New Canaan Library's video: New Canaan Library Presents: Women of The Civil War

Join us for this live webinar on Thursday October 21st at 7:00 PM EST. For a fascinating lecture by historian and professor Catherine Clinton, who will discuss the wide range of roles women took on during the Civil War. Most depictions of the Civil War be it literature, documentaries, or art focus heavily on male soldiers and military leaders. Women, however, played important roles during the Civil War, moving beyond moral support and keeping the home together to roles ranging from medical and nursing to espionage and actual military action. Professor Clinton will explore the topic and also address what aspects of women’s lives during this era have been researched by historians and what topics future scholarship might explore. This program supports the Library’s 14th Annual Literary Luncheon Benefit, an event that this year features Martha Hall Kelly, speaking on Sunflower Sisters, her historical novel set in the Civil War years. Dr. Catherine Clinton | Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies CATHERINE CLINTON holds the Denman Chair of American History at the University of Texas in San Antonio and is Professor Emerita at Queen’s University Belfast. She has served on the executive council of the Society of American Historians and on the Advisory Committee of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Bicentennial Commission, and she remains on advisory boards for Civil War History, Civil War Times, The President’s Cottage and Soldier’s Home, and Ford’s Theatre. Clinton has written and edited over thirty books, from children’s fiction about Phillis Wheatley to the Columbia Guide to American Women in the Nineteenth Century from booklets for the National Park Service to poetry anthologies. Her first book, The Plantation Mistress: Woman’s World in the Old South, appeared in 1982 and was a selection of the History Book Club; her 2004 biography of Harriet Tubman, Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom, was named as one of the best non-fiction books by the Christian Science Monitor and the Chicago Tribune. Mrs. Lincoln: A Life was published by Harper Collins in 2009, and Clinton subsequently served as a consultant for Steven Spielberg’s 2012 film, Lincoln. In 2016 Louisiana State University Press published her Fleming Lectures: Stepdaughters Of History: Southern Women and The Civil War. Notably, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in U.S. History also in 2016. In November 2016, she served as President of the Southern Historical Association. Her public presidential address, “The Southern Social Network,” has inspired The Cassandra Project, a non-profit educational initiative to combat sexual harassment within departments of history at southern postgraduate institutions. The first book in her new University of Georgia Press series, History in the Headlines, will be published in 2019: Confederate Statues and Memorialization.