Dr. Lesley Gordon, Charles G. Summersell Chair of Southern History, welcomed two visitors to The University of Alabama Department of History during the month of February.

Matthew Christopher Hulbert (Ph.D., UGA, 2015) is an Assistant Professor of History at Hampden-Sydney College. Dr. Hulbert delivered his lecture “Irregular Recollections: Civil War and Guerrilla Memory in the Missouri-Kansas Borderlands” to a crowd of faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students. Based on his award-winning book, The Ghosts of Guerrilla Memory: How Civil War Bushwhackers Became Gunslingers in the American West (UGA Press, 2016), Dr. Hulbert’s lecture analyzed the tensions between the actions and legacies of infamous “gunslingers” like Jesse James. He also spent time with the graduate students at a breakfast, where he shared his insight on a wide variety of topics from the job hunt to teaching and publishing.

 

Later in the month, the department also hosted Kristopher Teters (Ph.D., Alabama, 2012), who is a course faculty member at Western Governors University. Dr. Teters’s lunch talk, “An Army of Liberation: How Western Union Officers Carried out and Felt about Emancipation during the Civil War,” summarized the findings of his 2018 book Practical Liberators: Union Officers in the Western Theater During the Civil War (UNC Press). Dr. Teters argued that practical, military necessity motivated most Union officers towards emancipation rather than a moral compulsion. Dr. Teters also shared his experiences from his time at UA, the job search, publishing, and teaching through technology in the twenty-first century.

The Department of History thanks both Dr. Hulbert and Dr. Teters for their visits, as well as all students and faculty who came out to support them.