Momentous Events in Small Places: The Coming of the Civil War in Two American Communities

The Frank L. Klement Lectures: Alternative Views of the Sectional Conflict

by Edward L. Ayers

Edward L. Ayers received his PhD from Yale University in 1980 and since then has taught in the History Department at the University of Virginia, where he is now Hugh P. Kelly Professor of American History. A specialist on the history of the South, his books include Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment In the Nineteenth-Century American South (1984) and The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction (1992). The latter won the Frank L. and Harriet C. Owsley Award from the Southern Historical Association and the James Rawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians; it was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and for a National Book Award.

Ayers has also been recognized for his teaching. He has won several teaching awards at the University of Virginia, including the State Council of Higher Education in Virginia Outstanding Faculty Award. In 1995, he was John Adams Professor of American Studies at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands, under the auspices of the Fulbright Commission.

Ayers is currently at work on a major project linking digital technology with Civil War history. As one of the founders of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia, he is the director of the “Valley of the Shadow Project,” an ambitious Website and CD-ROM that will explore the Civil War era in two communities, one in Virginia and one in Pennsylvania. His Klement Lecture draws on those experiences.

39 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 1998

About the author

Edward Ayers is President Emeritus of the University of Richmond, where he now serves as Tucker-Boatwright Professor of the Humanities. Previously Dean of Arts and Sciences at the University of Virginia, where he began teaching in 1980, Ayers was named the National Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in 2003.

A historian of the American South, Ayers has written and edited 10 books. The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. In the Presence of Mine Enemies: Civil War in the Heart of America won the Bancroft Prize for distinguished writing in American history and the Beveridge Prize for the best book in English on the history of the Americas since 1492. He was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2013.

A pioneer in digital history, Ayers created "The Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War," a website that has attracted millions of users and won major prizes in the teaching of history. He serves as co-editor of the Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States at the University of Richmond's Digital Scholarship Lab and is a co-host of BackStory with the American History Guys, a nationally syndicated radio show and podcast.

Ayers has received a presidential appointment to the National Council on the Humanities, served as a Fulbright professor in the Netherlands, and been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences