Please join us for a Chambersburg Civil War Seminars & Tours Lecture Series! Our next lecture will be: "The Longest and Clearest Head of Any General Officer": George Meade as Corps Commander by Chris Stowe. Cost is $6 per person. Zoom Login details will be sent with your email registration confirmation.

Synopsis

A brigadier within the Army of the Potomac as September 1862 dawned, George Gordon Meade by June 1863 found himself appointed its commander. His rise within the army's leadership structure can justly be considered meteoric. Stowe's presentation looks at Meade's six-month tenure in command of the famed Fifth Corps, examining the cultural, political, and military factors that enabled the bespectacled general to gain esteem from most of his peers and, more critically, the trust of his government. In so doing, Stowe will deconstruct the aspirations of a career-minded professional military officer--one whose abiding quest for recognition was perhaps his most interesting (and understudied) personal trait.

Biograpy

Christopher S. Stowe, Ph.D., serves as Professor of Military History within the War Studies Department at Marine Corps University’s Command and Staff College in Quantico, Virginia. His publications include numerous articles and reviews in nineteenth-century American history. Among his most recent works are an essay in Civil War History entitled “George Gordon Meade and the Boundaries of Military Masculinity,” which was nominated for the United States Army Historical Foundation’s 2015 Distinguished Writing Award, as well as chapters in Corps Commanders in Blue: Union Major Generals in the Civil War (LSU Press) and The Oxford Handbook of the American Civil War (Oxford University Press). His first full-length book, George Gordon Meade: A Nineteenth-Century Life, is nearing completion for the Kent State University Press. Professor Stowe served previously with the United States Army Command and General Staff College in Fort Lee, Virginia, McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana, and the University of Toledo (Ohio). He was awarded the Department of the Army Commander’s Award for Civilian Service in 2011 and the Department of the Army Superior Civilian Service Award in 2014.