Crossroads of Memory: A Conference Honoring the Life and Work of John NefF

October 29 & 30, 2021

Register Here For Zoom Link to All Events

Program

Friday, October 29

2:00-3:30 Panel 1: One Museum, Two Boats, Three Famous Lecturers, and One Giant Painting: Buying and Selling the Civil War

4:15-4:45 2020 Wiley Silver Prize: "A 'Rough' in Uniform: General Lew Wallace and the Civil War" (Christopher Mortenson, Ouachita Baptist University)

4:45-6:00 Virtual Gathering to Remember Dr. John Neff

6:00 Keynote Address: "Honoring the Olustee Dead: Commemoration and the Problem of Erasure" (Barbara Gannon, University of Central Florida)

Saturday, October 30

10:00-11:30 Panel 2: The Uses of Historical Memory

11:30-12:30 Break

12:30-2:00 Panel 3: Wartime and the Shaping of Civil War Memory

2:15-3:45: Panel 4: Spirits, Hauntings, and History's Shadow

3:45-4:30: Closing Comments & Gathering

Speakers & Papers

Panel 1: One Museum, Two Boats, Three Famous Lecturers, and One Giant Painting: Buying and Selling the Civil War (10/29; 2:00-3:30)

A panel of authors in the volume Buying and Selling Civil War Memory in Gilded Age America (UGA 2021). John Neff contributed a chapter to this volume entitled, "A Simple Business Speculation: The Selling of a Civil War Prison."

Caroline E. Janney John L. Nau III Professor in the History of the American Civil War, University of Virginia

James Marten Professor of History, Marquette University

Jonathan W. White Associate Professor of American Studies, Christopher Newport University

Anna Gibson Holloway Supervisory Historian, Fleet History at Naval History and Heritage Command

Wiley-Silver Prize for Best First Book in Civil War History, 2020 Awardee (10/29; 4:14)

Politician in Uniform: General Lew Wallace and the Civil War (University of Oklahoma Press, 2019)
Christopher Mortenson, Professor and Chair, Ouachita Baptist University
"A 'Rough' in Uniform: General Lew Wallace and the Civil War"

Keynote Address: "Honoring the Olustee Dead: Commemoration and the Problem of Erasure" (10/29; 6:00)

Barbara Gannon, University of Central Florida

Panel 2: The Uses of Historical Memory (10/30; 10:00-11:30)

Sarah Elliott, University of Mississippi
-Death of Nations, Birth of a State: How the Civil War Transformed the West, Dissolved Indigenous Sovereignty, and Created the State of Oklahoma”
Stanley Schwartz, Temple University
-From Battlefields to Memories: Toward a Civil War Era in the United States’ Foreign Relations
Tim Galsworthy, University of Sussex
-The Party of Abraham Lincoln/the Party of Jefferson Davis: Civil War Memory, Civil Rights, and Southern Republicanism
Heath Anderson, Mississippi State University
The Fragmented Lost Cause: William Mahone and the Readjuster Party in Historical Memory

Panel 3: Wartime and the Shaping of Civil War Memory (10/30; 12:30-2:00)

Thomas Robinson, Museum of Florida History
-The Southern Memory of the American Revolution
Kristin Bouldin, University of Mississippi
-Previewing the Bureau: The North Carolina Contraband Camps and Freedmen’s Bureau Policy, 1862-1866
Andrew Davis, PhD
-When the Tide Turns: The Wartime Origins of the Lost Cause in the South Carolina Lowcountry
Beth Kruse, University of Mississippi
-The “Prisoner’s Friend”: Civil War and Post-war Efforts of Southern-sympathizing Women Living in the North

Panel 4: Spirits, Hauntings, and History's Shadow (10/30; 2:15-3:45)

Christopher Wilkins, William Jewell College
-Defending Academic Freedom: Slavery Research, Faculty and Student Rights, and the Contest Over Historical Memory in Higher Education
Adam Petty, Associate Historian, Church History Department, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
-The Wilderness Mystique
Jennifer Ford, Head of Special Collections and Professor, University of Mississippi
-“Our Dead Still Speak to Us”: Death, Spiritualism, and Mississippians, 1830-1920
Amy Laurel Fluker, Youngstown State University
-Haunted by the Memory: Civil War Ghost Stories and the Continuing Work of John R. Neff

Dr. John Neff, author of Honoring the Civil War Dead: Commemoration and the Problem of Reconciliation, was a historian of Civil War memory and the founder of the Center for Civil War Research at the University of Mississippi.  Friends, colleagues, and fans of Dr. Neff interested in attending, participating, or receiving updates about the conference, please email aholm @ olemiss.edu.