Clio readers are invited to the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga’s twenty-ninth annual Symposium on the 19th Century Press, the Civil War, and Free Expression Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, November 11–13, 2021. The purpose of the conference is to share current research and to develop a series of monographs on the 19th century press, the Civil War and the press, and 19th century concepts of free expression.

Papers from the first five conferences were published by Transaction Publishers in 2000 as a book of readings called The Civil War and the Press. Purdue University Press published papers from past conferences in three books: Memory and Myth: The Civil War in Fiction and Film from Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Cold Mountain (2007), Words at War: The Civil War and American Journalism (2008), and Seeking a Voice: Images of Race and Gender in the 19th Century Press (2009). In 2013, Transaction published Sensationalism: Murder, Mayhem, Mudslinging, Scandals, and Disasters in 19th-Century Reporting, and in 2014, it published A Press Divided: Newspaper Coverage of the Civil War. In 2017, Transaction (now Routledge/Taylor & Francis) published After the War: The Press in a Changing America, 1865–1900, and our latest book, The Antebellum Press: Setting the Stage for Civil War, was published by Routledge/Taylor & Francis in 2019.  

All paper sessions are free and open to the public via Zoom. To register, please email us at west-chair-office@utc.edu with your name, affiliation, email, cell phone number, and the identification name on your Zoom account. Please also indicate which days you would like to attend. Download the 2021 Symposium Program here. For more information, please contact Dr. David Sachsman.