Historian Visiting UA to Address ‘Incredible Coincidence’ Helping Cause Civil War

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. – Dr. William W. Freehling, one of America’s most distinguished historians of the Old South and the era of the American Civil War, will give a public talk at The University of Alabama Wednesday, Jan. 25 at 4 p.m. in the Henry Jacobs Reading area in Gorgas Library.

The talk is the 10th Summersell Lecture in Southern History and is sponsored by the Summersell Fund in Southern History, the Center for the Study of the South and the department of history.

Freehling, the Otis A. Singletary Endowed Chair in the Humanities at the University of Kentucky and a Senior Fellow at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, will address the question: “Did an Incredible Coincidence Help Cause the Civil War?”

His groundbreaking works on slavery and the years leading up to the Civil War have earned him numerous awards and prizes. He is the author of several books including “Prelude to Civil War: The Nullification Controversy in South Carolina,” which won both the Nevins and Bancroft prizes. His most recent book is “The South versus the South: How Anti-Confederate Southerners Shaped the Course of the Civil War,” which won the Jefferson Davis prize. He is currently completing the second volume of his study, “The Road to Disunion,” a major reexamination of the Southern road to secession.

The UA history department is part of the College of Arts and Sciences, the University’s largest division and the largest public liberal arts college in the state. Students from the college have won numerous national awards including Rhodes Scholarships, Goldwater Scholarships and memberships on the “USA Today” Academic All American Team.