Consider the Rebel Yell  – The Dispatch

What did the 1960s sound like? You might imagine Bob Dylan, the Beatles, the Beach Boys. But what about the 1860s, when commercial records weren’t yet available? In this weekend’s American Artifacts, historian Dixie Dillon Lane traces the history of the “Rebel Yell,” a howl—or a screech, or a scream—sometimes released by Confederate soldiers as they attacked their enemies. Elsewhere in this newsletter, you’ll find a story suggestion and book review by yours truly, recommendations from Dispatch managing editor Wendy Lane Cook, and a Work of the Week submitted by Dispatch member Reed Benet. 

On the site today, we have contributing writer Alan Jacobs on A.J. Liebling, who served as war correspondent for The New Yorker during World War II. “The emotional complexity of war—for both the soldiers themselves and the people on the home front—is something Liebling describes with, I think, unmatched precision and vividness,” Jacobs writes. “But he’s precise and vivid about everything.” 

We also have contributing writer Katherine Dee on GIRLS®, a much-anticipated nonfiction book by British Gen Z whisperer Freya India. “The biggest question GIRLS® never answers is what India knows about the internet that any thoughtful person with a smartphone does not,” Dee writes. “Parents looking for an explanation of why their daughters are depressed won’t find much.” 

Finally, for this week’s Where I’m From, we have Michelle Van Loon of Des Plaines, Illinois, who lived there as a child and recently returned—50 years later. “When I remove the ill-fitting lenses of nostalgia, what I see in hindsight was that though Des Plaines left me with some happy memories, it was also a place marked by a sense of existential loneliness that was a function of its cookie-cutter sameness,” Van Loon writes. 

Aye-yai-yai-yai-yai-yai-yai! 

This is what I, an American historian, have always hollered at my students when discussing that most blood-curdling of battle cries, the Confederate “Rebel Yell.” I yell this particular “aye-yai-yai” at them both because it’s fun to do unexpected things and because they definitely need to be woken up a bit about the realities of what they’re studying. The American Civil War can seem romantic to teens and young adults, and they sometimes can be tempted to dismiss the suffering it entailed. They need something to shock them out of their daydreams, to bring home the point that war is, in the words of my veteran godfather, actually “a very personal and very terrible memory.” And the Rebel Yell is personal and terrible as well.

I also yell it this way, however, because “aye-yai-yai-yai-yai-yai-yai” is a direct quote I read once from a Yankee who wrote it out phonetically in his journal. This young soldier had just survived a surprise attack by Confederates who screamed the cry as they pounced upon him and his messmates as they made their morning coffee over a campfire. This same fellow also later enclosed a lock of hair cut from the head of a dead “Johnny Reb” in a letter home to his family. So we see that war is “very personal and very terrible” all around.

A few years ago, however, a recording of several Confederate veterans giving the Rebel Yell in the 1930s changed the way I taught it. In the video, a rhythmic group yell is first attempted. Next, each of the gray-clad ancients steps forward and performs the yell individually for a delighted crowd. The context is about as far from battle as one can get—it’s an occasion highly shaped by purpose and memory, at a time when the nation was purposefully remaking the war’s memory. There is laughing, cheering, and who knows what else going on underneath it all. But most of all, there is the yell: hooting, hawing, trilling, undulating, yipping, and in absolutely no way at all resembling an “aye-yai-yai.”

How to explain it? The problem is, nobody today really knows what the Rebel Yell sounded like, although we do know that it had many versions even during wartime. So while “aye-yai-yai” it truly may have been to our terrorized, barbering Yankee—it may have been something else to someone else. (Walter Ong might have had something to say about that.)

Sound also changes across place and time. Does a crowd in any given region or time period yell—or does it roar, or perhaps shriek? What does applause sound like in different contexts, and how would you know without cultural knowledge of these? Does the wind outside my window tonight sound like it would have 200 years ago? And if I try to recreate the sound of my late mother’s voice, will it be anything like hers was at all?

What were those veterans remembering? Is it what was actually so?

Probably all we know about the sound of the Rebel Yell is a little bit false and a little bit true. Surely what comes out of a man as he charges his enemy is not easy to write down or recreate later. But sound creates context, and context creates understanding, and so students ought to hear and think about and consider historical sounds. We may think we know what sounds are, just as we may think we understand people. But often enough, we’re only being close-minded.

Now, when I teach about the Civil War, I tell the story of the “aye-yai-yai,” and then I also play the video. What would it be like to hear that when you were making coffee one morning? I ask my students. And what do you think you actually might have heard? That is a great starting point for understanding both history and humanity.

One advantage of living in New York City is that the literary culture is very rich. Last weekend, I had the opportunity to attend a launch party for “Steak Zine”—that is, a steak-themed issue of a food-focused magazine usually known as Cake Zine. Held in a steakhouse in the Lower East Side, the party provided a low-lit smattering of readings from all sorts of authors, and offered free dessert (mousse-filled lemons) to boot. (Afterward, my associate and I went out for burgers, which seemed only appropriate.) The zine came in the form of a tiny tome with the marbled pattern of wagyu beef and contained short fiction and essays, my favorite of which was written by a former plant-based meat scientist who develops a taste for the real stuff. 

“Our cushy ‘professional development budgets’ and travel per diems were spent on steakhouses and ‘bromakase,’ typically frequented by a richer corporate echelon,” the author writes. “Even PTO abroad was recounted with egotistical reportage of the flesh qualities of kangaroo (minerally, like Chablis), pufferfish (as crisp as a pearl), and snake (exhilaratingly toothsome). In the name of our noble mission, we all silently developed a justifiable, testosteronal compulsion to consume as much Real Meat as we could.” 

The Butter Book, by Amanda Stockwell. Published March 17, 2026. 

So far in this newsletter, we haven’t recommended any cookbooks, but following former New York Times writer Jennifer Steinhauer’s masterful Dispatch essay from March on why cookbooks are anything but bygone, we’re trying something new today. Which brings me to The Butter Book, by New York-based food writer and recipe developer Amanda Stockwell. 

Part of the draw of The Butter Book is undoubtedly how it looks: It has a jacket reminiscent of wax paper, as though the book were a stick of butter itself. But inside, you’ll also find essays on the history and use of butter, as well as recipes in which butter is a crucial ingredient. For example, the book describes the earliest discoverers of butter, likely nomads around 8000 B.C. who, after carrying animal skin pouches full of milk, might have realized that the butterfat and buttermilk separated after long periods of agitation. (Given the current viral trend of running to churn butter, this book was seemingly published at the perfect time.) We also learn about different members of the butter family: cultured butter, sweet cream butter, and Irish butter, as well as various types of compound butter with flavors like garlic, raspberry and thyme, and miso-orange. 

The book is certainly different from other, more serious novels and historical accounts we’ve recommended before, so if you’re looking for something to place next to your box set of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Stockwell’s book probably shouldn’t be your first choice. Still, something light is sometimes nice, and if you want to get out of your head and into the real world—and into your kitchen—Stockwell’s book might help with that task. Beyond having excellent taste in food, after all, she also communicates a simple wonder at the versatility of a food we might take for granted: 

By Wendy Lane Cook, deputy managing editor

Living in the city is convenient, exciting—and noisy. The trade-off for living close to a Metro station in Northern Virginia is … living close to a Metro station. From my house, I can hear the sounds of Metro trains zipping along beginning at 5 a.m., clanking freight trains at all hours, and even Amtrak. All the rail traffic plus a nearby fire station means earplugs are a must for sleeping, but the big foam plugs from the drug store never stayed in my ears through the night. Enter the Loop Dream earplugs. These sleek silicone plugs are comfy to wear, designed to follow the shape of your ears, and fit snugly. I’ve had mine for about four months and they’ve proven to be a good investment.

I first encountered these L.L. Bean shoes while touring colleges in New England, and to my 17-year-old self they represented the kind of nonchalant cool I associated with the students at the schools I visited. No one at my public high school in Texas wore these plain brown lace-up moccasins with red-and-gold laces threaded through silver-tone eyelets, so naturally I had to have a pair. They were my go-to casual shoes for the rest of high school, well into college, and beyond—laces knotted, not tied, and never worn with socks. First introduced by L.L. Bean in 1926, according to the retailer’s website, Bluchers remained a men’s staple in the company’s catalogs but they fell victim to the whims of fashion over decades and the women’s version disappeared—until this spring. The 2026 Bluchers are not exact duplicates of the shoes I had (alas, the sole is a slightly different color), but they are close enough to evoke a satisfying degree of nostalgia.

No, not those small security cameras people mount near their front doors. These are cameras used by ornithologists at known nesting sites to observe birds, often raptors, as they lay eggs, incubate them, and raise their hatchlings. I’ve gotten hooked on watching several of these feeds this spring, following the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, which posts highlights on social media. Starring barred owls, red-tailed hawks, ospreys, and kestrels in locations from Austin, Texas, to Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, the nest cam action unfolds slowly, over a span of months as the females sit on their eggs for four weeks or so. In the case of a red-tailed hawk the Cornell Lab folks call Big Red, her mate Arthur will take over incubation duties while Big Red goes in search of prey. It’s remarkable to see these fierce-looking birds tend to their clutch of eggs so diligently, all in preparation for the first signs of a pip, when the eggs start to hatch; the stakes get higher from there as the raptor hatchlings demand a steady supply of fresh meat. But things don’t always end happily. Nest cam viewers recently witnessed a great horned owl struggle to get food for her weeks-old owlets as her mate stopped visiting, and she abandoned the nest entirely after one owlet died (the surviving owlet is thriving in the care of wildlife rehabilitators). However the nest cam sagas ultimately end, I view them as a testament to the renewal of spring, the importance of teamwork in raising offspring, and the payoff that comes from nurturing the young. 

Work: Michelangelo, Grazie, by Ben Benet, 2025

Why I’m a Dispatch member: The Dispatch family makes me feel like I’m not the crazy one in this seemingly so crazy world seemingly so populated by crazy people, and The Dispatch has gotten me from describing myself as a “recovering Republican” to (as once said during a podcast) a “moderately right of center Libertarian.”

Why I chose this work: Ben is a highly talented artist in many ways in terms of styles, materials, subject matters, etc. His artistic meditation on Michelangelo’s near touch of G-d and Adam on the Sistine Chapel ceiling is made out of used lottery scratchers, and I find it sublime and even near divine. But I am fascinated by such an effect on me—and I assume it might be the same on The Dispatch’s “dear listeners”—because it uses and speaks to the ephemeral, transitory, brief, and the chance and hope and disappointment-ridden and even the sublime moments … of life.