LEXINGTON, Va. Oct. 22, 2024 — Virginia Military Institute welcomes Brian McKnight, Ph.D., professor of history and a founding director of the Center for Appalachian Studies at the University of Virginia, who will give a lecture on the Civil War titled, “Guerrilla Warfare and Base Criminality in the Civil War Borderland” Thursday, Nov. 7, at 8 p.m., in Gillis Theater of Marshall Hall on post. The event is free and open to the public.

McKnight is a specialist in contested and coerced loyalties and is the author of “Contested Borderland: The Civil War in Appalachian Kentucky and Virginia,” which won the Dr. James I. Robertson Literary Prize for Confederate History; and “Confederate Outlaw: Champ Ferguson and the Civil War in Appalachia,” which won the Tennessee History Book Award for best book in Tennessee history. Additionally, he wrote, “We Fight For Peace: Twenty-Three American Soldiers, Prisoners of War, and Turncoats in the Korean War” and coedited “The Guerrilla Hunters: Irregular Conflicts During the Civil War” with Barton Myers, Ph.D., professor of history at Washington and Lee University. McKnight’s other writings have been featured in The New York Times, and his work on Korean War prisoners of war was profiled in The New Yorker.

The event is sponsored by the VMI Department of History and the John Biggs ’30 Cincinnati Chair in Military History Fund.

-VMI-