Timothy J. Williams to present a talk titled, "Assembling the South's Lost Cause in Union Prisons," for the Central Pennsylvania Civil War Round Table on Tuesday, September 20.

Stories about prisoners of war fascinated and horrified American readers since the first capture of political prisoners in the spring of 1861. For decades, historians, have written both popular and scholarly accounts of both Union and Confederate prisoners of war focusing on everything from prison conditions, surveillance, health, death, and survival. This talk sheds light on a less explored aspect of wartime imprisonment of Confederates in Union prions: the individual and collective work to assemble first drafts of Lost Cause history with personal memories of imprisonment, shared grievance, and camaraderie, at the center.

Timothy Williams is an associate professor of history at the University of Oregon with interests in nineteenth century U.S. history, the Civil War and Reconstruction, intellectual and cultural history, book history, gender, education, and prisons and prisoners. He is the author of Intellectual Manhood: University, Self, and Society in the Antebellum South (University of North Carolina Press, 2015) and editor (with Evan A. Kutzler) of Prison Pens: Gender, Memory, and Imprisonment in the Writings of Mollie Scollay and Wash Nelson, 1863–1866 (University of Georgia Press, 2018). Currently, he is writing a book about Civil War prisoners and their influence on the era's intellectual history and literature.