Civil War 150! programs coming this spring

As one of three sites in the United States to receive an additional Civil War 150! programming grant, the library will host two Civil War themed programs funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Civil War 150! is a collaboration between The Library of America and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.

On Thursday, May 22 at 7:00 p.m. Dr. Elaine Frantz Parsons will discuss Women in the Civil War. Register to attend by emailing programs@ptlibrary.org or call 724.941.9430.

The Civil War reshaped cultural ideas of what it meant to be a woman. A small but influential group of northern women had launched a women's rights movement just a few years before the war's beginning: the war posed both challenges and opportunities for these reformers. Women’s rights advocates helped with the war effort, and used the war to make a case for further political, economic, and legal rights. The war disrupted traditional households, often allowing, or requiring, women to take on new roles. At the same time, the disruption of the war made many men and women, northern and southern, nostalgic for a return to traditional ways. Many freedpeople rushed to assume the domestic life that they had so long been denied. This talk explores the tensions between the reformist and traditionalist impulses.

Dr. Parsons is an Associate Professor of History at Duquesne 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. Her first book Manhood Lost: Fallen Drunkards and Redeeming Women in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002) explores the social meanings of saloon violence. She is currently completing a book about the Ku Klux Klan, Constructing the Ku Klux: The Ku Klux Klan and the Modernization of the Reconstruction-Era South. She is the recipient of a Harry Frank Guggenheim Fellowship for the study of violence in culture.

On Thursday, June 19 at 7:00 p.m. Dr. Faith Barrett will discuss American Poetry and the Civil War. Dr. Barrett is an Associate Professor of English at Duquesne University. Register to attend by emailing programs@ptlibrary.org or call 724.941.9430.