Spring Lecture Series
This spring, we turn our attention to the end of the war, and its
aftermath . . . the ways that Americans viewed the struggle by 1865, and began
to form their own understanding of it even as veterans were still returning
from battlefields. How would the nation
heal this great wound, and HAS it entirely healed 150 years later?
Each presentation will be held in the Lecture Hall of The Lyceum --- Alexandria’s History Museum, at 7:30 PM, and a $5 donation is requested for each program. Seating is limited, so please reserve your space early by visiting the Historic Alexandria Museum Store online http://shop.alexandriava.gov, in person, or by calling The Lyceum at (703) 746-4994.
Scott Reynolds Nelson is Legum Professor of History at the College of William and Mary. He is the prizewinning author of five books on nineteenth-century American history. The New York Times has most recently called him a “fascinating guide to the grim landscape of Reconstruction.” His first book, Iron Confederacies, explored the birth of the first modern corporation – the Southern Railway – and its outsized influence in cementing the inequalities of the modern South.
UNC Press says about his book: Iron Confederacies uses the history of southern railways to explore linkages among the themes of states' rights, racial violence, labor strife, and big business in the nineteenth-century South. By 1868, Ku Klux Klan leaders had begun mobilizing white resentment against rapid economic change by asserting that railroad consolidation led to political corruption and black economic success. As Nelson notes, some of the Klan's most violent activity was concentrated along the Richmond-Atlanta rail corridor. But conflicts over railroads were eventually resolved, he argues, in agreements between northern railroad barons and Klan leaders that allowed white terrorism against black voters while surrendering states' control over the southern economy.
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