Nathan Samoriski Named Recipient of 2017 Peter R. D'Agostino Prize

2017 Jun 27

The Department of History at Stonehill College is pleased to announce that Nathan P. Samoriski, of Victor, NY has been awarded the tenth annual Peter R. D'Agostino Prize for Excellence in History for his senior thesis, The Battle of the Bands: Music in the American Civil War, which was supervised by Prof. John C. Rodrigue.

Utilizing a wide array of primary and secondary source materials, Mr. Samoriski examines the many different meanings that the soldiers, both Union and Confederate, ascribed to popular music during the U.S. Civil War. Most of the previous scholarship on this topic emphasizes the "political" nature of Civil War era popular music, accentuating how music was used to articulate the conflicting goals of each side and to motivate the soldiers to fight and die for them. In addition to this politicized music, however, were songs that Mr. Samoriski describes as either "quasi-political" or "non-political." The former category, as his thesis shows, consisted of songs that were popular with both sides but for which the lyrics could be altered, as necessary, or that possessed political undertones but no explicit message and thus could be embraced by either side. The latter included songs that were devoid of political content and instead expressed ideas and sentiments--home, family, loved ones--to which soldiers on either side of the conflict could relate. By examining audio recordings and notated music, as well as the letters, diaries, and other writings of Civil War soldiers, Mr. Samoriski provides a deeply textured analysis of the meanings these soldiers gave to the songs they listened to and sang as they tried to come to terms with the experience of the Civil War. Mr. Samoriski's thesis also offers tantalizing evidence that Civil War music, the non-political songs in particular, anticipated what scholars have called the "reconciliationist" memory of the war, one in which white Americans of both sides, in the decades following the conflict, came to highlight the soldiers' heroism, sacrifice, and suffering over slavery, emancipation, and the struggle for racial justice.

The Peter R. D'Agostino Prize was created to honor the memory of Peter D'Agostino, a member of the Stonehill College History and Religious Studies Departments from 1995 to 2001, who died tragically in June 2005.