WHO:             Speaker: Stephanie McCurry, professor of history, University of                          Pennsylvania

                      Introduced by Bruce Kuklick, professor of history, Penn

WHAT:          “Thinking With the Past,” History Department lecture

WHEN:          Thursday, April 12, 5 p.m.

WHERE:        Annenberg School for Communication, Room 110, 3620 Walnut St.                                                

Stephanie McCurry will talk about and sign copies of her award-winning book Confederate Reckoning: The American South and The Civil War that tells the story of why the South seceded and what happened when it did.  The book was a finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for History and won the 2011 Frederick Douglass Book Prize and awards from the Organization of American Historians and Southern Association for Women Historians. 

McCurry will detail how Southern statesmen and generals built the most powerful slave regime in the Western world but excluded the majority of their own people — white women and slaves — from the national project.  It was the reckoning with their own people, and not just with Union armies, that sowed the seeds of their demise and redefined the possibilities of democracy at home and abroad.

The event is free and open to the public.  Additional information is available by contacting Nari Baughman at nlinette@sas.upenn.edu or 215-898-8452.