Gary W. Gallagher

• 1. A War Misremembered

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  Gary W. Gallagher was born on the 8th of October 1950. He built his career on a premise that sits uncomfortably in American culture. The way a nation remembers its wars shapes how it understands itself. His books challenge received wisdom about both the Confederate and the Union experiences of the Civil War. They have earned wide recognition, from academic prizes to popular selections. Three questions run through his work. Why did Confederate soldiers fight? Why did Union soldiers fight? And how did Hollywood come to answer both so badly?

• 2. Adams State to Virginia

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  Adams State College granted Gallagher his undergraduate degree in 1972. He then studied at the University of Texas at Austin, earning a Master of Arts in 1977 and a doctorate in 1982. He joined the faculty at Pennsylvania State University in 1986 and remained there for twelve years. In 1998, he moved to the University of Virginia. As of 2024, he held the John L. Nau III Professorship in the History of the American Civil War. His publication record began before he joined Penn State's faculty in 1986 and runs to roughly a dozen books and edited volumes.

• 3. A Bookshelf in Both Directions

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  Stephen Dodson Ramseur: Lee's Gallant General, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1985, was Gallagher's first book. The History Book Club selected it.

  Lee and His Generals in War and Memory appeared in 1998, winning the Fletcher Pratt Award. Lee and His Army in Confederate History followed in 2001. Causes Won, Lost, and Forgotten came in 2008. It shifted his focus from battlefield command to popular culture, asking how films and art had distorted public memory of the war.

  Harvard University Press published The Confederate War in 1997. It became a finalist for the Lincoln Prize and won the Laney Prize in 1998. The Union War, also from Harvard, came in 2011. It won the Eugene Feit Award in Civil War Studies in 2011. The Tom Watson Brown Book Prize and the Laney Prize followed in 2012. The New York Times Book Review named The Union War an Editors' Choice.

  Gallagher co-authored The American War: A History of the Civil War Era with Joan Waugh in 2015. His most recent solo work, The Enduring Civil War, came from LSU Press in 2022. He also edited The Shenandoah Valley Campaign of 1864 with Alan T. Nolan for the University of North Carolina Press in 2009.

• 4. Twenty-Four Hours of History

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  The Great Courses gave Gallagher a platform beyond academic publishing. His series, titled The American Civil War, spans 48 lectures, each running 30 minutes, for a total of 24 hours. He both wrote and presented all of them. The lectures are available as video through The Great Courses and as audio through Audible.

  In 2021, the Lincoln Forum recognized his career with the Richard Nelson Current Award of Achievement. The lectures remain available in both formats, offering the argument he has spent decades making to anyone willing to listen.