The Lincoln Memorial Shrine welcomes Megan Kate Nelson, PhD on Saturday, January 11, 2025 at 11am in the Assembly Room of A.K. Smiley Public Library and on Zoom. Dr. Nelson’s program, “The American Civil War in the Desert Southwest,” will explain why and how the desert Southwest—New Mexico, Arizona, and southern California—became an important site of conflict between U.S. soldiers, Confederate Texans, and Indigenous peoples during the American Civil War.
In the summer of 1861, Confederate troops invaded New Mexico from Texas, hoping to conquer that territory and then launch a campaign to win the entire West. Drawing on material from her book, The Three-Cornered War (a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History in 2021), Dr. Nelson will describe four phases of warfare in this often-overlooked theater, explaining how U.S. troops were able to push the Confederates back to Texas without winning a single battle. She will then talk about how, in the fall of 1862, U.S. troops under General James Henry Carleton turned their attention to extermination campaigns against Chiricahua Apaches and Navajos. She will introduce several of the protagonists in her book—including Carleton, Confederate officer John Baylor, and the Navajo civilian Juanita—and discuss several of the sources she used to write about their wartime actions and experiences.
This program is available courtesy of the Friends of A.K. Smiley Public Library and is free and open to the public. To view from home, please use this link on the day of the program: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81873723684?pwd=GEJxY2LiAl2G5Bn9DjaOCoLaRNQj4y.1. If you have any questions, please contact the Heritage Room at (909)798-7632 or heritage@akspl.org. Program subject to change.
About the Speaker…
Megan Kate Nelson is a historian and writer based in Boston, with a BA from Harvard and a PhD in American Studies from the University of Iowa. She is the author of four books, including Saving Yellowstone: Exploration and Preservation in Reconstruction America (Scribner 2022; winner of the 2023 Spur Award for Historical Non-Fiction) and The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West (Scribner 2020; 2021 Pulitzer Prize finalist in History). Dr. Nelson writes about the Civil War, the U.S. West, and American culture for The New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic, Smithsonian Magazine, Slate, and TIME. She is the 2024-2025 Rogers Distinguished Fellow in Nineteenth-Century American History at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California.
Due to scheduling conflicts, A.K. Smiley Public Library’s program commemorating Veterans Day has changed. Join us on Saturday, November 9 at 11am in the Assembly Room and on Zoom with a presentation by Smiley Library Director Don McCue. “Over There: Redlands Men in France,” will focus on Redlanders who served during World War I. From Cantigny and Belleau Wood to St. Mihiel and the Meuse Argonne, men from Redlands participated in all of America’s great 1918 battles and 40 would make the ultimate sacrifice.