, ranger at petersburg national battlefield, where we first met as park rangers many, many years ago. he is worked in manassas, vicksburg, and gettysburg. he will tackle the elephant in the room about gettysburg versus vicksburg, which one of these two battles he considers being a native mississippian and having worked at both parks, which he considers to be the biggest turning point. gettysburg or vicksburg? i will let matt get up here and explain. matt atkinson. [applause] matt: that s what it is. i understand you all had a row last night about something. right there, right? the most important battle, a top the top 10 battles in the american civil war, and gettysburg was left off. can you believe that? i want to tell you a quick story. i was invited down to a richmond roundtable. we were at the willow oaks country club. we had virginia ham. that is the only time they go out there. anyway, i was having a great time. i was in richmond and the man who did the top 10 last night
raffles going on. at your table you ve been given a note card that we would like you to write down a question for our panel this afternoon. if you have a question for them. and what i will do, i will take out the most objectionable ones. and then we ll proceed from there. but so if you find that and if you ve got a question, then write it down and we ll ask our wonderful speakers today. we ve also, at the break we re going to bring in my staff and we re going to have a chance to acknowledge them. and then our panel discussion is after lunch at 1:00. so that will be the end of our day. i really like our speaker s presentation title today, mission impossible, rethinking george b. mcclel an. after this conference i think it s more impossibler to do that. but dr. george rable, professor at the university of alabama where he held the care of southern history. he is the author of of a book that won the 2003 lincoln prize and was the choice outstanding academic title. his most rec
we ve also got some other raffles going on, and at your table you have been given a notecard that we would like you to write down a question for our panel this afternoon. if you have a question for them, and what i will do, i will take up the most objectionable ones [laughs] we ll proceed from there. but, so if you ve got a question, write it down, and we will ask our wonderful speakers today. we ve also at the break we are going to bring in my staff and we re going to have a chance acknowledge them. our panel discussion is after lunch at 1:00. so, that ll be the end of our day. i really like our speaker s presentation title today. mission impossible: rethinking george b. mcclellan. after what we ve heard so far in this conference, i think it is even more impossibler. dr. george rable is the professor emeritus at the university of alabama, roll tide. he held the charles sumner so chair of history. he is the author of fredericksburg, fredericksburg, which won a lincoln
columnist tom friedman, best selling authors j.d. vance and michael lewis, astronaut leland melvin and many others. now, for a complete schedule visit booktv.org, and you can follow us on social media for updates and behind-the-scenes videos. we re on facebook,visit facebook.com/booktv, @booktv is our twitter handle and on instagram, we re at book underscore tv.. this year s festival kicks off with librarian of congress carla haden making opening remarks, and she ll be followed immediately by author and historian david mccullough. you re watching booktv on c-span2 live from the 17th annual national book festival. [applause] wow, i was so worried [cheers and applause] i was so worried. it was raining [laughter] and i thought, book lovers are going to want to stay in bed concern. [laughter] and read. [laughter] well, here you are. thank you and good morning. [applause] and welcome to the 2017 national book festival. i m carla hayden, and i m so honored to be able to say
great depression, other gaps we had, and so i started plunging in the collection and i happened upon this is years ago works progress administration papers, the wpa in mississippi compiled county histories, and one of the topics was war. block. they were. that meant there was a lot more out there. in addition to looking at private collection at world war ii started reading county newspapers from all around the state. i did want to try to cover all areas of the state. i have succeeded to some degree but actually not as much as i d like to because some towns where i thought there would be letters to the editor about publication from the boys overseas were not any. there could be just to the addition of the paper to get a microfilm that was not the addition that had the letters. the different additions used to be. i do not know if early on if there are two or three editions of the paper. i did the best i could. i found some wonderful letters. i tried to have men who served