By Jeremy Dibbell

Join us today (Wednesday) at 12 noon in the Dowse Library for a brown-bag lunch with Megan Kate Nelson, Assistant Professor of History at California State University, Fullerton. Nelson will discuss the cultural and environmental frameworks that inform her book project, Ruin Nation: The Destruction of the South and the Making of America during the Civil War Era. She will explain how and why Americans destroyed southern cities, plantations, forests, and men, and how both soldiers and civilians responded to these different kinds of ruins between 1861 and 1900. Dr. Nelson will also talk about the importance that letters and diaries of New Englanders play in her research, with examples drawn from the collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society.

Nelson received five fellowships – including the Suzanne and Caleb Loring Fellowship in the Study of the Civil War and the New England Regional Fellowship Consortium Award – to support the research and writing of Ruin Nation in 2008-2009 and has presented her work as part of the Boston Environmental History Seminar Series at the Massachusetts Historical Society (10 Februrary 2009) and the Weirding the War Conference at the University of Georgia.

This event is free and open to the public.