Barton Myers to Deliver Lecture in Honor of His Appointment to the Martin and Brooke Stein Professorship in History Myers’ talk, titled “The Grand Old Man of the Army: General Winfield Scott and the American Civil War,” will be held Sept. 24 in Northen Auditorium.

By Brian Laubscher
August 29, 2025

Barton Myers, professor of history at Washington and Lee University, will present a public lecture to mark his appointment to the Martin and Brooke Stein Professorship at Washington and Lee University.

Myers’ lecture, “The Grand Old Man of the Army: General Winfield Scott and the American Civil War,” will be held at 5 p.m. on Wednesday, Sept. 24, in Northen Auditorium. The talk is free and open to the public.

In his talk, Myers will explore one of the most important and often overlooked figures of the late antebellum period, Gen. Winfield Scott. Scott was the general in chief of the U.S. Army at the beginning of the American Civil War, and for two decades prior to the conflict, he served as an important figure in the American government.

Myers will demonstrate that Scott created the antebellum U.S. Army while serving as its most important officer. He will discuss Scott’s unionism and decision-making, his views on slavery and abolition and his relationships with notable figures of the time that will frame a discussion about his personal loyalty and contributions to this important period of our nation’s history.

“It’s a profound honor to accept this appointment to the Stein Professorship in History at Washington and Lee,” said Myers. “As W&L embarks upon an incredibly bright future as one of America’s elite liberal arts institutions, I look forward to continuing my productive teaching and writing in American history here in Lexington over the coming years.”

Myers joined the W&L faculty in 2013 after three years as an assistant professor of history at Texas Tech University. He also taught at Cornell University and the University of Georgia and served as a public historian with the National Park Service at Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park, where he led tours of the historic battlefields.

Myers is a recognized authority on the American Civil War, military history and presidential history and has been featured in the History Channel series “Dark Marvels”; he will be featured in a forthcoming episode of “History’s Greatest Mysteries.” He’s also served as a featured contributor for History Channel documentary miniseries such as Grant (2020) and Abraham Lincoln (2022). He is the author of “Executing Daniel Bright: Race, Loyalty and Guerrilla Violence in a Coastal Carolina Community, 1861-1865” and “Rebels Against Confederacy: North Carolina’s Unionists,” and he co-edited “The Guerrilla Hunters: Irregular Conflicts During the Civil War.”

Myers is a recipient of several prestigious grants and fellowships from organizations such as the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, the Gilder-Lehrman Institute of American History, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Marine Corps Historical Center, the Filson Historical Society, the Virginia Historical Society and the Jack Miller Center for Teaching America’s Founding Principles and History.

The Martin and Brooke Stein Professorship was established in 2007 to support a distinguished professor who is an accomplished scholar and exceptional teacher, with a first preference for a faculty member in the Department of History and a secondary preference for a faculty member in the Williams School of Commerce, Economics and Politics. The professorship is managed by the provost in consultation with the deans of the College and the Williams School. The endowment is the gift of Martin E. Stein ’74 and his wife, Brooke, in honor of former faculty members William A. Jenks, H. Marshall Jarrett and Henry P. Porter Jr. ’54. The Steins considered Jenks, Jarrett and Porter to be model teachers and scholars who were influential in the lives of countless W&L students. The Martin and Brooke Stein Professorship was established by the Steins in response to the Lenfest challenge grant for faculty support.

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