It’s hard to believe I haven’t posted anything for over four years, when so much has happened! I loved my time as Associate Director of the Imaging Research Center, a position I held from January 2017 to August 2020. I spent a lot of time writing and doing strategic planning and working on various aspects of Visualizing Early Baltimore, especially Slave Streets, Free Streets.

In 2018, the memoir that I co-edited was published. The Perfect Scout:  A Soldier’s Memoir of the Great March to the Sea and the Campaign of the Carolinas reads like a dime novel, full of adventures and mishaps, and is a great complement to Through the Heart of Dixie.

I’ve been spending the 2020-2021 academic year working on a research project about food and famine in the Civil War-era South.

I’m very excited to announce that as of January 2017, I am the Associate Director of the Imaging Research Center at UMBC.  I loved working with them on my Sherman project and on their amazing site Visualizing Early Baltimore.  I’ll be there half-time, working on strategic planning and digital humanities, among many other things.  It’s great to get back to my digital roots!

Thanks to the generous support of UMBC’s Hrabowski Fund for Innovation, I was able to teach a new class during Spring 2015.  History undergraduate and Masters degree students worked with undergraduates in the Game Development program (under the direction of Dr. Marc Olano) to build an on-line game about the 1861 Pratt Street Riots, arguably the site of the first blood shed in the American Civil War.

The full game is still being finished by the game development students, but in the meantime you can see the interactive text games built by the history students at replayingthepast.wordpress.com.

I had a great conversation with Rich Fisher of Studio Tulsa when I was in Oklahoma.  The podcast can be found here:

http://publicradiotulsa.org/post/through-heart-dixie-shermans-march-and-american-memory

My piece about Sherman’s March in South Carolina, “Towns Made for Burning” was published in the New York Times Disunion  blog on March 1.  The comments are fascinating!

More talks about Through the Heart of Dixie and Sherman’s March planned for the Spring:

• January 23:  “Stories of Sherman’s March” at the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga
• February 12:  The National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh
• February 17:  Columbia Burning:  A Sesquicentennial Reappraisal, Columbia, SC
• February 26:  Two Talks at the University of Maryland, College Park
  • “Justifiable Destruction?: Sherman, the March, and the Laws of War,” for the Nathan and Jeanette Miller Center for Historical Studies, 12pm
  • “Stories of Sherman’s March,” for the Local Americanists Group, English Department, 4pm
• April 1:  Tulsa Community College Civil War Sesquicentennial Symposium
• April 16:  Bowdoin College

I had a great conversation a few weeks ago with Ed Linenethal of the Journal of American History about Sherman’s March, Through the Heart of Dixie and Mapping Memory.  You can listen to the podcast here.

And I was also interviewed by Dave Thomson of the Civil War Monitor for their “Behind the Lines” podcast.

The Wall Street Journal loves Through the Heart of Dixie.  It’s included in a list of the seven best Civil War Books to give for the holidays.

What a great way to kick-off the anniversary of Sherman’s March:  Through the Heart of Dixie is reviewed in today’s Wall Street Journal.  Favorably, I might add, although they do have some typos in the on-line version.  It’s behind a paywall, so here’s a PDF:

Book Review: ‘Through the Heart of Dixie’ by Anne Sarah Rubin – WSJ – WSJ

Phil Gast, who blogs at The Civil War Picket, appoached me about answering some questions about Sherman’s March.  My responses, along with those of several other historians, park rangers, and reenactors, can be found here:

Part 1:  Myths and Realities

Part 2:  Places to Visit

Part 3:  The Legacy