The 2021 Virginia Festival of the Book has confirmed it will host local historian Adrian Brettle, in a FREE virtual event on March 17 at 2PM, EST.
Brettle, a lecturer in history at Arizona State University, is author of Colossal Ambitions: Confederate Planning for a Post-Civil War World, which is a finalist for the 2021 Lincoln Prize, an annual award for a work that enhances the general public’s understanding of the Civil War Era. Colossal Ambitions explores how leading Confederate thinkers envisioned their post-war nation—its relationship with the United States, its place in the Americas, and its role in the global order. In this task, Brettle engages the perspectives not only of modern historians, but some of the most salient theorists of the nineteenth century. He concludes that while some Confederate commentators interpreted wartime industrialization as pointing towards a different economic future, most Confederates saw their society as revolving around coercive labor, staple crop production, and exports in the war’s wake.
According to New Statesman critic Professor Brendan Simms of Cambridge University, Colossal Ambitions is “stupendous” and he nominates it as a book of the year in 2020 because it tackles the “geopolitics of race” in “an engrossing investigation into the scale, but in some ways also the startling modernity, of the South’s territorial ambitions” during the American Civil War.
Brettle will participate in the event “Confederate Ambitions: Flawed Visions for a New Nation”, hosted by the Nau Center for Civil War History at the University of Virginia. Sharing their deep research into rich caches of published and unpublished letters and diaries, Confederate national and state government documents, newspapers published in North America and Europe, convention proceedings, pamphlets, and more, the panelists will be discussing a Confederate nation world view. Brettle will be joined by Ann Tucker, author of Newest of Nations: European Nationalist Movements and the Making of the Confederacy. Specific information about the event can be found at VaBook.org.
# # #
About the Virginia Festival of the Book:
A signature program of Virginia Humanities and the Virginia Center for the Book, the Virginia Festival of the Book brings readers and writers together for author readings, panel discussions, programs for children, and more. The 27th annual Virginia Festival of the Book will take place virtually, March 13-26, 2021. To learn about Festival programming, visit VaBook.org.
About Virginia Humanities:
Virginia Humanities is the state humanities council. We aim to share the stories of all Virginians—or, better yet, find ways for people to share their own stories. We want to connect Virginians with their history and culture and, in doing that, help us all get to know each other a little better. We are headquartered in Charlottesville at the University of Virginia but our work covers the Commonwealth. To learn more visit VirginiaHumanities.org.