Pitcaithley lecture
Pitcaithley to give talk, ‘The National Park Service Confronts Secession’
JOHNSON CITY (April 3, 2015) – Over the last four years, Americans have revisited the meaning of the Civil War in events, reenactments and rituals commemorating the war’s 150th anniversary. April marks the month when General Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox and when President Abraham Lincoln fell from an assassin’s bullet.
“Although the celebration of the Civil War Sesquicentennial nears its conclusion, the Civil War and how we have chosen to remember it remain at the heart of our national quest to understand who we are as Americans,” says Dr. Tom Lee, associate professor of history at East Tennessee State University.
On Thursday, April 16, the ETSU Department of History will present a lecture by Dr. Dwight Pitcaithley titled “States’ Rights or Slavery?: The National Park Service Confronts Secession.”
Pitcaithley is a college professor of history at New Mexico State University. He retired from the National Park Service in 2005 as its chief historian, a position he held for 10 years. He is a coeditor of “The Antiquities Act: A Century of American Archaeology, Historic Preservation, and Nature Conservation” (2006) and has contributed chapters to “Becoming Historians” (2009), “Slavery and Public History: The Tough Stuff of American Memory” (2006), “Preserving Western History” (2005), “Public History and the Environment” (2004), “Myth, Memory, and the Making of the American Landscape” (2001) and “Seeing and Being Seen: Tourism in the American West” (2001).
A recipient of the Organization of American Historians Distinguished Service Award, he also is an elected member of the American Antiquarian Society and a recipient of an honorary doctor of laws degree from the University of North Carolina.
The lecture, which will deal with the role of the National Park Service in the making of American memory, will take place at 7 p.m. in Rogers-Stout Hall, room 118.
The lecture is free. Attendees are asked to RSVP by emailing Lee at leet@etsu.edu or by calling the History Department office at 423-439-4222.
A reception with light refreshments will follow the presentation.
For disability accommodations, call the ETSU Office of Disability Services at 423-439-8346.