About the Center

Founding & Mission

The American Civil War is central to our nation’s history. The legacies of that nineteenth-century conflict continue to influence our twenty-first century lives, our politics, culture, economy, and society, not to mention our sense of who we are, individually and collectively. Such significance provides an opportunity, one the Center hopes to seize by setting for itself the following goals:

• To promote academic excellence among undergraduate and graduate students of the Civil War.
• To obtain and house research materials currently beyond the scope of the University libraries.
• To increase interest and opportunities for enrichment across departmental and disciplinary boundaries on the University campus.
• To provide outreach to the Oxford communities through public lectures, conferences and other programming.
• To forge meaningful working relationships with other institutes of higher learning throughout Mississippi and the region.
• To serve the people of the State of Mississippi by confronting those aspects of our common history that tend to perpetuate divisiveness, and to promote an understanding of our shared past as the foundation on which to build respect for our mutual and diverse society today.

Although the Center embraces all aspects of Civil War research, our special focus will be the memory of the Civil War. To study the memory of the war is in no small way to study its importance in American life, for every generation since.