"Making Sense of the Civil War" program filled within a week!

Peters Township Public Library will host a five-part reading and discussion series which will focus on making sense of the American Civil War. The library is one of more than 150 sites throughout the country that will host the reading and discussion series, a 2012 project of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Library Association. Additional support in Pennsylvania is provided by the Pennsylvania Humanities Council. Registrations for the program opened on January 9 and quickly filled within a week.

Peters Township Public Library is one of four Pennsylvania libraries chosen to partner with Pennsylvania Humanities Council. Readings selected for the program will provide a glimpse of the vast sweep and profound breadth of Americans’ war among and against themselves, and include:
• March by Geraldine Brooks
• Crossroads of Freedom: Antietam by James McPherson
• America’s Wars: Talking about the Civil War and Emancipation of Their 150th Anniversaries, a forthcoming anthology of historical fiction, speeches, diaries, memoirs, biography, and short stories, edited by national project scholar Edward L. Ayers.

Program books are provided to participants through funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, American Library Association and through the Pennsylvania Humanities Council for Peters Township Public Library participants.

Dr. Elaine Parsons, Civil War scholar and Associate Professor of History at Duquesne University, will lead all five discussion sessions. Dr. Parsons received her PhD at Johns Hopkins University. Her work focuses on social movements and popular culture in the nineteenth-century United States, with a focus on the Civil War and Reconstruction eras. She is currently completing a book about the Ku Klux Klan, entitled “Constructing the Kuklux: The Ku Klux Klan and the Modernization of the Reconstruction-Era South.” Dr. Parsons is the recipient of a Harry Frank Guggenheim Fellowship for the study of violence in culture.