Department of History

Historians refine their ideas and texts by sharing — “workshopping” — their work-in-progress chapters and articles with colleagues and graduate students in and beyond their fields. This History Workshop will feature a chapter from Sean Adams’ forthcoming book, Profiting From Poisoned Soil: The Economic Value of Land, Industry, and Civil War Memory in Virginia.

Participants are asked to read in advance one chapter, “Making Death and Destruction Pay: Spotsylvania’s Memory Landscape Emerges, 1865-1920,” a look at how this region recovered from significant destruction caused by four battles over three years, and where the “value” of battlefields became a rallying cry for local boosters in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. (For a copy of the paper, please email Nancy Hunt at nrhunt@ufl.edu.)

This 90-minute session will begin with remarks by two discussants:

Erin Mauldin is a professor of history at the University of South Florida. Her 2018 book published by Oxford University Press, “Unredeemed Land: An Environmental History of Civil War and Emancipation in the Cotton South,” received the 2019 Wiley-Silver Book Prize and was designated by CHOICE magazine as an ‘Outstanding Academic Title.’

William A. Link is Richard J. Milbauer Professor in Southern History at the University of Florida. We are delighted that Link, who recently announced his retirement, will comment on this paper in southern history. Professor Link has published extensively, including “Paradox of Southern Progressivism” (1992), “Roots of Secession” (2003), “Jesse Helms and the Rise of Modern Conservatism” (2008), “Atlanta, Cradle of the New South” (2013), and the two-volume “Southern Crucible” (2015). His 2021 book, “Frank Porter Graham Southern Liberal, Citizen of the World,” will be published shortly by the University of North Carolina Press.

Speaker Bio:

Sean Adams, the Hyatt and Cici Brown Professor of History, specializes in the history of energy and capitalism in America. His monographs include “Home Fires: How Americans Kept Warm in the 19th Century” (Johns Hopkins, 2014) and “Old Dominion, Industrial Commonwealth: Coal, Politics, and Economy in Antebellum America” (2004), and he has also been a prolific editor of “The American Coal Industry, 1789-1902” (2013); “A Companion to the Era of Andrew Jackson” (2013) and “The Early American Republic: A Documentary History” (2009).