Please join us on Friday, November 8 for a special salute to our veterans, past and present, as Dr. Brian Matthew Jordan discusses the myriad challenges Union veterans had to contend with when they came marching home again.
For well over a century, traditional Civil War histories have concluded in 1865, with a bitterly won peace and Union soldiers returning triumphantly home. The reality was decidedly less glorious. These veterans — tending rotting wounds, battling alcoholism, campaigning for paltry pensions — tragically realized that they stood as unwelcome reminders to a new America eager to heal, forget, and embrace the freewheeling bounty of the Gilded Age. Drawing on anguished letters and diaries, essays by amputees, and gruesome medical reports, all deeply revealing of the American psyche, Dr. Jordan will shed new light on the plight of those who won the war, but couldn’t bear the peace.
A native of northeastern Ohio, Dr. Jordan is an associate professor of history and chair of the History Department at Sam Houston State University. He graduated with a B.A. in History and Civil War Era Studies from Gettysburg College in 2009, and went on to earn his M.A., M.Phil. and Ph.D. from Yale University, where he studied under Professors David Blight and Joanne Freeman. He is the author of Marching Home: Union Veterans and Their Unending Civil War, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History, and A Thousand May Fall: Life, Death, and Survival in the Union Army, which recounts the many challenges faced by the 107th Ohio Volunteer Infantry, which was composed primarily by ethnic Germans whose loyalties were regularly questioned by the nativist northern press. He is a frequent speaker at Civil War Round Tables nationwide, and delivers popular tours for Gettysburg College’s Civil War Institute and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.
Those who are unable to attend this engagement in person are invited to tune in to the lecture and Q&A session via Zoom. Click on the following link:. https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87367347326. No password in required. To dial in by phone, call 1-301-715-8592 or click on the following link: https://us02web.zoom.us/u/kexk1usf9i. The meeting ID # is 873 6734 7326.Zoom participants should join the meeting by 7:00 pm.
