Speaker: Michael Vorenburg

This well researched book by historian Michael Vorenberg served as a key source of Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln. He was inspired to write about the peace Lincoln hoped for but could not make before his assassination. A peace that required not one but many endings, as Vorenberg reveals, the most important of which came well more than a year after Lincoln’s untimely death. To say how a war ends is to suggest how it should be remembered. This search is not just for the Civil War’s endpoint but for its true nature and legacy, so essential to the American identity. It’s also a quest, in our age of “forever wars,” to understand whether the United States's interminable conflicts of the current era have a precedent in the Civil War—and whether, in a sense, wars ever end at all, or merely wax and wane.