The Klement Lecture brings to campus distinguished scholars in American history. Established in 1992 to honor Prof. Frank L. Klement, the lecture series was devoted originally to the history of the U.S. Civil War, but it now includes all fields of American history. Prof. Klement received his Ph.D. in History from the University of Wisconsin in 1946 and joined the history department at Marquette University in 1948. He served at Marquette for twenty-seven years before his retirement at the rank of professor emeritus, and he died in 1994 at the age of 86. Prof. Klement’s scholarship focused on the Civil War era, focusing on northern dissent. He is best remembered for his monographs The Copperheads in the Middle West (1960) and The Limits of Dissent: Clement L. Vallandigham and the Civil War (1970). Earlier lectures in the Klement series can be ordered from Marquette University Press, and Kent State University Press published several lectures in the 2008 volume More than a Contest Between Armies: Essays on the Civil War Era, edited by Kristen Foster and James Marten.
2021 - 2024
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2024 |
Dr. Hasia Diner, New York University The History of Jewish Students in American Catholic Universities |
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2023-2024 |
Felipe Hinojosa, Baylor University "Body & Spirit: Preachers, Radicals, and the Politics of the Latinx Civil Movement" |
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2021-2022 |
Wendy Bellion, University of Delaware “The Horse’s Tail: Iconoclasm in Revolutionary New York” |
2011 - 2020
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2019-2020 |
Caroline E. Janney, University of Virgina "Communities of Memory: Remembering the Civil War |
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2018-2019 |
Ned Blackhawk, Yale University “American Indians and the Remaking of U.S. Colonial History” |
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2017-2018 |
Kathleen M. Brown, University of Pennsylvania |
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2016-2017 |
Stephen Berry, University of Georgia |
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2015-2016 |
Gray Brechin, University of California, Berkeley "Recovering from Depression: The Living New Deal Project Uncovers a Lost Civilization Built Eighty Years Ago, And What We Can Learn from It Today.” |
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2014-2015 |
Frank Costigliola, University of Connecticut |
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2012-2013 |
Steven Hahn, Roy F. and Jeanette P. Nichols Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania |
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2011-2012 |
W. Fitzhugh Brundage, William B. Umstead Professor of History, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill Watch W. Fitzhugh Brundage deliver "The American Tradition of Torture" |
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2010-2011 |
Kevin Boyle, Ohio State University Watch Kevin Boyle deliver "The Splendid Dead: An American Ordeal" |
2001 - 2010
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2009-2010 |
Allen Guelzo, Gettysburg College "Colonel Utley’s Emancipation; or, How Abraham Lincoln Offered to Pay for a Slave” |
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2008-2009 |
Patricia Limerick, University of Colorado at Boulder "The Ownership of the Public Lands: The Romance of Local Control meets the Romance of Expertise" |
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2007-2008 |
Nina Silber, Boston University "Why Northern Women Matter for Understanding the Civil War" |
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2006-2007 |
Stephen Engle, Florida Atlantic University "All the President's Statesmen: Union Governors and the Civil War" |
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2005-2006 |
Lesley J. Gordon, Akron University "'I Never was a Coward': Questions of Bravery in a Civil War Regiment" |
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2004-2005 |
William Blair, Pennsylvania State University "Why didn't the North hang some rebels? The postwar debate over punishment for treason" |
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2003-2004 |
Joan Waugh, UCLA "Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant: A History of the Union Cause" |
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2002-2003 |
J. Matthew Gallman, University of Florida "'Touched with Fire?': Two Philadelphia Novelists Remember the Civil War" |
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2001-2002 |
David Blight, Yale University "Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass: A Relationship in Language, Politics, and Memory" |
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2000-2001 |
George Rable, University of Alabama "News from Fredericksburg" |
1992 - 2000
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1999-2000 |
Catherine Clinton, The Citadel "Public Women and the Confederacy" |
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1998-1999 |
Phillip Paludan, University of Kansas "War and Home: The Civil War Encounter" |
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1997-1998 |
Edward L. Ayers, University of Virginia "Momentous Events in Small Places: The Coming of the Civil War in Two American Communities" |
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1996-1997 |
John Y. Simon, Southern Illinois University "Grant and Halleck: Contrasts in Command" |
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1995-1996 |
Gary W. Gallagher, Pennsylvania State University "Jubal A. Early, The Lost Cause, and Civil War History" |
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1994-1995 |
Robert W. Johannsen, University of Illinois-Urbana/Champaign "The 'Wicked Rebellion' and the Republic: Henry Tuckerman's Civil War" |
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1993-1994 |
Richard Nelson Current, University of North Carolina at Greensboro "What Is An American? Abraham Lincoln and 'Multiculturalism'" |
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1992-1993 |
Mark E. Neely, Jr., St. Louis University "Confederate Bastille: Jefferson Davis and Civil Liberties" |
Department of History
Sensenbrenner Hall, 202A
1103 W. Wisconsin Avenue
Milwaukee, WI 53233
(414) 288-7217
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