Garry Adelman – Lessons in History
Garry Adelman – Lessons in History
Lessons in History with Garry Adelman
Saturday, August 22, 2026 | 11:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.
The National Civil War Museum is pleased to welcome renowned Civil War historian, author, and speaker Garry Adelman as part of our popular Lessons in History lecture series.
The Civil War in Detail
Join the American Battlefield Trust and the Center for Civil War Photography’s Garry Adelman for an exploration of the largely unseen buried deep within Civil War photographs. Most of the roughly 10,000 documentary Civil War photographs were recorded on large glass plates and most of these glass plates have survived the ravages of time, These glass plates negatives are at least 30x larger than 35mm negatives and unlike today’s digital cameras, the hi-resolution digital scans of these plates do not substantially pixelate upon zooming in.
The details that emerge are as broad and varied as the war itself. From pickle jar labels to battlefield features, pets, games, engineering, technology, celebrity lookalikes, all come into sharper relief. Most moving are the details that reveal humanity among Civil War-era people–young, old, black, white, male female, which can have the unexpected effect of fostering sympathy for, and less judgment of, the people of the past.
This program is free to attend. Regular museum admission applies for those wishing to tour the galleries before or after the presentation.
Seating is first come, first served.
About Garry E. Adelman:
A graduate of Michigan State University and Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania, Garry Adelman is the award-winning author, co-author, or editor of 22 books and 50+ Civil War articles. He is the vice president of the
Center for Civil War Photography and has been a Licensed Battlefield Guide at Gettysburg since 1995. He has conceived and drafted the text for wayside exhibits at eleven battlefields, has given thousands of battlefield tours at more than 75 American Revolution and Civil War sites, and has lectured at hundreds of locations across the country including the National Archives, the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian. He has appeared as a speaker on the BBC, C-Span, Pennsylvania Cable Network, American Heroes Channel, and on HISTORY where he was a chief consultant and talking head on the Emmy Award-winning show Gettysburg (2011), Blood and Glory: The Civil War in Color (2015), Grant (2020), and Battles for America (2022). He works full-time as Chief Historian at the American Battlefield Trust.
