GRANT TO FUND AU PROGRAMS ON WOMEN, CIVIL WAR HISTORY
AUBURN -- A grant from the Alabama Humanities Foundation will sponsor an Auburn University-led program series on the Civil War that will look at the war from a woman's perspective.
The series, "Memoir and History: Southern Women's Civil War Stories," will be presented in Montgomery, Birmingham and Huntsville in February and March. It will be coordinated by AU's Center for the Arts and Humanities.
The series will provide a forum for the discussion of the humanities disciplines of history and literature in the context of Southern women's autobiography.
Leah Atkins, professor emerita of history and director emerita of AU's Center for the Arts and Humanities, and Sara Hudson, professor emerita of English at AU -- will primarily rely on two memoir books by Mary Chesnut and Virginia Clay- Clopton that offer differing views of the Civil War.
The Civil War diaries of Chesnut,The Private Mary Chesnut, is widely known as a memoir critical of the Confederacy. The daughter of one South Carolina senator and the wife of another, Chesnut describes Confederate politics and military leaders.
Belle of the Fifties: Memoirs of Mrs. Clay of Alabama, was recently co- edited by Atkins, Hudson and the late AU history professor Joseph Harrison.
The trio provided an introduction, annotations and an index to the annotations to a previously published memoir of Clay-Clopton, who through diaries, letters and family papers provided eyewitness accounts of events in Washington and Richmond, Va., before, during and after the war. The book was published last fall by the University of Alabama Press.
"The series will open up the lives of women in the South and offer a differing perspective on the times and events surrounding the Civil War," said Allen Cronenberg, professor of history and director of AU's Center for the Arts and Humanities.
The Huntsville program will be Feb. 17 at the Early Works Museum. It will be moderated by Johanna Sheilds, a history faculty member at the University of Alabama at Huntsville.
The Montgomery program will be Feb. 20 at Old Alabama Town, and will be moderated by Mary Ann Neely, executive director of Landmarks of Montgomery/Old Alabama Town.
The Birmingham program is set for March 5 at the Hoover Public Library and will be moderated by Harriet Amos Doss, a history faculty member at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
In addition to AU's Center for the Arts and Humanities, co-sponsors of the series are: EarlyWorks/Constitution Hall Village in Huntsville, Landmarks of Montgomery/Old Alabama Town, the Hoover Public Library and the University of Alabama Press.
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CONTACT: Cronenberg or Jay Lamar, associate director of AU's CAH, 334/844-4946.