Education /
Morning Lecture Platform
Week Three — July 7-July 13, 2013
America, 1863
As our country continues its sesquicentennial commemoration of the American Civil War, Chautauqua presents a weeklong series of lectures examining the war’s legacy in the context of a most pivotal year in United States history. Catherine Clinton, chair in U.S. history at Queen’s University Belfast and a consultant on Stephen Spielberg’s 2012 film “Lincoln,” will open the week Monday with a lecture setting the scene of America in 1863 politically, culturally and geographically. Time magazine editor-at-large David Von Drehle, author of Rise to Greatness: Abraham Lincoln and America’s Most Perilous Year, speaks Tuesday on the legacy of our 16th president. Gary W. Gallagher, a Civil War military historian and professor at the University of Virginia, delivers Wednesday’s address on the gritty details of how this war was fought. Harvard professor of American legal history Annette Gordon-Reed, author of Andrew Johnson, will speak Thursday on the legacy of the Emancipation Proclamation and the state of the abolitionist movement. Joan Waugh, professor of history at UCLA, ends the week with a Friday lecture on how the events of 1863 and the actions of a forward-thinking Union still inform our politics and culture today.
Confirmed Lecturers
Monday 7/8 |
Tuesday 7/9 |
Wednesday 7/10 |
Thursday 7/11 |
Friday 7/12 |
Catherine Clinton
|
David Von Drehle |
Gary W. Gallagher |
Annette Gordon-Reed |
Joan Waugh |
Monday–Friday, July 8–12 @ 10:45 a.m.
Monday, July 8
Catherine Clinton
professor of U.S. history, Queen’s University Belfast
Catherine Clinton holds a chair in U.S. history at Queen’s University Belfast. She has taught at Harvard University in the departments of History and of Afro American Studies, and held visiting chairs at the University of Richmond, the Citadel and the City University of New York, and the Mark Clark Chair of History at the Citadel. In 2012, she delivered the Fleming Lectures at Louisiana State University.
Clinton recently served as a consultant for Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln” and the documentary “Rebel!,” the story of Loreta Janeta Velasquez, an Hispanic woman from New Orleans who disguised herself as a man and fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War. Clinton has published more than a dozen books, including The Plantation Mistress: Woman's World in the Old South, Mrs. Lincoln: A Life and Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom, which was named as one of the best nonfiction books of 2004 by The Christian Science Monitor and the Chicago Tribune.
A member of the Screen Writer’s Guild, Clinton has also written for The History Channel. She serves on advisory councils for Civil War History, Ford's Theatre and Civil War Times, and was a member of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Bicentennial Commission. She is a graduate of Harvard, Sussex and Princeton
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Tuesday, July 9
David Von Drehle
author, Rise to Greatness: Abraham Lincoln and America’s Most Perilous Year editor-at-large, Time magazine
David Von Drehle is the author of four books, including the forthcoming Rise to Greatness: Abraham Lincoln and America’s Most Perilous Year. His acclaimed best-seller Triangle: The Fire That Changed America has been called “social history at its best” by The New York Times.
Von Drehle is an editor-at-large for Time magazine, where he has written many of the most important cover stories of the past six years, from the Supreme Court’s health care decision to the death of Osama bin Laden. His essay on the 2008 Time Person of the Year, Barack Obama, anchored the best-selling issue in the history of Time’s most famous franchise. His work has been featured on a wide variety of television and radio programs, including “Today,” “NBC Nightly News,” “PBS NewsHour” and “Morning Edition.”
Prior to joining Time, Von Drehle was a senior writer and editor at The Washington Post, where he covered national politics and led the paper’s renowned features and culture section, Style. His work for the Post has been collected in a number of anthologies, including America’s Best Newspaper Writing. Von Drehle received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Denver and a Master of Letters degree from Oxford.
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Wednesday, July 10
Gary W. Gallagher
John L. Nau III Professor in the History of the American Civil War, University of Virginia
Gary W. Gallagher is the John L. Nau III Professor in the History of the American Civil War at the University of Virginia. He is the author or editor of more than 30 books, including The Confederate War; Lee and His Generals in War and Memory; The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History; Causes Won, Lost, and Forgotten: How Hollywood and Popular Art Shape What We Know About the Civil War; and The Union War. He also appeared regularly on the A&E series “Civil War Journal.”
Gallagher has delivered the Brose Lectures in Civil War History at Penn State University, the Robert Fortenbaugh Memorial Lecture at Gettysburg College and the Lamar Lectures at Mercer University. He was the recipient of the Cavaliers’ Distinguished Teaching Professorship, the highest teaching award conveyed by the University of Virginia, for 2010–2012.
Active in the field of historic preservation, Gallagher has served as president of the Association for the Preservation of Civil War Sites and as a member of the board of the Civil War Trust. He has given testimony about preservation before Congressional committees on several occasions. A graduate of Adams State College of Colorado, Gallagher received his master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of Texas at Austin.
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Thursday, July 11
Annette Gordon-Reed
Charles Warren Professtor of American Legal History, Harvard Law School
Annette Gordon-Reed is the Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History at Harvard Law School, the Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and a professor of history at Harvard University. For her book The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family — a 2009 selection of the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle — Gordon-Reed won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize in History and the 2008 National Book Award for Non-Fiction. She was the first black person to win the Pulitzer Prize in History and the first black female to win the National Book Award in the Non-Fiction category.
Gordon-Reed’s other published works include the groundbreaking Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy; Vernon Can Read: A Memoir; Race on Trial: Law and Justice in American History; and, most recently, Andrew Johnson, a short biography of America’s 17th president.
Gordon-Reed was awarded a 2009 National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama, and was named a MacArthur “Genius” Fellow in 2010. Among her other honors are a Guggenheim Fellowship in the Humanities and a fellowship from the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for er for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Gordon-Reed is a graduate of Harvard Law School and Dartmouth College.
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Friday, July 12
Joan Waugh
professor of history, UCLA
A professor in the Department of History at UCLA, her alma mater, Joan Waugh researches and writes about 19th-century America, specializing in the Civil War, Reconstruction and Gilded Age eras. Her many essays and books on Civil War topics include the prize-winning U.S. Grant: American Hero, American Myth. Other works include Unsentimental Reformer: The Life of Josephine Shaw Lowell; Civil War and Reconstruction, 1856 to 1859; The Memory of the Civil War in American Culture; and Wars Within A War: Controversy and Conflict Over the American Civil War.
Waugh is a recipient of Huntington Library, National Endowment for the Humanities and Gilder-Lehrman fellowships, and has been interviewed for many documentaries, including the PBS series “American Experience,” on Ulysses S. Grant, and the History Channel’s production of “Lee and Grant.” She has also written op-eds on current controversies regarding Civil War issues for media outlets such as The Los Angeles Times and Salon.
Waugh delivered the 50th Annual Robert Fortenbaugh Memorial Lecture at Gettysburg College and the Joanna Dunlap Cowden Memorial Lecture at California State University, Chico. She has been honored with four teaching prizes, including UCLA’s most prestigious teaching honor, the Distinguished Teaching Award, and has led several battlefield trips for Southern California history teachers and for UCLA students.
