61st Annual Fortenbaugh Lecture

Dr. Craig Symonds

Professor of History Emeritus

U.S. Naval Academy

Craig L. Symonds is Professor of History Emeritus at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, where he taught for thirty years and served as History Department Chair. From 2017 to 2020 he was the Ernest J. King Distinguished Professor of Maritime History at the U.S. Naval War College, in Newport, RI. He is a four-time recipient of the Federal Government’s Superior Civilian Service Medal; in 2014 he received the Dudley W. Knox Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Naval Historical Foundation, and in 2023, he received the Pritzker Museum Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Writing of Military History.

He is the author of seventeen books, including Lincoln and His Admirals, which won the 2009 Lincoln Prize. His other Civil War era books include biographies of Joseph E. Johnston (1992), Patrick Cleburne (1997), and Franklin Buchanan (1999), as well as The Civil War at Sea (2009). He received the Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt Prize for his book Decision at Sea: Five Naval Battles that Shaped American History (2005). His more recent books focus on World War II, including The Battle of Midway (2011), Neptune: The Allied Invasion of Europe and the D-Day Landings (2014), and World War II at Sea: A Global History (2018). His newest book is Nimitz at War: Command Leadership from Pearl Harbor to Tokyo Bay (2022).

Dr. Jennifer Murray

Teaching Associate Professor

Oklahoma State University

Dr. Jennifer M. Murray is a Teaching Associate Professor in the Department of History at Oklahoma State University.  Murray’s teaching and research specialization is the American Civil War and U.S. Military History.  She is the author of On A Great Battlefield: The Making, Management, and Memory of Gettysburg National Military Park, 1933-2013, published by the University of Tennessee Press in 2014 and released for a second edition in 2023.  She also wrote The Civil War Begins, published by the U.S. Army’s Center of Military History in 2012.  Dr. Murray is currently working on a full-length biography of George Meade, tentatively titled Meade at War: The Military Life of George Gordon Meade.  This is a comprehensive treatment of Meade’s life, with a focus on his military career in the Army of the Potomac. She is the co-editor of the forthcoming, “They Are Dead, And Yet They Live”: Civil War Memories in a Polarized America, published with the University of Nebraska Press. 

Murray is a veteran faculty member at Gettysburg College’s Civil War Institute and a coveted speaker at Civil War symposiums and roundtables.  In addition to delivering hundreds of Civil War battlefield tours, Murray has led World War I and World War II study abroad trips to Europe.  Murray worked as a National Park Service seasonal interpretive park ranger at Gettysburg National Military Park for nine summers (2002-2010).

Dr. Lorien Foote

Patricia & Bookman Peters Professor of History

Texas A&M University

Lorien Foote is the Patricia & Bookman Peters Professor in History at Texas A&M University. She is the author of four books, editor of three volumes, and writer of numerous articles and essays on the cultural, intellectual, and military history of the American Civil War. Of her works, Rites of Retaliation: Civilization, Soldiers, and Campaigns in the American Civil War (2021) was awarded the Organization of American Historians Civil War and Reconstruction Book Award; The Yankee Plague: Escaped Union Prisoners and the Collapse of the Confederacy (2016), was a 2017 Choice Outstanding Academic Title; and The Gentlemen and the Roughs: Manhood, Honor, and Violence in the Union Army (2010), was a finalist and Honorable Mention for the 2011 Lincoln Prize.

She is the co-editor, with Earl J. Hess, of The Oxford Handbook of the American Civil War, and the creator and principal investigator of a digital humanities project, Fugitive Federals, that maps the escape and movement of 3000 Federal prisoners of war. The project includes contributions from undergraduate researchers at four universities.