On June 19th, the National Civil War Museum in Harrisburg is proud to provide a community-free day with activities and entertainment for the community, completely free of charge to visitors.
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Museum guests will enjoy special presentations, children's activities, and a living history encampment.
10:00 AM - 4:00 PM
Coloring Activity Station
Period Clothing Station for children & adults to try on garments and take selfies
10:00 AM, 1:00 PM & 3:00 PM: *Living History Encampment -Thompson's Battery C
Museum visitors will see the flash and smell the smoke of Civil War muskets and rifles. Visitors are encouraged to visit the camps and ask living historians questions about their attire, food rations, and daily life.
Presentations (Times to be Determined)
Alaina Roberts - "Black Slaves & Indian Masters: A New Story of Reconstruction in the West"
In this presentation, Alaina E. Roberts will discuss the history of Black slave-owning among the Five Tribes (the Chickasaw, Choctaw, Cherokee, Creek, and Seminole Nations) and the Reconstruction project the United States enforced in Indian Territory (Oklahoma), which ended with the Black people in this region becoming the only group of former slaves in the world to receive reparations in the form of land.
Bio: Alaina E. Roberts is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research focuses on the intersection of African American and Native American history from the nineteenth century to the modern-day with particular attention to identity, settler colonialism, and anti-Blackness. In addition to her first book, I’ve Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021), her writing has appeared in the Washington Post, the Journal of the Civil War Era, and the Western Historical Quarterly.
Dorothy Wickenden - "The Agitators"
From the intimate perspective of three friends and neighbors in mid-nineteenth century Auburn, New York—Harriet Tubman, Frances Seward, and Martha Wright, the “agitators” of the title—acclaimed author Dorothy Wickenden tells the fascinating and crucially American stories of abolition, the Underground Railroad, the early women’s rights movement, and the Civil War. Beginning two decades before the Civil War, when Harriet Tubman was still enslaved and Martha and Frances were young women bound by law and tradition, The Agitators ends two decades after the war, in a radically changed United States. Wickenden brings this extraordinary period of our history to life through the richly detailed letters her characters wrote several times a week.
Bio: Dorothy Wickenden is the author of Nothing Daunted and The Agitators, and has been the executive editor of The New Yorker since January 1996. She also writes for the magazine and is the moderator of its weekly podcast The Political Scene. A former Nieman Fellow at Harvard, Wickenden was national affairs editor at Newsweek from 1993-1995, and before that was the longtime executive editor at The New Republic. She lives with her husband in Westchester, New York.
Deb Willis - “Reading the Image of the Black Civil War Soldier”
Bio: Deborah Willis, Ph.D., is a University Professor and Chair of the Department of Photography & Imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. She is the recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is the author of The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship and Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present, among others. Professor Willis’s curated exhibitions include: "Let Your Motto Be Resistance: African American Portraits” at the International Center of Photography; Out of Fashion Photography: Framing Beauty at the Henry Art Gallery and "Reframing Beauty: Intimate Moments" at Indiana University.
*Program is weather contingent. Visitors should check back for updates to this schedule, as they are subject to change.