The 61st annual Robert Fortenbaugh Memorial Lecture (November 19, 2023) will break from tradition by featuring three speakers instead of one, pivoting from a lecture to a more conversational roundtable format. Craig Symonds (United States Naval Academy); Lorien Foote (Texas A&M University); and Jennifer Murray (Oklahoma State University) will come together to explore The State of Civil War Military History. Peter Carmichael, Robert C. Fluhrer Professor of Civil War Studies and Director of the Civil War Institute, will moderate. The program will begin at 7:00 pm at the Majestic Theater (25 Carlisle Street, Gettysburg); free tickets can be obtained from the Majestic box office at 717-337-8200. The lecture will be live streamed through the CWI YouTube channel.
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.
Lorien Foote is the Patricia & Bookman Peters Professor in History at Texas A&M University, and the author of four books, including The Yankee Plague: Escaped Union Prisoners and the Collapse of the Confederacy and The Gentlemen and the Roughs: Manhood, Honor, and Violence in the Union Army, which was a finalist and Honorable Mention for the 2011 Lincoln Prize. Her most recent book, Rites of Retaliation: Civilization, Soldiers, and Campaigns in the American Civil War, was awarded the Organization of American Historians Civil War and Reconstruction Book Award. Professor Foote is also the creator and principal investigator of a digital humanities project, Fugitive Federals, that maps the escape and movement of 3000 Federal prisoners of war.
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 worked as a National Park Service seasonal interpretive park ranger at Gettysburg National Military Park for nine summers (2002-2010).
The Robert Fortenbaugh Memorial Lecture is presented each year on November 19, the anniversary of the Gettysburg Address. The goal of the lecture is to speak to the literate general public without abandoning solid scholarly moorings.