Beyond Buffum: Readings for Further Discussion

Contemporary Veterans

C. J. Chivers, "The Fighter," New York Times Magazine. A Marine veteran of the war in Afghanistan is convicted of assault after a night of blackout drinking. It is only after his wartime journal is discovered that the legal system begins to understand how his stateside actions were related to his overseas service.

Brandon Heffinger, "The Things They Still Carry," The News & Observer. The Wake Forest Veterans Legal Clinic confronts a "cruel Catch-22" for veterans who cannot obtain treatment for PTSD because of the symptoms they present.

Mac McClelland, "Is PTSD Contagious?," Mother Jones. What does it mean for military families when veterans bring the war home with them? How do we assess the impact on spouses and children? How do these modern stories make us reflect on Buffum's family, about whom we know very little?

Patrick A. Lewis, "To 'Serve this Long Term at Home," Nursing Clio. What did it mean for Robert Buffum to wake up from nightmares about prisons to find himself in yet another cell? What does it mean for contemporary veterans to come back to the communities they joined the military to escape?

Kentucky Resources

Patrick J. Ward, Fatal Drug Overdoses in the Kentucky Military and Veteran Population, 2010-2015 (Lexington: Kentucky Injury Prevention and Research Center, 2017). The age-adjusted fatal overdose rate among Kentucky veterans increased 89% from 2010 to 2015. The most common class of drugs used was prescription opioids.

University of Kentucky, Julie Cerel principal investigator, Suicide Bereavement in Veterans and Military Families, Military Suicide Research Consortium.

VA Medical Center, Louisville, Lora L. Johnson principal investigator, Studying Group Therapy for Suicidal Veterans, Military Suicide Research Consortium.

Paul Coomes, et al., The Economic Importance of Military Activity in Kentucky, 2016 update, Kentucky Commission on Military Affairs.

Civil War Pensions

Peter David Blanck and Michael Millender, "Before Disability Civil Rights: Civil War Pensions and the Politics of Disability in America" Alabama Law Review 52, no. 1 (Fall 2000): 1-50.

Peter Blanck, “Civil War Pensions and Disability,” Ohio State Law Journal 62 (2001): 109-238.

Civil War Disability and Mental Health

Eric T. Dean, Jr., Shook over Hell: Post-Traumatic Stress, Vietnam, and the Civil War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).

Sarah Handley-Cousins, "'Wrestling at the Gates of Death': Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain and Nonvisible Disability in the Post-Civil War North" Journal of the Civil War Era 6, no. 2 (June 2016): 220-42.

Brian Matthew Jordan, Marching Home: Union Veterans and Their Unending Civil War (New York: W. W. Norton, 2016).

Brian Craig Miller, Empty Sleeves: Amputation in the Civil War South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015).

David Silkenat, Moments of Despair: Suicide, Divorce, and Debt in Civil War Era North Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).

Diane Miller Sommerville, "'A Burden Too Heavy to Bear': War Trauma, Suicide, and Confederate Soldiers" Civil War History 59, no. 4 (Dec. 2013): 453-91.

Kathleen Logothetis Thompson, "Researching Mental Trauma in the Civil War," AHA Today, September 2, 2015.