History Book Festival to host talk with Donald Miller Oct. 29
Historian Donald L. Miller will join a live online discussion at 5 p.m., Thursday, Oct. 29, of his book on a pivotal event in the Civil War, “Vicksburg: Grant’s Campaign that Broke the Confederacy,” presented by the History Book Festival, via Zoom.
The surrender of Vicksburg, Miss., to Union forces July 4, 1863, opened the Mississippi River to Union commerce and severed the Confederacy, isolating the slave states of Arkansas and Texas and part of Louisiana. It ignited a social revolution in Mississippi and eastern Louisiana that culminated in the violent overthrow of plantation slavery. The victory elevated Ulysses S. Grant to command of all Union armies and sent him east to take on Robert E. Lee.
Miller is the John Henry MacCracken Professor of History Emeritus at Lafayette College and author of 10 books, including “City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America,” which became a multi-part series on PBS that received four Emmy nominations. Four of Miller’s other books have been made into nationally aired, award-winning films. “Masters of the Air,” about the U.S. Army’s Eighth Air Force during World War II, is set to be made into a television miniseries by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks.
A. Wilson Greene will interview Miller. Greene is a Civil War historian and author who served as director of the Association for the Preservation of Civil War Sites, as well as director of Pamplin Historical Park and the National Museum of the Civil War Soldier in Petersburg, Va. His most recent book is “A Campaign of Giants: The Battle for Petersburg Volume 1: From the Crossing of the James to the Battle of the Crater.”
This Zoom event is free but registration is required. For more information and to register, go to historybookfestival.org and click on 2020 Events.
The 2020 Virtual History Book Festival is presented in cooperation with the Lewes Public Library and sponsored by Delaware Humanities and the Lee Ann Wilkinson Group.
Copies of “Vicksburg” with signed archival bookplates are available from the festival’s official bookseller, Browseabout Books in Rehoboth Beach. Biblion in Lewes also has copies. To borrow and arrange pickup from the Lewes Public Library, call 302-645-2733 or email lewes.library@gmail.com.
