The Genesee Community College History Club will kick off its Historical Horizons Lecture Club will kick off its Historical Horizons Lecture Series on for the 2023 spring semester on Wednesday, February 1. All events begin at 7 p.m. and will be held in room T102 of the Conable Technology Building on the Batavia Campus. Events are free and open to the public.
On February 1, Dr. Nicole Eustace, professor of history at New York University, will discuss “Murder and Mercy on the Susquehanna: Captain Civility of Conestoga Teaches Pennsylvania Colonists Native Principles of Justice.” When a pair of colonial Pennsylvania fur traders fought with a Native American hunter and left him for dead in 1722, rival investigations by Indigenous leaders of multiple Native nations, colonial officials from several colonies, and members of the British Board of Trade resulted in fierce debates about the true nature of justice. Whereas settler colonists confronting criminal offences emphasized legal retribution against individuals, Indigenous peoples believed in economic restitution, emotional reconciliation, and social reintegration of the whole community.
Dr. Eustace is the author of Covered with Night: A Story of Murder and Indigenous Justice in Early America, winner of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in history, the Francis Parkman Prize and a finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction.
On Wednesday, March 1, Dr. Brian Matthew Jordan will discuss “Marching Home: Union Veterans and Their Unending Civil War.” For well over a century, traditional Civil War histories have concluded in 1865, with a bitterly won peace and Union soldiers returning triumphantly home. In a landmark work that challenges sterilized portraits accepted for generations, Jordan creates an entirely new narrative. These veterans tending rotting wounds, battling alcoholism, campaigning for paltry pensions tragically realized that they stood as unwelcome reminders to a new America eager to heal, forget and embrace the freewheeling bounty of the Gilded Age.
Dr. Jordan is an Assistant Professor of History and Director of Graduate Studies in History at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas, where he teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on the American Civil War, Reconstruction, and the philosophy of history. Marching Home received the Governor John Andrew Award of the Union Club of Boston and was a finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in History.
On Wednesday, April 19, Dr. Marla Segol and Dan Hamner will discuss “The Wedding of the Waters and Grand Celebration of the Opening of the Erie Canal: the history of ritual and the ritual of history.” Nearly two hundred years ago, the Erie canal was opened with a month-long aquatic processional and series of celebrations led by a flotilla of barges, steam galleys, and other boats who were met along the way by local parades, ceremonies, and fireworks, culminating in a “Wedding of the Waters.” The ceremony mixed mythic imagery, masonic symbolism, and a new vision of a prosperous American future. This lecture will explore the political purpose of the ritual, the elements of its performance, and how they worked together to transform people and place.
Dr. Segol is a University at Buffalo Professor and Scholar in Religious Studies and Hamner is a historian and Genesee Community College Adjunct Professor of History. In this discussion of the “Wedding of the Waters,” they marry their own disciplines of history and religion for a deep dive into the importance and the meaning of this ritual.
On Wednesday, May 3, Associate Professor Derek D. Maxfield will discuss “Man of Fire: William Tecumseh Sherman in the Civil War.” Sherman has been accused of “studied and ingenious cruelty.” By turns he has been called a savior and a barbarian, a hero and a villain, a genius and a madman. Man of Fire: William Tecumseh Sherman in the Civil War tells the story of a man who found himself in war – and that, in turn, secured him a place in history. A brief book talk by Maxfield will be followed by a panel discussion with authors of the appendices of the book, including Jess Maxfield, Associate Professor Tracy Ford, and Associate Professor Michael Gosselin.
Derek Maxfield is an associate professor of history at Genesee Community College in Batavia. Author of Hellmira: The Union’s Most Infamous Civil War Prison Camp – Elmira, NY, Maxfield has written for Emerging Civil War since 2015. In 2019 he was honored with the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching and in 2013 he was awarded the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities.
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