I did have a clear idea of what i wanted the symposium to be. A blend of wellknown speakers. Blended with excellent lesserknown speakers who you should want to know well and will want to know well and have them speak about their Exciting New Research and their contributions to civil war scholarship. I stumbled on a title and a gimmick using the year 2020. As a way of providing hindsight and insight into the study of the civil war. With that concept in mind, i want to introduce our first speaker who was an obvious choice to lead off this conference. Jack davis has been one of the most prominent and accomplished civil war scholars for several generations. He started as a boy, i think. If i recall correctly, his first civil war book, a biography of John C Breckenridge he wrote as a college student. He won the first of four awards. You will find a partial list of titles of his civil war books in your program. Jack was also a longtime editor of civil war times illustrated. And editor of the