The Pember Library will present a lecture by Robert W. Arnold III on “Let Loose the Dogs of War: New York in the American Civil War”. Free and open to the general public, the event begins at 6:30 PM, Thursday, June 10 at the Pember Library in Granville. This event is made possible through Speakers in the Humanities, a program of the New York Council for the Humanities.
Robert W. Arnold III is a career public historian now retired from the New York State Archives. He was Albany County Historian and an historical archaeologist and serves as a Commissioner of Historic Resources for the City of Albany. Arnold teaches colonial and nineteenth century American, New York State, industrial revolution and preindustrial New York, and regional history at the College of Saint Rose. At Excelsior College Arnold teaches Colonial America, Revolutionary America, American Civil War and U.S. Immigration and Ethnic History.
New York supplied more men, money and material in the Civil War than any other state North or South, but New Yorkers responded to the Civil War in diverse and often contradictory fashions. Concentrating mainly on the home front, this presentation will examine a sample of those responses and some individuals who exemplify them, put in the political, social and military contexts of the war. It will look at the social costs of the war as they played out in the farms and cities of the Empire State, in families, workplaces and neighborhoods and the transition that went with it from an era of reform to the Gilded Age.
Since its launch in 1983, the Council’s Speakers in the Humanities program has linked distinguished scholars with a diverse audience through the presentation of lectures on a broad range of topics. All Speakers events are free and open to the general public. Each year, hundreds of cultural organizations and community groups take advantage of this program, which offers the very best in humanities scholarship to thousands of citizens in every corner of New York State.
The New York Council for the Humanities is a not-for-profit, independent affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Through statewide collaborations, and programs and services that encourage imaginative thinking and critical inquiry, the Council works to ensure that the humanities are present in the intellectual and cultural life of every New Yorker.