The United States has waged wars, large and small, almost continually across two and a half centuries. No figure looms as large in that history as the American president, the embodiment of national will, the nation’s preeminent diplomat, and the commander in chief of its armed forces. How have presidents made decisions about war and peace? How have they balanced American ideals with defense of the nation’s interests? Why have they succeeded in achieving their goals in some cases but not in others?

This six-part virtual series explores these and other questions through lively conversations with eminent historians of American politics, diplomacy, and military affairs. Each session will begin with a moderated discussion led by LBJ Library Director Mark Lawrence but will allow ample time for questions from the audience. Over six weeks leading up to Presidents’ Day, we will sweep across American history from the Confederate surrender at Appomattox Court House to the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003. We will examine presidents from Abraham Lincoln and Woodrow Wilson to Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, delving into their choices about war and peace as well as the implications of those decisions for the nation’s present and future.

About the speaker:

Elizabeth R. Varon is Langbourne M. Williams Professor of American History at the University of Virginia and a member of the executive council of UVA's John L. Nau III Center for Civil War History. Varon grew up in northern Virginia. She received her PhD from Yale, and has held teaching positions at Wellesley College and Temple University. A specialist in the Civil War era and 19th-century South, Varon is the author of We Mean to be Counted: White Women and Politics in Antebellum Virginia (1998); Southern Lady, Yankee Spy: The True Story of Elizabeth Van Lew, A Union Agent in the Heart of the Confederacy (2003), Disunion!: The Coming of the American Civil War, 1789-1859 (2008) and Appomattox: Victory, Defeat and Freedom at the End of the Civil War (2013). Southern Lady, Yankee Spy won three book awards and was named one of the “Five Best” books on the “Civil War away from the battlefield” in the Wall Street Journal. Appomattox won the 2014 Library of Virginia Literary Award for Nonfiction and was named one of National Public Radio’s “Six Civil War Books to Read Now.” Varon’s public presentations include book talks at the Lincoln Bicentennial in Springfield; and at Gettysburg’s Civil War Institute; and on C-Span’s Book TV. Her most recent book, Armies of Deliverance: A New History of the Civil War, won the 2020 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize and was named one of the Wall Street Journal's best books of 2019. She is currently working on a biography of James Longstreet, forthcoming with Simon & Schuster in 2023.