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Columns::January 22, 2002
Reaching out: Strategic plan for campus diversity efforts drafted
Bob Boehmer to coordinate strategic planning, assessment
Undergrad apprentice program introduces freshmen to research
Social work professor pens book about civil rights ‘foot soldier’
Held in high (self) esteem
Ethics at the edges
Campus Closeup
Kudos
Vet medicine holds annual white-coat ceremony
Common Concerns
Campus News
Civil War scholar will deliver Charter Lecture
By Larry B. Dendy
ldendy@arches.uga.edu
James M. McPherson, whose voluminous scholarship helped spawn renewed interest in the Civil War by focusing on the human drama and tragedy of the conflict, will deliver the spring Charter Lecture Jan. 24.
McPherson is author of more than a dozen books, including Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era, which won the 1989 Pulitzer Prize. He will speak at 4 p.m. in the Chapel. His talk, entitled “The Problem of Peace in the Midst of War, 1863-1865,” is open free to the public.
Regarded as one of America’s foremost Civil War scholars, McPherson has also written more than 100 articles, reviews and book chapters and is editor or co-editor of 12 books or series. In 2000, he held the prestigious Jefferson Lectureship in the Humanities, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Many scholars consider Battle Cry of Freedom the best one-volume history of the Civil War ever published. McPherson went beyond the traditional approach of analyzing the political and economic causes of the war and the battlefield strategies, and put a human face on the conflict by examining its effects on society in both the North and South.
The book, which sold more than 600,000 copies and was translated into French and German, also won the Best Book Award from the American Military Institute. It is credited with kindling public interest in the Civil War and setting the stage for--among other things--the success of Ken Burns’s 1990 PBS documentary The Civil War, for which McPherson was an adviser.
Another of McPherson’s books, For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War, is based on the letters and diaries of 25,000 Union and Confederate soldiers. The book won the 1998 Lincoln Prize.
Other books have focused on African Americans in the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln’s involvement in the war, the Reconstruction era and the abolitionist movement. McPherson and artist Mort Kunstler produced two volumes, titled Gettsyburg and Images of the Civil War, that feature Kunstler’s paintings with text by McPherson.
In a profile prepared by the National Endowment for the Humanities, McPherson says the nation remains fascinated with the Civil War because the burning issues that sparked the war remain relevant today.
“Even though the war resolved the issues of Union and slavery, it didn’t entirely resolve the issues that underlay those two questions,” he says. “These issues are still important in American society today: regionalism, resentment of centralized government, debates about how powerful the national government ought to be and what role it ought to play in people’s lives.”
McPherson is a strong advocate for preservation of Civil War historic sites. He was on the Civil War Sites Advisory Committee created by Congress in 1991 to assess the status of Civil War battlefields. The committee reported that more than a third of the nation’s major battlefields “are either lost or are hanging onto existence by the slenderest of threads.”
He also served on the boards of the Civil War Trust and the Preservation of Civil War Sites--two groups that helped save some 10,000 acres of battlefield land in 15 states before they merged in 1999 to form the Civil War Preservation Trust.
McPherson is the George Henry Davis 1986 Professor of American History at Princeton University, where he has been on the faculty since 1962. He was the Commonwealth Fund Lecturer in American history at University College in London, England, in 1982.
He has been a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, a Danforth Fellow and a Guggenheim Fellow, and has received three fellowships to spend a year conducting research at the Huntington Library.
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