Civil War book talk at Manassas Museum

Adam Goodheart, a historian, journalist, and travel writer, will talk about his new book, 1861: The Civil War Awakening at The Manassas Museum on Sunday, June 26 at 2 p.m
He said the book came into focus when he and his Washington College students discovered trunks full of the valuable papers at Poplar Grove, a plantation on the Eastern Shore of Virginia. The dusty historic papers not only illustrated the events in 1861 that led to the Civil War, but one family’s struggle in deciding their allegiance to the Union or the Confederacy.
Goodheart says he found the letters of an Army officer in the west writing to his family at Poplar Grove especially poignant.  The officer’s sympathies rested with the south and his friend Confederate President Jefferson Davis, but he fought under the Union flag in the Mexican war. The officer, like many throughout the country, was faced with a very personal decision: would he be a founding father or be strung as a traitor.
1861: The Civil War Awakening captures a time when ordinary citizens - like the Emory family at Poplar Grove—as well as military and political leaders knew that their very lives were on the line and no one knew what the outcome would be.
In the book, Goodheart also explores the shifting allegiances of other individuals and groups that caused such great national insecurity. German immigrants drilled in secret in preparation for war, abolitionists caused Missouri’s government to flee, and Native American tribes held deeply divided loyalties.
The book also introduces a cast of Civil War heroes: an acrobatic militia colonel, an explorer’s wife, a regiment of New York City firemen, and a young college professor who would one day become president.
Goodheart takes readers from the halls of the Capitol to the slums of Manhattan, from the mouth of the Chesapeake to the deserts of Nevada, from Boston Common to Alcatraz Island, while evoking the nation’s crisis and indecision.
Goodheart has recently appeared on panels with filmmaker Ken Burns and noted historians like James McPherson. He has been a recent guest on CNN, Fox News, and the nationally broadcast public radio shows Fresh Air, Here and Now, and Studio 360.
Goodheart’s articles have appeared in National Geographic, Outside, Smithsonian, The Atlantic, and The New York Times Magazine, among others, and he is a regular columnist for The New York Times acclaimed Civil War blog, Disunion. He lives in Washington, D.C., and on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where he is the Hodson Trust-Griswold Director of Washington College’s C. V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience.
1861: The Civil War Awakening presentation is free. Goodheart’s book is available for signing and purchase at Echoes, the Manassas Museum Store. Visit http://www.manassasmuseum.org or call 703-368-1873 for more information.