none hold more national appeal and recognition than Gettysburg National Military Park. Welcoming more than one million visitors annually from across the nation and around the world, the National Park Service at Gettysburg holds the enormous responsibility of preserving the war’s “hallowed ground” and educating the public, not only on the battle, but also about the Civil War as the nation’s defining moment. Although historians and enthusiasts continually add to the shelves of Gettysburg scholarship, they have paid only minimal attention to the battlefield itself and the process of preserving, interpreting, and remembering the bloodiest battle of the Civil War. In On a Great Battlefield, Jennifer M. Murray provides a critical perspective to Gettysburg historiography by offering an in-depth exploration of the national military park and how the Gettysburg battlefield has evolved since the National Park Service acquired the site in August 1933. As Murray reveals, the history of the Gettysburg battlefield underscores the complexity of preserving and interpreting a historic landscape. After a short overview of early efforts to preserve the battlefield by the Gettysburg Battlefield Memorial Association (1864–1895) and the United States War Department (1895–1933), Murray chronicles the administration of the National Park Service and the multitude of external factors—including the Great Depression, the New Deal, World War II, the Civil War Centennial, and recent sesquicentennial celebrations—that influenced operations and molded Americans’ understanding of the battle and its history. Haphazard landscape practices, promotion of tourism, encouragement of recreational pursuits, ill-defined policies of preserving cultural resources, and the inevitable turnover of administrators guided by very different preservation values regularly influenced the direction of the park and the presentation of the Civil War’s popular memory. By highlighting the complicated nexus between preservation, tourism, popular culture, interpretation, and memory, On a Great Battlefield provides a unique perspective on the Mecca of Civil War landscapes. Jennifer M. Murray, assistant professor of history at the University of Virginia’s College at Wise, is the author of The Civil War Begins. Her articles have appeared in Civil War History, Civil War Times, and Civil War Times Illustrated.

How American campus life shapes students, and how students shape campus lore

Decades after the Civil War’s end, Confederate veteran John Alexander Stikeleather reflected on his experiences as a soldier in the 4th North Carolina Infantry. He had served in many engagements during his four years of service, but there was one in particular that Stikeleather believed should “never be forgotten”: Cool Spring. While largely overlooked or treated as a footnote to Gen. Jubal A. Early’s raid on Washington in the summer of 1864, the fight at Cool Spring, which one soldier characterized as “a sharp and obstinate affair,” proved critical to Washington’s immediate safety. The virtually unknown combat became a transformative moment for those who fought along the banks of the Shenandoah River in what ultimately became the war’s largest and bloodiest engagement in Clarke County, Virginia. The Blood-Tinted Waters of the Shenandoah examines Gen. Horatio Wright’s pursuit of Jubal Early into the Shenandoah and the clash on July 17–18, 1864. It analyzes the decisions of leaders on both sides, explores the environment’s impact on the battle, and investigates how the combat impacted the soldiers and their families—in its immediate aftermath and for decades thereafter. Years of archival research—including an investigation into the backgrounds of the Union and Confederate soldiers who perished in the fighting—coupled with intimate knowledge of the battlefield helps preserve the memory of the fight that should “never be forgotten.” Author Jonathan Noyalas’s study offers not only a history of an overlooked engagement in the oft-contested Shenandoah Valley, but—as Pulitzer Prize finalist Brian Matthew Jordan notes in the book’s Foreword—“a keen reminder that Civil War battles are rich laboratories in which to observe the human experience in all its complexity.”

Hip-Hop Culture in College Students' Lives explores how diverse groups of young adults embody hip-hop culture and actively connect it to their lives on college campuses.

James Meredith broke the color barrier in 1962 as the first African American student at Ole Miss. The violent riot that followed would be one of the most deadly clashes of the civil rights era, seriously wounding scores of U.S. Marshals and killing two civilians, and forcing the federal government to send thousands of soldiers to restore the peace. In The Battle of Ole Miss: Civil Rights v. States' Rights, Frank Lambert--who was a student at Ole Miss at the time and witnessed many of these events--provides an engaging narrative of the tumultuous period surrounding Meredith's arrival at the University of Mississippi. Written from the unique perspective of a student, Lambert explores the riot and its aftermath, examining why James Meredith deemed it important enough to risk his life in order to enter Ole Miss and why scores of white students resisted Meredith's enrollment. Lambert captures the complex and confused reactions of the students--most of whom had never given race a second thought--and many of whom were not averse to Meredith attending Ole Miss. In examining this single incident, Lambert illuminates the broader themes of social and cultural fault lines, Mississippi race relations, the fight for racial justice, and the political realignment that transformed the south. Part of the Critical Historical Encounters series, The Battle of Ole Miss: Civil Rights v. States' Rights is an ideal supplement for undergraduate U.S. Survey courses and courses in African American History, Civil Rights, the U.S. Since 1945, and the 1960s.