2023 Fortenbaugh Speaker

The State of Civil War Military History

This year’s Fortenbaugh panel is made up of three eminent scholars who are supremely well positioned to explore the state of Civil War military history.

Craig Symonds

Craig L. Symonds is Professor of History Emeritus at the United States Naval Academy, where he taught for thirty years and served as chair of the History Department. From 2017 to 2020, he was the Ernest J. King Distinguished Professor of Maritime History at the U.S. Naval War College, in Newport, Rhode Island. Symonds was awarded the Pritzker Museum Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Writing of Military History in 2023, and is a recipient of the Naval Historical Association’s Dudley W. Knox Award for Lifetime Achievement. He is the author of seventeen books, including Lincoln and His Admirals, winner of the 2009 Lincoln Prize; The Civil War at Sea; Stonewall of the West: Patrick Cleburne and the Civil War; and Joseph E. Johnston: A Civil War Biography. His most recent book, Nimitz at War, was published in 2022.  

An image of Lorien Foote

Lorien Foote is the Patricia & Bookman Peters Professor in History at Texas A&M University. She is the author of four books, editor of three volumes, and writer of numerous articles and essays on the cultural, intellectual, and military history of the American Civil War. Of her works, Rites of Retaliation: Civilization, Soldiers, and Campaigns in the American Civil War (2021) was awarded the Organization of American Historians Civil War and Reconstruction Book Award; The Yankee Plague: Escaped Union Prisoners and the Collapse of the Confederacy (2016), was a 2017 Choice Outstanding Academic Title; and The Gentlemen and the Roughs: Manhood, Honor, and Violence in the Union Army (2010), was a finalist and Honorable Mention for the 2011 Lincoln Prize. She is the co-editor, with Earl J. Hess, of The Oxford Handbook of the American Civil War, and the creator and principal investigator of a digital humanities project, Fugitive Federals, that maps the escape and movement of 3000 Federal prisoners of war. The project includes contributions from undergraduate researchers at four universities.

An image of Jennifer Murray

Jennifer M. Murray is a Teaching Associate Professor in the Department of History at Oklahoma State University. She is the author of On A Great Battlefield: The Making, Management, and Memory of Gettysburg National Military Park, 1933-2013, published by the University of Tennessee Press in 2014 and released for a second edition in 2023. Murray is currently working on a full-length biography of George Meade, tentatively titled Meade at War: The Military Life of George Gordon Meade and is co-editor of the forthcoming, “They Are Dead, And Yet They Live”: Civil War Memories in a Polarized America, published with the University of Nebraska Press. She is a veteran speaker at Civil War symposiums and roundtables across the country, and in addition to delivering hundreds of Civil War battlefield tours, has led World War I and World War II study abroad trips to Europe.  Murray worked as a National Park Service seasonal interpretive park ranger at Gettysburg National Military Park for nine summers (2002-2010).