The Stephentown Historical Society Lets Loose The Dogs Of War

Robert W. Arnold III will present a talk, “Let Loose the Dogs of War: New York in the American Civil War,” on June 6, to the Stephentown Historical Society. The meeting will be at 7:30 pm at the Stephentown Heritage Center on Garfield Road, Stephentown. This Speakers in the Humanities event, which is free and open to the public, is made possible through the support of the New York Council for the Humanities, a State affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities. The building is handicapped accessible. For directions or information, phone 518-733-5675.
New York supplied more men, money and material in the Civil War than any other state North or South, but New Yorkers responded to the Civil War in diverse and often contradictory fashions. Concentrating mainly on the home front, this presentation will examine a sample of those responses and some individuals who exemplify them, put in the political, social and military contexts of the war. It will look at the social costs of the war as they played out in the farms and cities of the Empire State, in families, workplaces and neighborhoods and the transition that went with it from an era of reform to the Gilded Age.
Robert W. Arnold III is a career public historian now retired from the New York State Archives. He was Albany County Historian and an historical archaeologist and serves as a Commissioner of Historic Resources for the City of Albany. Arnold teaches colonial and nineteenth century American, New York State, industrial revolution and pre-industrial New York and regional history at the College of Saint Rose. At Excelsior College Arnold teaches Colonial America, Revolutionary America, American Civil War and U.S. Immigration and Ethnic History.