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When Jefferson Davis completed his book, The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government in 1881, he did not dedicate it to “officers and soldiers,” as Confederate Lieutenant General James Longstreet did. Nor did Davis dedicate his writings to “the memory of the dead” as Confederate Brigadier General E.P. Alexander did. Instead, when the former leader of the Confederacy completed his first book, he dedicated it to “The Women of the Confederacy” and their “enduring grief, love and reverence for our sacred dead.” Between 1861 and 1865, approximately three million men left for war, 750,000 died, and more than 200,000 women became widows. This lecture examines the complicated emotional and political relationships between Confederate widows and the Confederate state. Precisely because society invested widowhood with so much significance, it inadvertently created the stage upon which an unforeseen and unprecedented number of young Confederate women could be seen and heard. Presenter: Dr. Angela Esco Elder is an Assistant Professor of History at Converse College and the co-editor of Practical Strangers: The Courtship Correspondence of Nathaniel Dawson and Elodie Todd, Sister of Mary Todd Lincoln. She was the 2016-17 Virginia Center for Civil War Studies postdoctoral fellow at Virginia Tech. Cost: $25/$35 Coordinator: Freddie Flynt