The Forrest W. Clonts Lecture: Dr. Ari Kelman, “A Bloodless Revolution: How the Civil War Sesquicentennial Helped Recast Public Memory”

Dr. Kelman is Chancellor’s Leadership Professor of History 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 UP, 2013), recipient of several national awards and honors, including the Bancroft Prize.

Dr. Kelman will deliver a talk entitled “‘A Bloodless Revolution’: How the Civil War Sesquicentennial Helped Recast Public Memory.” He will discuss three high-profile public history projects that played out during the 150th anniversary of the Civil War: The New York Times’s “Disunion” series, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s writing at The Atlantic, and the National Park Service’s effort to establish a Reconstruction Era Historical Park. Kelman will suggest that these projects helped to recast the way the Civil War is remembered, bringing insights from the academy to the public and opening up a broader and more inclusive story of the conflict’s causes and consequences.