Larissa Vigue Picard is certain of one thing when it comes to the Civil War Sesquicentennial Symposium coming up April 27 in Portland.

“I will guarantee you that Joshua Chamberlain’s name will be mentioned at this symposium, although we do not have a specific event that focuses on him. But this is 150 years after Gettysburg,” she said,

Chamberlain, the battling Civil War general from Maine, won the Medal of Honor for his performance and valor at Gettysburg in July 1863. His presence will be a big part of the conference, presented jointly by the Maine Historical Society and the Maine Humanities Council.

The event will focus on causes of the war, its personalities and its cultural components. The 3rd Maine Infantry Fife and Drums Corps will perform, and panelists will discuss the literature and the role of theater during the war. Another session will focus on the use of photography and how, for the first time, it was used as a tool for telling the story of war.

The conference is the first of three annual events marking the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, which occurred from 1861 to 1865. Maine Historical and Maine Humanities won a federal grant from the National Endowment for Humanities to fund the three-year initiative.

The conference also kicks off a statewide focus on the war that includes almost two dozen museum and historical societies partnering to create the Civil War trail (mainecivilwartrail.org), an online resource that lists all the Civil War activities happening in Maine.

“Our goal is to have a broad-based conference on the Civil War, why it matters to us 150 years later, how it resonates today, the causes and effects of the war,” said Picard, the historical society’s community partnership coordinator. “We’re going to look at the national picture, but focus on Maine.”

The Civil War still matters because “there are all sorts of issues that came up during the war that we are still grappling with today,” Picard said. “The issue of race is a major topic. The issue of how we think of war in general, and how we memorialize our dead, and veteran’s issues.”

Speakers include Manisha Sinha, professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, on emancipation during the Civil War, and Patrick Rael, associate professor of history at Bowdoin College in Brunswick (where Chamberlain was a student and later a professor and president), on Maine in the Civil War.

Session leaders are Libby Bischof, assistant professor of history at the University of Southern Maine; Cedric Gael Bryant, professor of English at Colby College in Waterville; Gretchen Long, chair of the Africana Studies Program at Williams College in Williamstown, Mass.; and Richard Sautter, a Pennsylvania Humanities Council Commonwealth speaker and theater instructor at Messiah College in Grantham, Pa.

As part of the grant from the National Endowment for Humanities, four communities won funding to produce a local history project related to the war for use on the historical society’s online museum, the Maine Memory Network. Those communities are Belfast, Presque Isle, Gorham-Windham, Portland and Westbrook. The latter two are working jointly on a project.

Maine Historical opens a year-long exhibition about the Civil War on June 27. The centerpiece is a memorial wall listing every Maine soldier who died or was wounded in the war.

“As far as we know, this is the first time all these soldiers’ names have been pulled together in one place,” Picard said.

The wall includes about 8,000 names, and is constructed with panels so it can be taken apart and moved around the state.

“This is our idea of the Vietnam memorial wall in Washington. People can come visit and find the names of soldiers and their family,” Picard said.

Staff Writer Bob Keyes can be contacted at 791-6457 or

bkeyes@pressherald.com

Twitter: pphbkeyes

 

 

 

 

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