George Rable
OXFORD, Miss. – Well-known historian George Rable is set to discuss religion and the American Civil War April 25 at University of Mississippi.
Rable’s presentation, at 6 p.m. in Farley Hall, Room 202, is free and open to the public. Named the 2013 Burnham Lecturer in Civil War History, Rable plans to discuss “God as General: Was There a Religious History of the American Civil War?”
John Neff, director of the UM Center for Civil War Research, praised Rable as one of the foremost authorities on the Civil War era.
“Dr. Rable is one of the most versatile and accomplished historians of the Civil War,” Neff said. “He has written major works in a wide variety of subject areas, and his scholarship has received the highest accolades. We are very happy to have him speak on campus.”
Rable, professor and Charles G. Summersell chair in Southern History at the University of Alabama, earned a bachelor’s degree from Bluffton College in Ohio and master’s and doctoral degrees from Louisiana State University.
He is the author of five books: “But There Was No Peace: The Role of Violence in the Politics of Reconstruction” (University of Georgia Press, 1984); “Civil Wars: Women and the Crisis of Southern Nationalism” (University of Illinois Press, 1989), which won the Jefferson Davis Award in 1989 and the Julia Cherry Spruill Prize in 1991, “The Confederate Republic: A Revolution Against Politics” (University of North Carolina Press, 1994); and “Fredericksburg! Fredericksburg!” (UNC Press, 2002), which won the 2004 Distinguished Book Award in American History from the Society for Military History as well as the prestigious Lincoln Prize; and “God’s Almost Chosen Peoples: A Religious History of the Civil War” (UNC Press, 2010). His latest work explores how Americans used faith to understand the war’s larger meaning and its impact on their individual lives.
The Burnham Lecture in Civil War History is held each April. The annual series was made possible by Dr. Van Robinson Burnham, a family physician, Mississippi native and 1941 UM alumnus, whose lifelong love of history and archeology prompted his generous support for the Center for Civil War Research.
For more information, visit http://civilwarcenter.olemiss.edu/index.shtml