By Admin, BuyLocalBG.com, BuyLocalBg@gmail.com/
Thursday, October 13th, 2011 9:00 AM CST
Tonight, the Institute for Civil War Studies and the Department of History at Western Kentucky University are proud to host the First Annual Civil War Lecture. The lecture will take place at 7:00 p.m. in the auditorium of Gary A. Ransdell Hall on campus. The inaugural lecture will be delivered by Michael Vorenberg, Associate Professor of History at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. His topic will be “American by War: The People and Their Nations during the Civil War.” The lecture will offer a preview of Professor Vorenberg’s forthcoming book on how the Civil War influenced modern definitions and perceptions of U.S. citizenship. Admission to the lecture is free, and the public is invited to attend.
Professor Vorenberg received his A.B. and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard University. After receiving his Ph.D., Professor Vorenberg was a postdoctoral fellow at the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard, and then an Assistant Professor of History at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He began teaching at Brown University in 1999, became the Vartan Gregorian Assistant Professor in 2002, and was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2004.
His first book, Final Freedom: The Civil War, the Abolition of Slavery, and the Thirteenth Amendment was published by Cambridge University Press in 2001 and was a Finalist for the Lincoln Prize. He is also the author of The Emancipation Proclamation: A Brief History with Documents, forthcoming from Bedford Books/St. Martin’s. Currently, he is at work on a book about the impact of the Civil War on American citizenship.
That project has received funding from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Antiquarian Society, and Brown University’s Cogut Center for the Humanities Institute. He has published numerous essays and articles on topics ranging from Lincoln’s plans for the colonization of African Americans to the meaning of rights and privileges under the Fourteenth Amendment.
From 2004 to 2007, Professor Vorenberg was a member of Brown University’s Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice. He currently is a member of the Advisory Committee of the United States Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial and is on the Board of Editors of Law and History Review. He lives in Barrington, Rhode Island, with his wife and daughter.
The Bowling Green Civil War Round Table has moved its meeting date from the third Thursday of the month to the second Thursday in order to take advantage of Professor Vorenberg’s lecture; the BG CWRT will convene at the lecture for its official October gathering. Civil War enthusiasts and reenactors in the Bowling Green area will be interested in this important presentation by one of the country’s leading experts on the war, Abraham Lincoln, and the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution.
The Institute for Civil War Studies was established by the Department of History at Western Kentucky University for the purpose of promoting scholarship on Civil War topics of all kinds, including military, political, and social subjects. Its emphasis is on the study of the Civil War in the Western Theater (west of the Appalachian Mountains) and particularly on how the war played out in Kentucky. The First Annual Civil War Lecture focuses on a broader theme: Union and Confederate citizenship during the war era, and how our understanding of the rights of citizens has been shaped by the war and its aftermath.
