The American Civil War in the Desert Southwest

Name: The American Civil War in the Desert Southwest
Start: 2025-03-01T11:00:00-08:00
Location: 125 W Vine St, Redlands, CA, United States, California 92373

Schedule

Sat, 01 Mar, 2025 at 11:00 am

UTC-08:00

Location

125 W Vine St, Redlands, CA, United States, California 92373 | Redlands, CA

After a postponement in January, the Lincoln Memorial Shrine will welcome Megan Kate Nelson, PhD on Saturday, March 1, 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.

Dr. Nelson is author of four books, including 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) and currently serves as the Rogers Distinguished Fellow in Nineteenth-Century American History at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. For more information on Dr. Nelson, visit News & Events at www.lincolnshrine.org.

A.K. Smiley Public Library is located at 125 W. Vine Street in Redlands. This program 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. Program subject to change.