Join Trexler Library on Tuesday, October 17th at 5:30 p.m. in the Level A Concourse as we welcome Dr. Michael Barton of Penn State-Harrisburg. Dr. Barton will be reading from
“Glorious Recollections: J. Howard Wert’s Lost History of the 209th Regiment, Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry, 1864-1865, including the Defense of Bermuda Hundred, the Battle of Fort Stedman and the Storming of Petersburg, with Additional Documents.”
Dr. Barton and his students have transcribed, edited, and compiled supporting documentation for Trexler Library’s previously unpublished Civil War regimental history, authored by historian, educator, collector, poet, and novelist John Howard Wert (1841-1920).
Prof. Barton received his doctorate in American Civilization at the University of Pennsylvania and was a faculty member in the American Studies program at the Harrisburg campus of Penn State University for over four decades. He has been a Fulbright professor at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark and an invited lecturer in fifteen countries.
His Civil War scholarship includes the books Goodmen: The Character of Civil War Soldiers (Penn State, 1981), The Civil War Soldier: A Historical Reader (NYU, 2002), co-edited with Prof. Larry Logue, and The Civil War Veteran: A Historical Reader (NYU, 2007) also co-edited with Logue. He and his students and co-editors have recently published The Civil War Memoir of Sgt. Christian Lenker, 19th Ohio Volunteers (Xlibris, 2014), Noble Sentiments of the Soul: The Civil War Letters of Joseph Dobbs Bishop, Chief Musician, 23rd Connecticut Volunteer Infantry, 1862-1863 (Xlibris, 2015), and, Glorious Recollections: J. Howard Wert’s Lost History of the 209th Regiment, Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry, 1864-1865 . . . . (Xlibris, 2016).
During the sesquicentennial of the Civil War, Prof. Barton was a co-organizer of a scholarly symposium on the US Colored Troops, held in conjunction with the reenactment of the USCT Grand Review in Harrisburg. Recently he was in charge of a symposium on Paul Kahan’s new biography of Simon Cameron, held at the Historical Society of Dauphin County, Cameron’s city home from 1865 to 1889. Barton has also been a member of the Advisory
Council of the National Civil War Museum in Harrisburg.
A website he supervises contains the journals that Charles Rawn kept from 1830 to 1865; Rawn was an anti-slavery attorney, elderly soldier, and Harrisburg draft board member. Another of Barton’s websites, old8thward.com, contains research articles, photographs and maps from a neighborhood that was a playground for Civil War soldiers from nearby Camp Curtin.
This event is open to members of the Muhlenberg community and members of the public. Refreshments will be served.
