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Join Jonathan W. White, associate professor of American Studies at Christopher Newport University, as he explores “Dreams of War and Peace: The Remarkable Night Life of Civil War Americans”

The Civil War placed new and unique strains on nineteenth-century Americans, and their nightly visions reflected those hardships.  Sometimes the war intruded on people’s slumber, vividly bringing to life the horrors of the conflict.  For others, nighttime was an escape from the hard realities of life and death in wartime.  

In this talk, professor White will explore what dreams meant to Civil War-era Americans, and how their dreams reveal that generation’s deepest longings—their hopes and fears, desires and struggles, and guilt and shame.  When Americans recorded their dreams in their diaries, letters and memoirs, they sought to make sense of the changing world around them, and to cope with the confusion, despair, and loneliness of life amid the turmoil of a war the likes of which they had never imagined.

After his talk, he will sign copies of his book which is available in the gift shop for $34.95--members enjoy a 10% discount!

The talk is free for museum members, $5 for non-members. Join to enjoy free lectures, concerts, exhibition previews, gift shop discounts and more! 

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Jonathan W. White is associate professor of American Studies at Christopher Newport University and is the author of several books, including Abraham Lincoln and Treason in the Civil War: The Trials of John Merryman, and Emancipation, the Union Army, and the Reelection of Abraham Lincoln, which was a finalist for both the Lincoln Prize and Jefferson Davis Prize, a “best book” in Civil War Monitor, and the winner of the Abraham Lincoln Institute’s 2015 book prize.  He has published more than seventy-five articles, essays and reviews, and is the winner of the 2005 John T. Hubbell Prize for the best article in Civil War History, the 2010 Hay-Nicolay Dissertation Prize, and the 2012 Thomas Jefferson Prize for his Guide to Research in Federal Judicial History (2010).  He is president of the Abraham Lincoln Institute, he serves on the Board of Directors of the Abraham Lincoln Association and the Lincoln Forum, the Board of Advisors of the John L. Nau III Center for Civil War History at the University of Virginia, and the Ford’s Theatre Advisory Council.  His most recent books include Lincoln on Law, Leadership and Life (2015), Midnight in America: Darkness, Sleep, and Dreams during the Civil War (2017), and “Our Little Monitor”: The Greatest Invention of the Civil War (2018), which he co-authored with Anna Gibson Holloway.  Check out his website at www.jonathanwhite.org/ or follow him on Twitter at @CivilWarJon