Please join us for a Chambersburg Civil War Seminars & Tours Lecture Series! Our next lecture will be: Abraham Lincoln as Ideal Commander-in-Chief: The Strange History of an Idea by Kenneth Noe. Cost is $6 per person. Zoom Login details will be sent with your email registration confirmation. The talk will be recorded and sent to participants to view about a week after the live talk.

Synopsis

Although modern scholars have sifted and judged every other aspect of Abraham Lincoln's life and career, he remains for most of us the model commander-in-chief.  His critics on that score are few and largely ignored.  The pervasive idea of Lincoln's martial near-perfection, however, is in fact a tangled story that began in the White House, blossomed after World War I thanks to a handful of disenchanted British generals who looked to Lincoln as the perfect military dictator, and finally found permanence after World War II at the hands of a mathematics professor from Indiana.

Biography

Ken Noe is a native Virginian who received his doctorate from the University of Illinois, and currently is the Draughon Professor of Southern History at Auburn University. He is the author or editor of eight books on the American Civil War, including Perryville: This Grand Havoc of Battle and most recently The Howling Storm: Weather, Climate, and the American Civil War.