What experiences of spiritual and character formation can prepare us for a time of testing? If the habits and practices developed in our private lives are suddenly drawn out "on great fields," how can we be ready to stand firm?

Joshua Chamberlain, a mild-mannered Bowdoin College professor, shocked his colleagues when he volunteered for the Union Army at the age of 32, and became an unlikely hero after holding the line at Gettysburg and routing the confederate attackers, despite a precarious position and shortage of ammunition. Deeply wounded a year later at Petersburg - and told by surgeons he would die - he survived and went on to be elected governor of Maine four times, serve as an innovative president of Bowdoin, and help envision and articulate the meaning of America in the post-Civil War decades.

How did a stuttering boy come to be fluent in nine languages and teach rhetoric? How did a “book worm college and seminary student” become a “risk-taking Civil War soldier”? What intellectual and spiritual formation contributed to his military leadership and his post-war public service? Trinity Forum Senior Fellow and acclaimed historian Ronald C. White, author of On Great Fields: The Life and Unlikely Heroism of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, is the ideal guide to this extraordinary life.

Ronald was the guest of The Trinity Forum at an Evening Conversation at the National Press Club on Monday, October 30. where he spoke and answered questions about the unlikely heroism of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. Thank you to Pepperdine School of Public Policy for supporting this event!