Meeting Dates
The organization meets on the fourth Tuesday of each month September through May. Meetings are held in the Williamsburg Regional Library Theatre located at 515 Scotland St in Williamsburg, VA, unless otherwise posted. The meetings begin at 7 PM. Membership is open to the general public.
This Month's Speaker
Join us for the next meeting of the Williamsburg Civil War Roundtable at the Williamsburg Public Library Theatre at 7 PM on Tuesday, October 24, 2017.
On October 24, 2017, Dennis Frye will present “Did McClellan
out-think Lee during the first Confederate invasion?”
We often laugh when we think of George McClellan. We enjoy making
McClellan the Union's whipping boy. McClellan, himself, brings little
sympathy to his cause. Full of bravado, often arrogant, and sometimes
insubordinate, McClellan is the general we like to dislike. We chuckle
when he claimed, following the first invasion of the North, that it was
the second time he had saved the North.
Yet when Robert E. Lee was asked after the war who was the best Union
general he faced, he responded with George McClellan.
Was McClellan as incompetent and ineffective as history has branded him?
Discover some answers as we ask: "Did McClellan out-think Lee
during the 1st invasion?"
Dennis E. Frye is the Chief Historian at Harpers Ferry National
Historical Park. Writer, lecturer, guide, and preservationist, Dennis is
a prominent Civil War historian. Dennis has numerous appearances on PBS,
The History Channel, The Discovery Channel, C-SPAN, Fox News, A&E, and
Voice of America as a guest historian. He helped produce Emmy
award-winning television features on the Battle of Antietam,
abolitionist John Brown, and Maryland during the Civil War. Dennis is
one of the nation’s leading Civil War battlefield preservationists.
He is co-founder and first president of the Save Historic Antietam
Foundation, and he is co-founder and a former president of today’s Civil
War Trust, from whom he received the Trust’s highest honor - the Shelby
Foote Award. Dennis also earned the prestigious Nevins-Freeman
Award for his lifetime achievements in the Civil War community. Dennis
is a tour guide in demand, leading tours for organizations such as the
Smithsonian, National Geographic, numerous colleges and universities,
and Civil War Round Tables. Dennis also is a well-known author,
with 98 articles and nine books. Harpers Ferry Under Fire
received the national book of the year award from the Association of
Partners for Public Lands; and September Suspense: Lincoln’s Union
in Peril, was awarded the 2012 Laney Book Prize for distinguished
scholarship and writing on the military and political history of the
war. Dennis has written for prestigious Civil War magazines such
as Civil War Times Illustrated, America’s Civil War, Blue & Gray
Magazine, North and South Magazine, and Hallowed Ground, and as a guest
contributor to the Washington Post. Dennis resides near the
Antietam Battlefield in Maryland, and he and his wife Sylvia have
restored the home that was used by General Burnside as his post-Antietam
headquarters.
Winner of the 2017 scholarship essay is Kyle Mastracci from York High School. (view essay)
Visit the Williamsburg Battlefield Association (view
newsletter)
(http://www.williamsburgbattlefieldassociation.org/)
(https://www.facebook.com/WilliamsburgBattlefieldAssociation)