The National Park Service and the Arkansas Civil War Sesquicentennial Commission present a special symposium on the Civil War West of the Mississippi August 9-11 in Fayetteville, exploring one of the most fascinating yet least studied areas of the war. Topics include the vital issues that were at stake and the Civil War experiences of people living west of the Mississippi River, including Arkansas. Nationally known scholars from across the country will offer presentations on the war, life on the home front, and the experiences of the diverse peoples of the Trans-Mississippi. The symposium also will include guided tours of Pea Ridge National Military Park and Prairie Grove Battlefield State Park.

Registration for the symposium is $25, and you can click here for registration information.

Speakers will include:

• Dwight T. Pitcaithley, Professor, New Mexico State University & former NPS chief historian

Dwight T. Pitcaithley is a College Professor of History at New Mexico State University. He retired from the National Park Service in 2005 as its Chief Historian, a position he held for ten years. He is the coeditor of The Antiquities Act: A Century of American Archaeology, Historic Preservation, and Nature Conservation (2006) and has contributed chapters to Becoming Historians (2009), Slavery and Public History: The Tough Stuff of American Memory (2006), Preserving Western History (2005), Public History and the Environment (2004), Myth, Memory, and the Making of the American Landscape (2001), and Seeing and Being Seen: Tourism in the American West (2001). In 2005, the Organization of American Historians awarded him its Distinguished Service Award.

• Ernesto Chavez, Professor of History, University of Texas at El Paso

Chavez researches the ethnic Mexican past. In 2002 the University of California Press published his book Mi Raza Primero! (My People First): Nationalism, Identity, and Insurgency in the Chicano Movement in Los Angeles, 1966-1978. He recently completed a book for Bedford/St. Martin's Culture and History Series on the U.S. Mexico War. Chavez's next project is critical biography of silent film actor Ramón Novarro tentatively titled "Crossing the Boundaries of Race, Religion, and Desire: The Life of Ramón Novarro.

• Steven E. Woodworth, Professor of History, Texas Christian University

Steven Woodworth received his BA degree from Southern Illinois University in 1982 and his Doctorate from Rice University in 1987. He has taught at several colleges and has been at TCU since 1997. He is the author, co-author or editor of 30 books on the Civil War, including Jefferson Davis and His Generals, Davis and Lee at War, Six Armies in Tennessee, A Scythe of Fire, Beneath the Northern Sky, Nothing But Victory: The Army of the Tennessee, 1861-1865, While God is Marching On, Sherman and Manifest Destinies: America's Westward Expansion and the Road to the Civil War. He is a two-time winner of the Fletcher Pratt Award of the New York City Round Table.

• Daniel Sutherland, Distinguished Professor of History, University of Arkansas

Daniel E. Sutherland received his Ph.D. in history from Wayne State University in 1976. He taught at Wayne State University, Mercy College of Detroit, the University of Alabama, and McNeese State before coming to the University of Arkansas. His principal area of research in nineteenth-Century America. He has written eight books and edited five others. He has published over forty book chapters and articles in both popular magazines and scholarly journals. He has received over thirty honors, awards, and research grants. Five of his books have been selected by the History Book Club.

• Jerry Thompson, Regents Professor, Texas A&M International University

Thompson is Regent’s Professor of History at TAMIU and considered one of the nation’s top authorities on the Civil War. The author of over 20 books, he is a past president of the Texas State Historical Association. He holds a doctorate from Carnegie-Mellon University and has received numerous awards from the Texas Historical Commission, Western Writers of America, Texas State Historical Association, Historical Society of New Mexico, and Arizona Historical Society. He was a recipient of a 2009 Texas A&M University System’s Teaching Excellence Award, a voluntary, student-selected honors program and was just named a recipient of The Texas A&M University System’s 2010 Chancellor’s Teaching Award. The TIL awarded him the Best Scholarly Book Published in 2006 award for his “Civil War to the Bloody End: The Life and Times of Major General Samuel P. Heintzelman.” His recent biography, Cortina: Defending the Mexican Name in Texas, is thought to be the definitive study of Juan Nepomuceno Cortina and has won numerous awards. Thompson’s latest book, Tejanos in Gray: Civil War Letters of Captains Joseph Rafael de la Garza and Manuel Yturri, documents the Tejano Civil War experience through period letters. The book will be available at the TAMIU Bookstore. Additional information is available at tamupress.com

• Wilma King, Strickland Professorship in African American History and Culture, University of Missouri-Columbia

Wilma King holds the Strickland Professorship in African American History and Culture at the University of Missouri-Columbia. She is the author of Stolen Childhood: Slave Youth in Nineteenth-Century America (2nd edition, 2011), The Essence of Liberty: Free Black Women During the Slave Era (2006), and African American Childhoods: Historical Perspectives from Slavery to Civil Rights (2005).

• Bradley R. Clampitt, Assistant Professor of History, East Central University

Dr. Bradley Clampitt, Assistant Professor of History at East Central University, was a visiting assistant professor of history at Texas A&M University. He taught history classes as a teaching fellow at the University of North Texas from 2001 to 2006 and was a teaching assistant at UNT from 1999 to 2001. Clampitt has a book manuscript about the Civil War under review with a university press and has had several articles published in professional refereed journals. He received a bachelor's degree from ECU in 1997 and master's and doctoral degrees from UNT where he was named the College of Arts and Sciences Teaching Fellow of the Year in 2005-06 and UNT's outstanding master's student in 2000-01 and doctoral student in 2002-03 and 2004-05.

• Carl Moneyhon, Professor of History, University of Arkansas at Little Rock

Dr. Moneyhon joined the faculty in 1973 and holds a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. He is faculty liaison with the University History Institute, an organization that develops closer ties between the department and the community. He also serves on the editorial boards of the Arkansas Historical Quarterly and the Encyclopedia of Arkansas History and Culture. He was won the UALR Faculty Excellent Award for Research and the UALR Faculty Excellence Award for Teaching. Dr. Moneyhon is a specialist in the history of the American Civil War and the South and is widely published in the field. His work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, and he recently received one of the first College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences Summer Fellowships for Research. He is a Fellow of the Texas Historical Association. He is working on a book on the connection of war-time experience and developed identity among Confederate soldiers.

• Linda Reed, Associate Professor, The University of Houston

Dr. Linda Reed is a noted scholar in African American history, with a particular interest in women and the South. She also served nine years as the Director of the University of Houston's African American Studies Program at the University of Houston. Between 2001 and 2003, Dr. Reed was the National Director for the Association of Black Women Historians. She has received fellowships from the University of North Carolina, the University of Michigan, the Ford Foundation, and Princeton University. She received her Ph.D. from Indiana University, Bloomington.

• William C. Davis, Professor of History, Virginia Tech

William C. Davis, a native of Independence, Missouri, was educated in northern California, then spent twenty years in editorial management in the magazine and book publishing industry, before leaving in 1990 to spend the next ten years working as a writer and consultant. He is the author or editor of more than fifty books in the fields of Civil War and Southern history, as well as numerous documentary screenplays. He was the on-camera senior consultant for 52 episodes of the Arts & Entertainment Network/History Channel series "Civil War Journal," as well as a number of other productions on commercial and Public Television, as well as for the BBC abroad, and has acted as historical consultant for several television and film productions, including "The Blue and the Gray," "George Washington," and "The Perfect Tribute." He is the only three-time winner of the Jefferson Davis Award given for book-length works in Confederate History. His most recent book is The Pirates Laffite: The Treacherous World of the Corsairs of the Gulf published in 2005 by Harcourt. Davis has come to Virginia Tech as Director of Programs for the new Virginia Center for Civil War Studies, as well as serving as Professor of History. In coming to Virginia he is in a way returning to his roots, since his Davis ancestors settled in nearby Carroll and Grayson Counties some 200 years ago, and virtually all of his ancestry goes back in the Old Dominion, some as far as 1608.

• Mary Jane Warde, Independent Historian

The conference hotel is the Holiday Inn Express and Suites at 1251 N. Shiloh Dr. in Fayetteville, with rooms available for $77 per night. To make reservations, call (479) 444-6006.