What matters to you.
0:00
0:00
NEXT UP:
 
Top

Forum Network

Free online lectures: Explore a world of ideas

Funding provided by:
American Inspiration Author Series

Historian John Matteson on "A Worse Place Than Hell"

In partnership with:
Date and time
Tuesday, March 23, 2021

See Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Matteson with his latest work, “A Worse Place Than Hell: How the Civil War Battle of Fredericksburg Changed a Nation.” Matteson is joined by guest moderator author Debby Applegate, winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Biography. December 1862: As Abraham Lincoln’s government threatened to fracture, five extraordinary individuals were tested – Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., army chaplain Arthur Fuller, poet Walt Whitman, Louisa May Alcott, and John Pelham, a West Point cadet on the other side of the national schism. The months ahead had repercussions in the country’s law, literature, politics, and popular mythology. Hear about the lives of these individuals and John Matteson’s new work, an interweaving of the personal and the historic. Our featured author is joined on screen by guest moderator author Debby Applegate, also winner of the Pulitzer Prize for History. Image: American Ancestors

john-matteson-author-photo.jpg
John Matteson is a Distinguished Professor of English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the editor of “The Annotated Little Women.” He received the Pulitzer Prize for Biography for “Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father” and the Ann M. Sperber Prize for “The Lives of Margaret Fuller.” A
Debby_Applegate.jpg
Historian and biographer DEBBY APPLEGATE is the author of "Madam: The Biography of Polly Adler" and "The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher" (2007 Pulitzer Prize).
Explore: