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.
Gary W. Gallagher is the John L. Nau III Professor in the History of the American Civil War Emeritus and former Director of the John L. Nau III Center for Civil War History at the University of Virginia. He is the author or editor of more than forty books, including The Confederate War (Harvard University Press, 1997), Lee and His Generals in War and Memory (Louisiana State University Press, 1998), The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History (co-edited with Alan T. Nolan, Indiana University Press, 2000), Causes Won, Lost, and Forgotten: How Hollywood and Popular Art Shape What We Know About the Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 2008), The Union War (Harvard University Press, 2011), Becoming Confederates: Paths to a New National Loyalty (University of Georgia Press, 2013), and The American War: A History of the Civil War Era (co-authored with Joan Waugh, Spielvogel Books, 2015; third edition 2023). He has served as editor of two book series at the University of North Carolina Press ("Civil War America," with more than 115 titles date, and “Military Campaigns of the Civil War,” with 10 titles) and appeared regularly on the Arts and Entertainment Network's series "Civil War Journal" as well as participating in more than five dozen other television projects in the field.
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.
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).