On April 1, 2016, the Nau Center held its first signature conference titled, "War as Muse: Revisiting Iconic Texts of the Civil War." The theme for this year's conference was inspired by a book by UVA's Dr. Stephen Cushman (Robert C. Taylor Professor of English), Belligerent Muse: Five Northern Writers and How They Shaped Our Understanding of the Civil War (UNC Press, 2014).
Beginning at 8:30 AM in the Small Special Collections Library auditorium, the conference was an opportunity for the UVA and Charlottesville communities to learn more about important Civil War memoirs from leading historians and scholars of the Civil War era.
Throughout the course of the day over one hundred people, including UVA's president, Teresa A. Sullivan, learned about the war's profound impact on American history through the writings of such figures as William Tecumseh Sherman, Mary Boykin Chesnut, Jefferson and Varina Davis, Joseph T. Wilson, Edward Porter Alexander, and Charlotte Forten. Our special thanks to Dr. Sarah Gardner of Mercer University and Dr. Brenda Stevenson from UCLA for coming to Charlottesville to take part in our first conference.
We would like to thank everyone who came as well as the staff of the Small Special Collections Library for making this conference possible. For more information on the conference, please follow us on Twitter (@NauCivilWar) where we lived tweeted each talk, or read The Cavalier Daily's recap of our conference linked below.