Tim Williams is an assistant professor of history at the Robert D. Clark Honors College, University of Oregon, and the recipient of a 2018 Earhart Fellowship from the Clements Library. His work deals with the intellectual and cultural history of the American South in the Civil War era. 

As many as 420,000 men were imprisoned during the American Civil War. Both Union and Confederate prisons were filthy, mismanaged, and deadly. Yet they were also places where captured soldiers thought about the meaning of the war and their role in it. This was especially the case in Union prisons for Confederate soldiers. In this talk, Williams will show how captured prisoners’ dispositions to think and reflect also led them to record their own memories. In the process, they assembled a vast, useable archive of Confederate reminiscences that have had a lasting effect on popular understandings of the Civil War to the present day.