Yale panel to discuss Civil War legacy after 150 years

Five influential writers on the Civil War and Emancipation will convene at Yale March 29 to discuss the conflict’s legacy over the last 150 years.

Viewers may watch this event live online at http://www.livestream.com/yale. It will also be broadcast on C-SPAN.

The free and public event takes place at Linsly-Chittenden Hall (LC), 63 High St., Rm. 102, at 4:30 p.m.

Titled “The American Civil War: Legacies for Our Own Time,” the event is the 2012 David Brion Davis Lecture sponsored by Yale’s Gilder-Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance & Abolition, and is moderated by the center’s director, David W. Blight. The panel includes:

Gary Gallagher, professor of history at the University of Virginia. He is a preeminent military-social historian of the Civil War, and author of “The Confederate War” and “The Union War,” among other notable books.

Stephanie McCurry, professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the most recent winner of the Frederick Douglass Book Prize for her book, “Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates is senior editor for The Atlantic, where he writes about culture, politics, and social issues for TheAtlantic.com and the magazine.  He is author of the memoir, “The Beautiful Struggle.”

Andrew Delbanco, professor of American Studies at Columbia University, is a preeminent American literary historian of the 19^th century  and author of “Melville: His World and Work”; “The Death of Satan: How America Lost the Sense of Evil”; and the forthcoming “The Abolitionist Imagination.”

John Fabian Witt, the Allen H. Duffy Class of 1960 Professor of Law and professor of history at Yale Law School. Witt is the author of “Patriots and Cosmopolitans: Hidden Histories of American Law” and “ The Accidental Republic: Crippled Workingmen, Destitute Widows, and the Remaking of American Law.”

Blight is the author of “Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory” and “American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era.”

Recent books by panel participants will be available for purchase. 

For more information, call 203-432-3339 or visit the Gilder-Lehrman Center website.