The public is invited to “Union Demobilization and the Meaning of Peace in the Wake of America’s Civil War,” a talk by Dr. Andrew Lang, author of In the Wake of War: Military Occupation, Emancipation, and Civil War, on Thursday, January 31 at 4:00 p.m. at the Caroline Marshall Draughon Center for the Arts & Humanities at Pebble Hill.

Throughout the Civil War citizen-soldiers confronted the complicated challenges of invading, occupying, and subduing hostile peoples. Drawing on firsthand accounts from these soldiers, Lang shows that many white volunteers equated their martial responsibilities with those of standing armies, which were viewed as corrupting institutions hostile to the republican military ethos. Additionally, with the advent of emancipation came the enlistment of African American troops into Union armies, facilitating an extraordinary change in how provisional soldiers interpreted military occupation. Black soldiers garrisoned regions defeated by Union armies and embraced occupation as a tool for destabilizing the South’s long-standing racial hierarchy. Ultimately traditional fears about the army’s role in peacetime society, grounded in suspicions of standing military forces and heated by a growing ambivalence about racial equality, governed the trials of Reconstruction.

Dr. Andrew Lang is currently an Assistant Professor and Off-Campus Recruiting Coordinator at Mississippi State University. He specializes in how nineteenth-century Americans understood and created warfare, particularly during the Civil War. He has published various articles about the Civil War as well as the book In the Wake of War: Military Occupation, Emancipation, and Civil War, winner of the Tom Watson Brown book award.

The event is free, open to the public, and will be followed by refreshments. Books will be available for purchase and signing. The Caroline Marshall Draughon Center for the Arts & Humanities at Pebble Hill is located at 101 S. Debardeleben Street, Auburn.

For more information on the program, call 334-844-4903 or visit www.auburn.edu/cah.