“Remembering and Forgetting the American Civil War”

In the summer of 2015, following the horrific shootings at Charleston, South Carolina, debates about the place of the Confederate battle flag raged throughout the South. Calls for Confederate monuments to be razed – or at least moved – followed as did cries for street names bearing Confederate names to be changed. And then there was Charlottesville in 2017, which ended in more bloodshed and the loss of three lives. But why does the Civil War continue to elicit such reactions – some intensely violent – more than a century and a half after its close? In this lecture, Professor Janney will examine the long history of Civil War memory, of the efforts by Union and Confederate veterans alongside their respective civilians to both remember and forget aspects of the war in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Caroline E. Janney is the John L. Nau III Professor of the American Civil War and Director of the John L. Nau Center for Civil War History at the College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences at the University of Virginia. She is the author of Burying the Dead but Not the Past: Ladies’ Memorial Associations and the Lost Cause (2008) and Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation (2013). She co-edited with Gary W. Gallagher Cold Harbor to the Crater: The End of the Overland Campaign (2015) and edited Petersburg to Appomattox: The End of the War in Virginia (2018). She serves as a co-editor of the University of North Carolina Press’s Civil War America Series and is the past president of the Society of Civil War Historians.

Admission includes a complimentary cocktail reception in the Saybrook Room of the Yale Club. Admission is free for members and $15.00 for non-members. Members may purchase a maximum of two tickets at the member rate. Not a member yet? Join today!

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