Annual Civil War Lectures to be Held at UA

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. – A series of lectures about the Civil War will be held Saturday, March 20, from 8:30 a.m.-12:15 p.m. in Alston Hall, 361 Stadium Drive, on The University of Alabama campus.

This John Caldwell Calhoun Sanders Lecture Series is named after a young student from Greene County who became one of the Confederacy’s three famous “boy generals.”

The annual lecture series includes talks from biographical sketches and personal wartime experiences on campus and in the field to unit histories and accounts of battles or skirmishes involving some 900 UA alumni and its Corps of Cadets.

Dr. George Rable, the Charles G. Summersell Professor of Southern history at UA, will speak on his book “Fredericksburg! Fredericksburg!” (University of North Carolina Press), for which he won the nation’s most generous annual American history award, the Lincoln Prize.

Frances Robb, cultural and art historian and museum consultant, will present Civil War photography in Alabama. Robb is currently working with UA’s Alabama Museum of Natural History on the Eugene Allen Smith Photography Project that will represent the late UA professor’s 54-year tenure as the state geologist of Alabama.

O. James Lighthizer, president of the Civil War Preservation Trust, will discuss the efforts to save historic battlefields, and John Curry, a member of the 5th Alabama Band, will lead a brief memorial service at the close of the event.

Admission is free, but advance registration is requested. For more information, phone 205/348-7551 or e-mail ccumming@aalan.ua.edu.

The Sanders Memorial Endowment Fund was established by Paul Bryant Jr. and is administered jointly by UA’s Alabama Museum of Natural History and UA’s William Stanley Hoole Special Collections Library.

Sanders left the UA campus in 1861 and returned home to join the Confederate Guards, which became part of the 11th Regiment Alabama Volunteer Infantry at Lynchburg, Va., and remained as part of the Army of Northern Virginia throughout the war. On Aug. 21, 1864, Sanders, in command of Wilcox’s Old Brigade, died, at age 24, fighting to save the Weldon Railroad near Petersburg, Va.