Featured series 
Tag: Civil War
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Nation & World
Celebrating the humanities
If scholars were celebrities, life might look a little bit like it does on the day of the annual Jefferson Lecture (May 2), with interviews and toasts in anticipation not of a concert or play but a speech on the humanities.
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Nation & World
Secret identity
Michael Fosberg learned of his African-American roots as an adult, and will tell his story at Harvard on April 6 in his one-man play “Incognito.”
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Nation & World
Unraveling Reconstruction
Professor sifts post-Civil War writings for societal clues that give context to a troubled time in American life.
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Nation & World
Attention!
War is an unpredictable, nonlinear interplay of policy and strategy, Adm. Mike Mullen said in a Harvard talk, and “sense and adjust” is the way to proceed.
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Nation & World
Suffering, through an Asian lens
Several Asian scholars and historians gathered at the Faculty Club Nov. 5 to discuss the cultures of suffering produced by war and tragedy, as shown in the book “This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War,” by Harvard President Drew Faust.
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Nation & World
David Herbert Donald
At a Meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on October 5, 2010, the Minute honoring the life and service of the late David Herbert Donald, Charles Warren Professor of American History and Professor of American Civilization Emeritus, was placed upon the records. Donald was an influential scholar of American history and noted biographer…
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Nation & World
Leading the way
In a series of profiles, Gazette writers showcase some of these stellar graduates, including Lahiru Jayatilaka, who as a young computer whiz learned a lasting lesson about the importance of precision.
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Nation & World
Photographic memory
By a roundabout route, Robin Kelsey became an authority on photography, eventually becoming a professor in the field at Harvard.
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Nation & World
HDS and the Civil War scholar
Harvard President Drew Faust served as guest lecturer for a Harvard Divinity School class, where she discussed her most recent book.
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Nation & World
As the Civil War finally ends, a relieved, sad, graduation day
The Commencement of 1865 and the day of commemoration that followed it hold a unique spot in Harvard history. Though some military actions were still taking place, the Civil War had essentially ended in April of that year. John Langdon Sibley, head librarian at Harvard, wrote in his diary that there had already been a…
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Nation & World
Seceding from the secessionists
Deep in Civil War Mississippi, where manicured plantations gave way to wild swampland and thick pine forests, a young white man named Newton Knight led a ragtag band of guerilla fighters against the Confederate Army. His story is one of personal bravery and unwillingness to adhere to the secessionist movement that all but surrounded him.
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Nation & World
President Faust named American Historian Laureate
Louise Mirrer, president and CEO of the New-York Historical Society, has announced that Drew Faust, Harvard’s president and Lincoln Professor of History, will receive the society’s fourth annual American History Book Prize for “This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War.”
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Nation & World
Poetry, music, death take the stage at New College Theatre
John Adams ’69, A.M. ’72 returned to Harvard on Nov. 17, where he attended a performance of his piece by Harvard’s Bach Society Orchestra (a group he led in the 1960s) at the New College Theatre.
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Nation & World
Probing an unlikely friendship
Theirs was an unlikely friendship. One man was a black abolitionist, orator, and journalist who had been a slave from Maryland, the other a white politician from the backwoods of Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois.
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Nation & World
Exploring tangled legacy of slavery
Certain adages exist about historical repetition: those who don’t remember the past are doomed to repeat it, for example, or history doesn’t repeat itself but it does rhyme. Walter Johnson doesn’t necessary believe in these old chestnuts, but he does see how the past and the present can illuminate one another in order to provide…
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Nation & World
Africans, ‘Africanness,’ and the Soviets
It’s no secret that a century and a half after the Civil War, the United States still struggles to come to terms with the legacy of African slavery.
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Nation & World
Scholar looks at abiding interest in the ‘Great American Novel’
Literary critics tend to discredit the concept of a “Great American Novel” as nothing more than media hype — an arbitrary appellation that has more to do with pipe dreams than merit. And yet, what would-be author hasn’t imagined, when putting pen to paper, what it would feel like to be hailed as the greatest…
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Nation & World
Borderless America
Sometimes what we call something changes the way we see it. Steven Hahn wants to call the groups of escaped slaves who found refuge in the northern United States prior to the Civil War “maroon communities.”
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Nation & World
Provocative Civil War exhibit at Fogg to coincide with inauguration
An exhibition opens at the Fogg Art Museum this Saturday (Oct. 6) that will have lots of people talking.
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Nation & World
Notorious U.S. Supreme Court decision is revisited
Dred Scott. You don’t have to be a lawyer or historian to have that name conjure up feelings of horror and injustice.