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2009 Spring Speakers Series Topic is “George Washington and Robert E. Lee”

The 2009 Spring Speakers Series at Washington and Lee University, titled George Washington’s and Robert E. Lee’s Rise to Prominence and Legacy, will present speakers comparing and contrasting various aspects of the lives of these great men.

The first event will be held on Sunday, March 8, at 2 p.m. in Lee Chapel. All presentations are free and open to the public. The series is sponsored by the Lee Family Digital Archive, Lee Chapel and Museum and W&L’s history department.

The topic of the first talks, presented by Peter R. Henriques and William J. Miller, will be Preludes to Greatness: The Making of George Washington and Robert E. Lee. Henriques, professor of history emeritus at George Mason University, is the author of Realistic Visionary: A Portrait of George Washington and The Death of George Washington: He Died as He Lived.

Miller, who teaches at Stuart Hall School in Staunton, Va., is the author of Mapping for Stonewall: The Civil War Service of Jed Hotchkiss, Great Maps of the Civil War: Pivotal Battles and Campaigns Featuring 32 Removable Maps and the three-volume The Peninsula Campaign of 1862.

The other two events in the series will be on March 22 and April 5. Event titles and speakers for the rest of the 2009 Speakers Series, all at 2 p.m. and in Lee Chapel, are:

March 22-Farewell to the Armies: Success and Defeat will be given by Edward G. Lengel, associate editor of the papers of George Washington at U.Va. and author of General George Washington: A Military Life and This Glorious Struggle: George Washington’s Revolutionary War Letters; and James Holmes Armstead, author and professor of strategy and international law emeritus at the United States Naval College. He is currently a visiting professor at VMI.

April 5-Measures of the Men: Now They Belong to the Ages will be presented by Jack D. Warren Jr., executive director of the Society of the Cincinnati in Washington, D.C., and author of The Presidency of George Washington; and Charles F. Bryan Jr., president emeritus of the Virginia Historical Society, co-author of Eye of the Storm: A Civil War Odyssey, Images from the Storm and Facts and Legends of the Hills of Richmond.

The Lee Family Digital Archive is an online repository of the collected papers of the Lee Family of Virginia, and when complete, will make it possible to read from anywhere in the world virtually any Lee Family document known to survive. For more information, see leearchive.wlu.edu.