Second Friday Lecture: How the Great Lakes Caused the Civil War

The Civil War was won, and the American Republic was saved because of the remarkable contributions of men, supplies, and leaders provided by the states of the Great Lakes region. These are the states that created the Republican Party. Something more than slavery was behind their deep resentment of the Confederacy. Join us for a program detailing how navigation issues exasperated sectional relations in the years before the war and how Union victory transformed our region.

Theodore Karamanski (Loyola University Chicago, Ph.D., 1979; B.A., 1975) is a Professor Emeritus of History at Loyola University Chicago where he has taught courses in American Indian history, the Civil War, and public history. Karamanski has been a leading national voice in the promotion of American and public history for more than three decades.  He was the founder and later director of Loyola’s Public History Program as well as a prolific author in the fields of American Indian, Great Lakes, Civil War, and nineteenth-century American history.