Chris Mackowski, Ph.D., Saturday Presenter & Field Tour Guide

Chris Mackowski, Ph.D., is the editor-in-chief and co-founder of Emerging Civil War and the series editor of the award-winning Emerging Civil War Series, published by Savas Beatie. Chris is a writing professor in the Jandoli School of Communication at St. Bonaventure University in Allegany, NY, where he also serves as associate dean for undergraduate programs. Chris is also historian-in-residence at Stevenson Ridge, a historic property on the Spotsylvania battlefield in central Virginia. He has worked as a historian for the National Park Service at Fredericksburg & Spotsylvania National Military Park, where he gives tours at four major Civil War battlefields (Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Wilderness, and Spotsylvania), as well as at the building where Stonewall Jackson died.

Chris has authored or co-authored nearly two dozen books and edited a half-dozen essay collections on the Civil War, and his articles have appeared in all the major Civil War magazines. Chris serves on the board of directors for the Central Virginia Battlefields Trust and on the advisory board of the Civil War Roundtable Congress and the Brunswick (NC) Civil War Roundtable—the largest in the country. He is also a member of the Antietam Institute and the U. S. Grant Homestead Association. In 2023, he was honored with the Houston Civil War Round Table’s Frank Vandiver Award and also selected as the Copie Hill Fellow at the American Battlefield Trust.

Kris White – Saturday Presenter & Field Tour Guide

Kris is the Director of Education and Events at the American Battlefield Trust. White is a graduate of Norwich University with an M.A. in Military History and California University of Pennsylvania with a B.A. in History. He served as a ranger-historian at Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park. He has also served the Penn-Trafford Recreation Board as a historian and as a continuing education instructor for the Community College of Allegheny County. In 2008, Kris successfully passed the Licensed Battlefield Guide Exam at Gettysburg. White is the co-founder and chief historian of Emerging Civil War and co-creator of the Emerging Civil War Series. An award-winning speaker and editor, White has authored, co-authored, or edited more than two dozen books and numerous articles, covering a wide range of topics from the Seven Years War to the World Wars. A frequent fixture on battlefields around the world, he leads and coordinates tours and staff rides in the United States and Europe.

George Rable – Saturday Evening Keynote Speaker

George C. Rable is Professor Emeritus and formerly the Charles G. Summersell Chair in Southern History at the University of Alabama (1998-2016). Born in Lima, Ohio, in 1950, he received his B.A from Bluffton College (1972), his M.A from Louisiana State University (1973), and his Ph.D. from Louisiana State University (1978) where he studied under T. Harry Williams. He taught at Anderson University in Indiana from 1979-1998. From 2004-2008, he served as the President of the Society of Civil War Historians. His books include: Damn Yankees! Demonization and Defiance in the Confederate South (Louisiana State University Press, 2015), which won the James I. Robertson, Jr. Literary Prize. God’s Almost Chosen Peoples: A Religious History of the American Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 2010), which won the Jefferson Davis Award and was a Choice Outstanding Academic Title; Fredericksburg! Fredericksburg! (University of North Carolina Press, 2002), which won the Lincoln Prize, the Society for Military History Distinguished Book Award in American Military History, the Jefferson Davis Award, the Douglas Southall Freeman History Award and was a History Book Club selection; The Confederate Republic:  A Revolution Against Politics (University of North Carolina Press, 1994), which was a History Book Club selection; Civil Wars:  Women and the Crisis of Southern Nationalism (University of Illinois Press, 1989), which won the Julia Cherry Spruill Prize and the Jefferson Davis Award; and But There Was No Peace:  The Role of Violence in the Politics of Reconstruction. (University of Georgia Press, 1984). His most recent book is Conflict of Command: George McClellan, Abraham Lincoln (LSU Press, 2023), which won the Barondess/Lincoln Award from the Civil War Round Table of New York and the Daniel and Marilyn Laney Book Prize from the Austin Civil War Round Table.

“Conflict of Command: George McClellan, Abraham Lincoln, and the Politics of War”

The fraught relationship between Abraham Lincoln and George McClellan is seemingly set in stone—as far as most students of the Civil War are concerned. They know McClellan as a foil to Lincoln who might be able to organize an army but would not or could not fight. As Lincoln once said, McClellan had “the slows” and had to be removed from command. Indeed opinions about McClellan appeared to almost be baked in and not likely to change. In his own day, however, McClellan had many warm friends and political supporters; and of course no shortage of critics and enemies. McClellan had the misfortune to clash with Abraham Lincoln–another controversial figure of the time but who quickly became the savior of the Union, the great emancipator, and the martyr president in the aftermath of his assassination. This talk will not refight McClellan’s military campaigns but instead will focus on the politics of the clash between Lincoln and McClellan and its impact on the course of the war.

Elizabeth Varon – Sunday Keynote Speaker

Elizabeth R. Varon is Langbourne M. Williams Professor of American History at the University of Virginia and a member of the executive council of UVA’s John L. Nau III Center for Civil War History. She is the author of six books, including Armies of Deliverance: A New History of the Civil War (Oxford University Press, 2019), which won the 2020 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize; Appomattox: Victory, Defeat, and Freedom at the End of the Civil War (Oxford University Press, 2013); Disunion!: The Coming of the American Civil War, 1789-1859 (University of North Carolina Press, 2003); and Southern Lady, Yankee Spy: The True Story of Elizabeth Van Lew, a Union Agent in the Heart of the Confederacy (Oxford University Press, 2003). Her most recent book Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South (Simon & Schuster, 2023) was reviewed in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Atlantic.  Longstreet won the inaugural American Battlefield Trust Prize, and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times biography prize, among other honors. Varon’s current project is a biography of humanitarian Clara Barton.

“The Wars of Clara Barton”  

Highlighting Barton’s work in the Fredericksburg region in 1862 and 1864, Varon’s lecture will put Barton’s Civil War exploits as a nurse and purveyor into the context of her long and remarkable career as a philanthropist and stateswoman. The Union’s victory in the war was the touchstone for Barton’s later activism with the Red Cross and beyond.

Kathryn “KT” Shively – Friday Presenter

Kathryn is an environmental and military historian of the American Civil War and Reconstruction. Their research and teaching interests involve the evolution of America’s armed forces from the 1600s through the late nineteenth century, with a particular focus on the interactions of soldiers’ mental and physical health with their “natural” environments. To this end, Shively’s first book, “Nature’s Civil War: Common Soldiers and the Environment in 1862 Virginia,” winner of the 2014 Wiley-Silver Prize for best first book on the Civil War, explores how enlisted soldiers adapted to the mental and physical challenges of their wartime environments by adopting self-care techniques, from eradicating mosquitoes to boiling water, and creating informal networks of health care, including African Americans, women, and each other. Shively is finishing a monograph on Confederate general Jubal A. Early’s troubling influence on modern historical consciousness, a study of the nexus of memory and history through the lens of Science, Technology, and Society.

Previously, Kathryn was an assistant professor of history at the University of Scranton, Pennsylvania, and before that a schoolteacher in the Bay Area of California.