Lecture Date: March 17, 2015
Virginia Partners Bank Lecture
The lecture will assess the ups and downs of the reputation of General U. S. Grant, the Union’s hero during the United States Civil War and a two-term President. At the time of his death in 1885, Grant’s legacy seemed assured as one of America’s greatest generals and most essential Presidents. It was not assured at all. Grant’s immense prestige declined rapidly throughout the twentieth century largely as a result of a campaign by “Lost Cause” historians sympathetic to the South. They whittled away at his reputation, wrongly portraying him as a drunk, a military butcher-general, and a corrupt, incompetent president. All those stereotypes are distorted, reflecting a larger historical amnesia afflicting many citizens today. The lecture confronts the dilemma between history and memory and proposes why it is important to get the record right on the remarkable life of the man who, along with President Lincoln, was credited by his own generation as “Saving the Union.”
Lecture Photos
Speaker: Joan Waugh
Professor Joan Waugh of the UCLA History Department researches and writes about nineteenth-century America, specializing in the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Gilded Age eras. Waugh has published numerous essays and books on Civil War topics, both single authored and edited, including her prize-winning U. S. Grant: American Hero, American Myth, (University of North Carolina Press, 2009). Other works include Unsentimental Reformer: The Life of Josephine Shaw Lowell (Harvard University, 1998); Civil War and Reconstruction, 1856 to 1859 (Facts on File, 2003, 2010); The Memory of the Civil War in American Culture(University of North Carolina Press, 2004), and Wars Within A War: Controversy and Conflict Over the American Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 2009). The recipient of Huntington Library, NEH and Gilder-Lehrman fellowships, she has been interviewed for many documentaries, including the PBS series, “American Experience” on Ulysses S. Grant and the History Channel’s production of “Lee and Grant.” Waugh has also published a number of op-eds on current controversies regarding Civil War issues for media outlets such as the Los Angeles Times and Salon.com. Serving on numerous advisory boards and editorial boards, Dr. Waugh has been honored with four teaching prizes, including UCLA’s most prestigious teaching honor, the Distinguished Teaching Award. In 2013-2014 Dr. Waugh held the Stephen and Janet Rogers Distinguished Fellowship in Nineteenth Century American History at the Henry Huntington Library in San Marino, California.