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Award-winning historian speaks about film “Glory” Feb. 22

|||Doug Egerton

Last updated February 8, 2017

By Tina Underwood

Doug Egerton, professor of history at Le Moyne College (Syracuse, N.Y.) will deliver the 2017 George B. Tindall Memorial Lecture in History Wednesday, Feb. 22, at 5 p.m. in Johns Hall 101 on the campus of Furman University.

Doug Egerton, Professor of History, Le Moyne College

His talk, “Thunder at the Gates: The Black Civil War Regiments That Redeemed America,” is based on the book of the same name, which was just awarded the 2017 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize.  The prize is awarded annually by Gettysburg College and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History to a work that enhances the general public’s understanding of the Civil War era.

Egerton’s lecture is free and open to the public, and is presented by the Furman Department of History. It is part of Furman’s Cultural Life Program.

Thanks to the 1989 film Glory, many Americans are familiar with the Massachusetts Fifty-fourth, the first federally-approved black infantry regiment. Despite its success at the box office, the film managed to get almost every piece of the story wrong, and implied that the regiment’s saga ended in July 1863 at the battle of Battery Wagner. But the regiment and its sister unit, the Fifty-fifth, fought on for two more years in South Carolina, Georgia and Florida.

Egerton will discuss the regiment’s later service in South Carolina, where the battalion acted as liberators and protectors of enslaved Carolinians, and then after the war, politicians in Reconstruction era Columbia.

Egerton holds a Ph.D. in history from Georgetown University. He is the author of numerous prize-winning books and articles about American history including Thunder At the Gates: The Black Civil War Regiments That Redeemed America, The Wars of Reconstruction: The Brief, Violent History of America’s Most Progressive Era, and He Shall Go Out Free: The Lives of Denmark Vesey.

The Tindall Memorial Lecture is given in honor of Greenvillian and Furman alum George Brown Tindall.

For more information, contact Lloyd Benson in the Furman Department of History at lloyd.benson@furman.edu, or 864-294-3492. Or contact the Furman News and Media Relations office at 864-294-3107.

 

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