My name is Robert Matthew Brangan, I was born January 9th, 1998 during a thunderstorm in Elkins, West Virginia but thankfully I’ve spent most of my life in the beautiful state of Vermont. I am a Secondary Education and History major here at KSC. I inherited a love of history from my father and my favorite topics include Rome, Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, US-Native Relations, and basically anything from the 19th century. My other interests include lifting weights, chess, reading, and long walks/drives.

“Imagine a great segmented body moving in contractions and dilations at a rate of twelve to or fifteen miles a day. A creature of a hundred thousand feet. It is tubular in its being and tentacled to the roads and bridges over which it travels. It sends out as antennae its men on horses. It consumes everything in its path. It is an immense organism, this army, with a small brain. That would be General Sherman, whom I have never seen.” This is how a character in E.L. Doctorow’s historical novel The March describes the eponymous campaign(s) undertaken by Union General William T. Sherman in the last months of 1864 and the first of 1865. These destructive campaigns through the heartlands of the Confederacy were intended to destroy the Confederate’s will and ability to wage the war. Significant due to their early use of “total war” style strategy which would come to define warfare in the 20th century, Sherman’s March is a wildly interesting piece of Civil War history. I Intend to study the short and long term effects these campaigns had on the South.