W&L Professor Barton Myers Awarded Research Fellowship at Filson Historical Society
Barton Myers, assistant professor of history at Washington and Lee University, has won the Filson Historical Society’s 2016 Ballard Breaux Visiting Research Fellowship.
The Breaux Fellowship allows awardees to conduct research within the Filson Historical Society’s collections. Meyers’ award will help him with research on guerrilla warfare during the American Civil War.
“I’m very excited to receive the Ballard Breaux Visiting Research Fellowship,” Myers said. “The archival holdings in Louisville are exceptionally strong for the American Civil War era. The excellent archival staff has been extremely helpful during previous trips to present and research at the Filson, and I’m looking forward to spending two weeks in residence there this summer.”
The work will build on a topic Myers visited as part of his forthcoming book “The Guerrilla Hunters” (LSU Press, 2017), and also in his previous books “Rebels Against the Confederacy” (2014) and “Executing Daniel Bright” (2009).
“While I’m in residence at the Filson, I’ll be researching my new book project on the Confederate partisan rangers, sanctioned petite guerre forces recruited to use the tactics of guerrilla warfare alongside the regular armies of the South,” Myers said.
“In an effort to establish a new Confederate nation-state, Southerners experimented on the edges of accepted military activity. There has never been a comprehensive study of the Confederate government’s experiment with guerrilla warfare in its official, sanctioned form, and I look forward to producing a first-rate study of the Confederacy-wide problem of guerrilla conflict through an examination of this policy.”
Founded in 1884, the Filson is Kentucky’s oldest privately supported Historical Society. Its mission is to collect, preserve and tell the significant stories of Kentucky and Ohio Valley history and culture. The Filson Society’s fellowships encourage the scholarly use of their nationally significant collections.
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