George and Ann RichardsCivil War Era Center

“Too Soon? Is it Time Already to Consider What the Civil War Sesquicentennial Can Tell Us About Our Past and Present?”

Ari Kelman will discuss the nation’s effort to grapple with the lingering impact of the Civil War around the 150th anniversary of the conflict.

The first lecture, on Thursday, is titled “‘Disunion’: What the Paper of Record Taught Us About the Civil War.”

Ari Kelman is Chancellor’s Leadership Professor of History and Faculty Advisor to the Chancellor and Provost at the University of California, Davis.  He is the author, most recently, of Battle Lines: A Graphic History of the Civil War (Hill and Wang, 2015), as well as A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling Over the Memory of Sand Creek (Harvard University Press, 2013), recipient of several national awards and honors, including the Bancroft Prize, and A River and Its City:  The Nature of Landscape in New Orleans (University of California Press, 2003), which won the Abbott Lowell Cummings Prize.  Kelman’s essays and articles have appeared in Slate, The New York Times, The Nation, The Times Literary Supplement, The Journal of American History, Reviews in American History, and many other publications. Kelman has contributed to outreach endeavors aimed at K-12 educators, and to public history projects, including documentary films for the History Channel and PBS’s American Experience series.  He has received many grants and fellowships, including from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Huntington Library; served on a variety of editorial boards, program and prize committees; and held several administrative posts.  He is now working on a book titled, For Liberty and Empire: How the Civil War Bled into the Indian Wars and editing the journal Reviews in American History.