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The New York Times’ current entry on the publication’s Civil War blog is the work of James L. Ferguson Professor of History Maurice Isserman. Titled “From the Playing Field to the Battlefield,” the article reveals that during the war, the majority of Hamilton students participated on both the Union and Confederate sides and that many perished.

James Robbins came to Hamilton to talk about someone no Hamilton student wants to be: the individuals last in their class. Robbins was talking in particular about the “Goats,” men who graduated last in their class from West Point and ended up fighting in the Civil War. He drew extensively from his book, Last in their Class: Custer, Pickett and the Ghosts of West Point (2006) in providing an often-humorous overview of America's most famous Goats.

February 22 was the 150th anniversary of Jefferson Davis's announcement of the Confederate cabinet and Abraham Lincoln's enunciation of his goals for America at a speech in Philadelphia. It was also the date on which Yale University Professor David Blight visited Hamilton to present a retrospective on American views of the Civil War. By examining a pair of 20th century authors who wrote on the topic, Blight illustrated long-term trends on the way Americans think about the Civil War and the nation.

David W. Blight, the Class of 1954 Professor of American History and director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University, will lecture on Tuesday, Feb. 22, at 7 p.m., in the Hamilton College Chapel. The title of his talk is “The Civil War in Modern Memory: Robert Penn Warren and James Baldwin at the Centennial.” The lecture, sponsored by Hamilton’s History Department, is free and open to the public.