Georgia Historical Society

Visiting Scholars
Speakers and course readings have been selected to engage participants in rigorous review of some of the best recent scholarship on the Civil War and are intended to inform their understanding of the themes presented in the Seminar. These distinguished scholars will discuss their books with us and guide our group dialogue on the War's causes, participants, and consequences.  We've invited three of the nation's leading Civil War scholars to be part of our workshop:

David Blight is the Class of 1954 Professor of American History at Yale University and director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale.  His book Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory received eight book awards, including the Lincoln Prize, the Bancroft Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize. He has many other published works, including his most recent, A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Narratives of Emancipation. He is a frequent book reviewer for the Washington Post Book World, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, and other newspapers, and appears frequently on documentaries and historical panels like this one. Please welcome David Blight.

Chandra Manning is an assistant professor of history at Georgetown University and is the author of What this Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War, for which she received the 2008 Lincoln Prize Honorable Mention. Manning's research and writing focuses on 19th century United States history with an emphasis on the growing sectional tensions of the antebellum period, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. She is a graduate of Mount Holyoke College, received an M.Phil. from the National University of Ireland, Galway, and earned her Ph.D. at Harvard University.

Elizabeth Brown Pryor is a Senior Diplomat with the American Foreign Service and the author of two books about the Civil War era, Clara Barton: Professional Angel, considered the definitive biography of the pioneering nurse, educator, and Red Cross organizer, and Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee through His Private Letters, for which she won the Lincoln Prize in 2008. Pryor received an undergraduate degree in history from Northwestern University & the University of London, and an M.A. in history from the University of Pennsylvania. She worked for 5 years as a historian with the National Park Service before entering the diplomatic service. Working in the U.S. Foreign Service, she has served in a variety of posts, including the U.S. Embassy in Madrid, the U.S. embassy in South Africa, served as a Senior Negotiator on the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe, as Director for Arms Control on the National Security Council, as well as posts in Sarajevo and the U.S. Mission to NATO.