Lesley J. Gordon

• 1. Introduction

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  Lesley J. Gordon has spent her career picking apart a myth built by a grieving widow. After Confederate general George E. Pickett died, his wife LaSalle Pickett spent more than fifty years on the lecture circuit talking about him. Gordon, an American military historian who studies the Civil War, wanted to know what was true beneath those decades of speeches. What makes a scholar spend years testing a story built one lecture at a time? And how far did her research into the Civil War end up reaching beyond Pickett?

• 2. From Connecticut To Alabama

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  Gordon attended East Granby High School in East Granby, Connecticut, before heading to the College of William & Mary to study history. She earned her PhD at the University of Georgia, then taught at Murray State University and the University of Akron. In 2016, she succeeded George C. Rable as the Charles G. Summersell Professor of Southern History at the University of Alabama. Her scholarship on the war's most persistent myths was still ahead of her.

• 3. Unmaking A Confederate Legend

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  George E. Pickett earned his lasting fame for a failed charge at the Battle of Gettysburg. He became the subject of Gordon's first book in 1998. Gordon argued that Pickett's image as a tragic hero of the Lost Cause was largely built by his wife rather than earned in battle. In her account, his actual military achievements were more modest than the legend suggested. Reviewers described the book as "well-written and exhaustively researched," and praised it for its attention to women's roles during the period. Her attention next turned to a full-length survey of the war written for the classroom.

• 4. Beyond The Pickett Book

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  This Terrible War, published in 2003, is a Civil War textbook Gordon co-wrote with Daniel E. Sutherland and Michael Fellman. The book is now in its third edition and still introduces students to the war. A Broken Regiment, released in 2014, traces the record of the 16th Connecticut Infantry Regiment. Gordon also edited and contributed to several edited volumes, and for a time edited the journal Civil War History. That editorial experience would resurface later, at a different press entirely.

• 5. A Genealogy Surprise

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  In 2017, Gordon appeared on the American version of Who Do You Think You Are?, a genealogy documentary series. On the show, she told actor Noah Wyle that one of his ancestors had fought in the Confederate Army. That on-camera moment brought her academic specialty to a very different kind of audience.

• 6. New Chapters

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  In 2022, Gordon became chair of the editorial board of the University of Alabama Press. Her most recent listed work, Dread Danger: Cowardice and Combat in the American Civil War, is set for release in 2025 through Cambridge University Press. That title, focused on cowardice under fire, hints she is still testing an old gap. It is the space between how soldiers were remembered and how they behaved in the field.