Storytelling Series // Elizabeth Varon’s Latest Biography

×

Expand

Charleston Library Society

Storytelling Series // Elizabeth Varon’s Latest Biography

RESCHEDULED EVENT FROM MARCH 2024

The Library Society and Buxton Books are pleased to host renowned historian, Elizabeth Varon, of the Civil War era, for her latest release – the story of American history’s most remarkable political about-face.

Elizabeth Varon’s Longstreet is a bold new biography of the Confederate general whose support of constitutional rights for Black Americans after the Civil War enraged Southern critics and ignited a campaign to destroy his reputation. General James Longstreet fought tenaciously for the Confederacy. He was alongside Lee at Gettysburg (and counseled him not to order the ill-fated attacks on entrenched Union forces there). He won a major Confederate victory at Chickamauga and was seriously wounded during a later battle.

After the war, Longstreet dramatically changed course. He supported Black voting and joined the newly elected, integrated postwar government in Louisiana. When white supremacists took up arms to oust that government, Longstreet, leading the interracial state militia, did battle against former Confederates. His defiance ignited a firestorm of controversy, as white Southerners branded him a race traitor and blamed him retroactively for the South’s defeat in the Civil War.

Although he was one of the highest-ranking Confederate generals, Longstreet has never been commemorated with statues or other memorials in the South because of his postwar actions in rejecting the Lost Cause mythology and urging racial reconciliation.

Tickets: Members – $10 // General Admission – $15

If you purchased tickets for the event in March and did not receive a refund, your tickets are valid for this event. If you are unable to attend the new event date please call (843) 723-9912 for a refund.

To purchase, click here

or call 843.723.9912 during Box Office Hours

(11:00AM–4:00PM Monday through Thursday).

If you are unable to attend but would still like a (signed) copy of “Longstreet”, Click Here, or call Buxton Books at (843) 723-1670

About the Book:

LONGSTREET reintroduces Americans to one of the Civil War era’s best known, but least understood, figures. This is the first full biography in decades, and the first to give proper attention to Longstreet’s long post-Civil War political career. Longstreet’s unusual life illuminates both the transformative changes and the entrenched inequalities of the Civil War era. Longstreet is being rediscovered in the new age of racial reckoning. Varon, an acclaimed Civil War historian and author of the 2020 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize-winning book, Armies of Deliverance, demonstrates that Longstreet’s controversial choices have enduring relevance for our modern debates over American history.

About the Author:

Elizabeth R. Varon is Langbourne M. Williams professor of American history at the University of Virginia and a member of the executive council of UVA’s John L. Nau III Center for Civil War History. Varon’s books include Southern Lady, Yankee Spy: The True Story of Elizabeth Van Lew, A Union Agent in the Heart of the

Confederacy, and Appomattox: Victory, Defeat and Freedom at the End of the Civil War. Her most recent book, Armies of Deliverance: A New History of the Civil War, won the 2020 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize and was named one of The Wall Street Journal’s best books of 2019.