Recorded Webinar: History Check-In: The Lost Cause: The Confederacy's Most Enduring Myth

History Check-In: The Lost Cause: The Confederacy's Most Enduring Myth is an AASLH Continuing Education recorded webinar. This webinar is about the origins and effects of the Lost Cause. This event is presented by Caroline E. Janney. This webinar explores the origins and effects of the Lost Cause. The term “Lost Cause” has received a great deal of media attention lately in discussions of removing Confederate monuments. But what does it mean? Who promoted it? Why? How and why does it still capture the American imagination? In a survey of the period between 1865 and the present, this webinar examines the ways in which this “best case scenario” of the Confederacy was crafted and imparted as well as the ways in which it still resonates today. This webinar is part of the History Check-In webinar series, a partnership between the American Association for State and Local History (AASLH) and the Organization of American Historians (OAH). The webinar is designed to provide history professionals from throughout the field with an update on the current state of historiography for a particular subject.

About the Presenter:

Caroline E. Janney is professor of history at Purdue University. A specialist in the Civil War era, she is the author of Burying the Dead but Not the Past: Ladies’ Memorial Associations and the Lost Cause (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008) and Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation, a volume in the Littlefield History of the Civil War Era Series (Littlefield Fund for Southern History and University of North Carolina Press, 2013), which has been selected for the History Book Club and Military Book Club and won the Charles S. Sydnor Award by the Southern Historical Association and the Jefferson Davis Award by the American Civil War Museum.

In addition to her monographs, Janney is the editor of Petersburg to Appomattox: The End of the War in Virginia and John Richard Dennett’s, The South As It Is, 1865-66. She is likewise co-editor with Gary W. Gallagher of Cold Harbor to the Crater: The End of the Overland Campaign. She is the author of essays about the Civil War and its aftermath that have appeared in the Journal of Southern History, Civil War History, the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, Crucible of the Civil War: Virginia from Secession to Commemoration, Virginia’s Civil War, the Journal of the Civil War Era and numerous other collections.

An active public speaker, she has given presentations at locations such as the Lincoln Presidential Library, Clinton Presidential Library, Huntington Library, Gettysburg College’s Civil War Institute, and has appeared on C-SPAN as well as NPR. She is a speaker with the Organization of American Historians’ Distinguished Lectureship program and a recipient of the Kenneth T. Kofmehl Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching Award from Purdue’s College of Liberal Arts. She serves as a co-editor of the University of North Carolina Press’s Civil War America Series and is the past president of the Society of Civil War Historians.