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Civil War Weekend

Thank you to the speakers and guests who helped make our 2025 Civil War Weekend a huge success! We heard from a stellar group of speakers and enjoyed fellowship with other history enthusiasts — all in the comfortable surroundings of the Inn at Virginia Tech.

A highlight of the weekend was the announcement of a major donation to Virginia Tech from speaker Sue Heth Bell - read the details here: https://news.vt.edu/articles/2025/04/univlib-Wharton-Collection.html

Click here for more details from our Civil War Weekend 2025 and Spring Campaign. 

Free webinar: Lincoln's Peace

When did the American Civil War truly end? Was it on April 9, 1865, as conventional wisdom holds, when Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox? Or was it ten weeks later on June 19 — Juneteenth — when Black Americans in Galveston celebrated the end of slavery? Or was it a few days after that, when the Cherokee leader Stand Watie became the last Confederate general to surrender? Not until August 20, 1866, was there something like an official end, a mere declaration by President Andrew Johnson that the war was over, even as racial violence and political chaos continued to tear the country apart.

In a free webinar on April 22 at 7 p.m., Michael Vorenberg, the author of Lincoln’s Peace: The Struggle to End the American Civil War, will discuss the multiple endings and non-endings of the Civil War. To search for the Civil War’s endpoint is to grapple with the war’s true nature and legacy, and to confront whether any war has an obvious ending, and if it does, who gets to say when it’s over.

Vorenberg is a professor of history at Brown University, in Providence, Rhode Island. He is the author of Final Freedom: The Civil War, the Abolition of Slavery, and the Thirteenth Amendment, and The Emancipation Proclamation: A Brief History with Documents.