MARION, OH (MARION COUNTY NOW)—Assistant Professor and Historian, Dr. Brianna Frakes from Ohio State’s Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture, and Society will present a free public lecture entitled, To the Gates of Richmond: The Civil War in Virginia, Tuesday, August 11, 5:30 p.m. at Bucci’s Italian Scratch Kitchen as part of the campus’s Buckeye Talks on Tap monthly community lecture series.
Frakes’ discussion will center on Richmond, Va. as the cornerstone to both the Union and Confederate war objectives. Virginia boasts of the highest concentration of Civil War battlefields in the country. Considered the “gateway to the Confederacy” and home to the Confederate capital at Richmond, capturing Virginia or defending it was a paramount goal for both the Union and Confederate armies. The 1862 Peninsula Campaign marked the first significant action the Union Army took into Confederate heartland. Culminating in the Seven Days Battles, this campaign was the closest the Union Army came to capturing Richmond until the wars end in 1865. Their inability to take the Confederate capital in 1862 forced Lincoln to recalibrate the Union’s military and political goals around emancipation, making this the most consequential campaign during the entire Civil War.
Brianna E. Frakes is an historian of the American Civil War, with an emphasis on the military, social, and political dimensions of the Civil War and Reconstruction eras. Her research and teaching center around how everyday Americans understand the change that inevitably comes during and after conflict…