REGISTRATION NOW OPEN!
McCormick Civil War Institute Spring 2025 Conference
“Glimpses… into those Lurid Interiors of the Period” Fighting, Writing, and Refighting the Civil War
Saturday, April 26, 2025
On the campus of Shenandoah University, Winchester, Virginia
“Scenes in and about the Army of the Potomac” (Library of Congress)
A decade after the Civil War’s end poet Walt Whitman published Memoranda during the War in an attempt to help future generations gain “a few stray glimpses… into those lurid interiors of the period” based on his experiences in hospitals in the nation’s capital and battlefields near Washington. Whitman believed that without his book future generations would never understand the Civil War’s “interior history… its practicality, minutia of deeds and passions.” Inspired by Whitman’s perspective the McCormick Civil War Institute’s spring 2025 conference will look behind the veil and explore aspects of the conflict’s “lurid interiors” from the perspective of soldiers and newspaper correspondents, examine how veterans remembered and shaped elements of the conflict’s history, and highlight some of the conflict’s important legacies.
Registration fee of $30 covers cost of all presentations, refreshments, and lunch in Shenandoah University’s “Family Kitchen” in Allen Dining Hall.
A limited number of scholarships are available for educators and students. For more information on obtaining a scholarship please email jnoyalas01@517b2b.com
Draft Schedule
- 8:30-9:30 a.m.: Check-in Shenandoah University (1460 University Drive, Winchester, Virginia). If you are unfamiliar with the campus please follow this link to the campus map
- 9:30-9:40 a.m.: Welcome
- 9:40-10:40 a.m.: ““The Country was Jubilant… but did not Know… the Sufferings”: The Press & the Shenandoah in 1864 (Jonathan A. Noyalas, Shenandoah University)
- 10:40-10:55 a.m.: Break
- 10:55-11:55 a.m.: Remembering “That Dark Episode”: Union and Confederate Ex-Prisoners of War and their Memories of Imprisonment (Angela Riotto, Brigadier General Charles Young Research, Analysis, and Lessons Learned Institute within the Defense Security Cooperation University in Washington D.C.)
- 11:55 a.m.-1:15 p.m.: Lunch, Family Kitchen at Allen Dining Hall
- 1:15-2:15 p.m.: “Gut Busters”: The Development of Ambulances and Ambulance Corps during the Civil War (Dana Shoaf, National Museum of Civil War Medicine)
- 2:15-2:30 p.m.: Break & book raffle
- 2:30-3:30 p.m.: Grant’s Last Battle: The Story Behind the Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant (Chris Mackowski, Emerging Civil War/St. Bonaventure University)
- 3:30-4 p.m.: Concluding remarks and book signing
Registration Details
*To register online click HERE.
*For those who would like to register via a paper form that can be mailed to Shenandoah University please click HERE to download a pdf of the registration form that can be printed, completed, and sent with payment to the address noted at the bottom of the form.
For questions about the conference, contact Jonathan Noyalas at jnoyalas01@517b2b.com or 540-665-4501.
About the Speakers
Chris Mackowski is the editor-in-chief and co-founder of Emerging Civil War and the series editor of the award-winning Emerging Civil War Series, published by Savas Beatie. Chris is a writing professor in the Jandoli School of Communication at St. Bonaventure University in Allegany, NY, where he also serves as associate dean for undergraduate programs. Chris is also historian-in-residence at Stevenson Ridge, a historic property on the Spotsylvania battlefield in central Virginia. He has worked as a historian for the National Park Service at Fredericksburg & Spotsylvania National Military Park, where he gives tours at four major Civil War battlefields (Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Wilderness, and Spotsylvania), as well as at the building where Stonewall Jackson died. Chris has authored or co-authored nearly two dozen books—including Grant’s Last Battle: The Story Behind the Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant—and edited a half-dozen essay collections on the Civil War, and his articles have appeared in all the major Civil War magazines. Chris serves on the board of directors for the Central Virginia Battlefields Trust and on the advisory board of the Civil War Roundtable Congress and the Brunswick (NC) Civil War Roundtable—the largest in the country. He is a member of the Antietam Institute and the U. S. Grant Homestead Association. In 2023, he was honored with the Houston Civil War Round Table’s Frank Vandiver Award and also selected as the Copie Hill Fellow at the American Battlefield Trust.
Jonathan A. Noyalas is director of Shenandoah University’s McCormick Civil War Institute, the founding editor of Journal of the Shenandoah Valley during the Civil War Era, and a professor in the history department at Shenandoah University. He is the author or editor of sixteen books including most recently “The Blood-Tinted Waters of the Shenandoah”: The 1864 Valley Campaign’s Battle of Cool Spring (Savas Beatie, 2024) and Slavery and Freedom in the Shenandoah Valley during the Civil War Era (University Press of Florida, 2021). Noyalas has authored more than 100 articles, essays, book chapters, and reviews for a variety of scholarly and popular publications. In addition to teaching and writing Noyalas has consulted on various public history projects with organizations such as the National Park Service, American Battlefield Trust, Shenandoah Valley Battlefields National Historic District, and National Geographic. Noyalas has appeared on NPR’s “With Good Reason,” C-SPAN’s American History TV, and PCN. He is the recipient of numerous awards for his teaching and scholarship including Shenandoah University’s Exemplary Teaching Award for the First Year Seminar, Shenandoah’s Wilkins Award, and the State Council for Higher Education in Virginia’s Outstanding Faculty Award. His next book, a biography of General Philip H. Sheridan, is under contract with Routledge.
Angela Riotto is a military historian, who specializes in the American Civil War era, prisoners of war, memory studies, and gender studies. She currently works as the historian for the Brigadier General Charles Young Research, Analysis, and Lessons Learned Institute within the Defense Security Cooperation University in Washington D.C. Before joining the Young Institute, she worked for the Office of the Secretary of Defense Historical Office and as an assistant professor of military history at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. She also formerly worked on the Army University Press’s Films Team making documentaries. She has published on a variety of topics, including articles on multimedia learning tools and their use in the classroom with “Teaching the Army: Virtual Training Tools to Train and Educate Twenty-First Century Soldiers” appearing in Military Review. Some of her more recent work includes a chapter comparing the battles of Bull Run and Vicksburg in America’s Second Battles under contract with Naval Institute Press. She is currently working on a book manuscript, “Beyond the Prison Pen: Union and Confederate Former Prisoners of War and their Narratives of Captivity, 1861-1930.”
