UNH Today

A lecture by J. William Harris on the Civil War will air on C-SPAN 3 on Saturday, Dec. 9 at 8 p.m. and midnight ET.

A C-SPAN crew filmed the class meeting at UNH earlier this semester. Harris, a professor of history, lectured on Abraham Lincoln, the Civil War Battle of Antietam and the issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1862. The lecture was part of Harris’ Civil War Era course.

The program will be available online for viewing on the C-SPAN website immediately after airing.? A podcast will be available starting on Dec. 12.?

The lecture appears as part of the Lectures in History series on C-SPAN's American History TV, which airs for 48 hours each weekend on C-SPAN 3 from 8 a.m. Saturday to 8 a.m. Sunday ET. American History TV programming also airs in the evenings on C-SPAN 3 when the U.S. Congress is out of session. The Lectures in History series airs every Saturday at 8 p.m. and midnight ET.

The series allows viewers to take a peek inside college classrooms around the country on a weekly basis to hear lectures on a variety of American history topics. Viewers have responded positively to the series, says producer Russell Logan, and the Lectures in History page at the American History TV website is the most visited.

Logan says that C-SPAN invited Harris to be part of the series because he is a former Pulitzer Prize nominee and a noted professor, adding “…everyone we tape for Lectures in History is recommended in some way, be it by a fellow professor?or by a C-SPAN producer who saw the person at another event we covered, or because they are particularly distinguished in some way like Professor Harris.”

Harris specializes in the history of the American South, the Civil War and African American history. He is the author of “The Hanging of Thomas Jeremiah: A Free Black Man's Encounter with Liberty,” “The Making of the American South: A Short History, 1500-1877,” and “Deep Souths: Delta, Piedmont, and Sea Island Society in the Age of Segregation,” which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History, co-winner of the Organization of American Historians' James A. Rawley Prize, and winner of the Agricultural History Society's Theodore Saloutos Memorial Book Prize.

This is the second UNH classroom lecture that has been covered by C-SPAN. Political science professor Andrew Smith’s lecture on the History of the New Hampshire Primaries aired in September 2011.