Join us on Zoom for our final History Happy Hour of the season as we welcome historian and educator, Keith Harris, author of Across the Bloody Chasm.
There are over 1300 monuments memorializing sacrifice and commemorating fortitude at Gettysburg. Most of these monuments went up during the late-19th and early-20th centuries and nearly all of them commemorate the victory of the United States Army of the Potomac in July 1863. Veterans played a vital role creating this commemorative landscape. The words that resonated on the battlefield during this commemorative era explained why Union soldiers supported a cause to secure the integrity of the Republic on the premise of freedom and free institutions. Their commemorative ethos suggests that a generation of citizen soldiers thoroughly embraced a national creed and used the Gettysburg battlefield as the central place from which to articulate their beliefs and national vision. They told the world that they had fought to resolve a mid-19th century crisis of American exceptionalism, and by the Grace of God they were victorious.
Keith Harris is a historian, a high school history teacher, an author, a Star Wars fan, and a cat person. He received his BA at the University of California at Los Angeles (summa cum laude) and his Ph.D. in United States history at the University of Virginia. He has taught courses in United States history at the University of Virginia and the University of California at Riverside, and currently teaches at a private high school in Los Angeles. His work focuses on nineteenth and twentieth-century American history with a special emphasis on the Civil War, Reconstruction, historical memory, the Progressive Era, and national Reconciliation. His first book, Across the Bloody Chasm: the Culture of Commemoration Among Civil War Veterans, is available from the Louisiana State University Press. He is currently writing a book on American exceptionalism and the monuments at Gettysburg. He lives and works in Hollywood, California.