"Richmond Burning" Author to Deliver Peple Lecture at University of Richmond
February 3, 2004
Nelson Lankford, author of "Richmond Burning: The Last Days of the Confederate Capital," will deliver the 15th annual Edward C. and Mary S. Peple Library Lecture at the University of Richmond Feb. 24.
Sponsored by Friends of Boatwright Memorial Library, the talk will begin at 7:30 p.m. at Jepson Alumni Center. It is free and open to the public. A book signing and reception will follow.
"Richmond Burning," an account of the end of the Civil War in Virginia's capital city, provides unforgettable scenes of Jefferson Davis and his cabinet fleeing Richmond, Abraham Lincoln sailing up the James River to the Confederate White House and Robert E. Lee returning from Appomattox. The book was a nonfiction finalist for the Library of Virginia's annual literary award in 2003.
Lankford is editor of the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, the quarterly journal of the Virginia Historical Society, where he also is director of publications and scholarship.
Lankford's next book, provisionally titled "Cry Havoc: How Civil War Came to America," will examine the last weeks of peace in 1861 between Lincoln's inauguration and the beginning of the war.
His most recent two books before "Richmond Burning" concern Pvt. Robert Knox Sneden, a New York map maker and prisoner of war during the Civil War, who kept diaries and drew extensive watercolors of the war.
The first, which Lankford co-edited with Charles F. Bryan Jr., is "Eye of the Storm," which presents Sneden's rich, eyewitness account of a Union soldier's life in Virginia and inside prisoner of war camps. It has been called one of the most important Civil War documents published since U.S. Grant's "Personal Memoirs."
The second, related book, "Images from the Storm," edited with Bryan and James C. Kelly, presents along with commentary from Sneden's memoir 300 of the 900 watercolors and sketches he made of battles, graves, miles-long lines of infantry, cities under siege and life in prison camps in Richmond and Andersonville, Ga.
For further information, please call 289-8454.