Professor Gary Gallagher
Gary W. Gallagher is the John L. Nau III Professor in the History of the American Civil War Emeritus and former Director of the John L. Nau III Center for Civil War History at the University of Virginia. A native of Los Angeles, California, he received his B.A. from Adams State College of Colorado and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin. An archivist at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library for ten years, he began his academic career in 1986 at Penn State University, where he taught for twelve years and headed the Department of History for five. He joined the faculty of the University of Virginia in 1998. He is the author or editor of more than forty books, including The Confederate War (1997), Causes Won, Lost, and Forgotten: How Hollywood and Popular Art Shape What We Know About the Civil War (2008), The Union War (2011), The Enduring Civil War: Reflections on the Great American Crisis (2020), and The American War: A History of the Civil War Era (co-authored with Joan Waugh; 3rd edition, 2023). He has served as editor of three book series at the University of North Carolina Press ("Civil War America," with more than 115 titles to date; “Military Campaigns of the Civil War,” 10 titles; and “The Littlefield History of the Civil War Era,” 15 titles) as well as offering a 48-lecture course on the Civil War from The Teaching Company (now Wondrium). Professor Gallagher was the Times-Mirror Foundation Distinguished Fellow (2001-2002) and the Rogers Distinguished Fellow in 19th Century American History (2018-2019) at the Henry E. Huntington Library in San Marino, California. He is also the recipient of the Cavaliers’ Distinguished Teaching Professorship for 2010-2012 (the highest teaching award conveyed by the University of Virginia) and the Philip Merrill Award for Outstanding Contributions to Liberal Arts Education from the American Council of Trustees and Alumni in 2013. Active in the field of historic preservation, he was a founding member and president from 1987 to mid-1994 of the Association for the Preservation of Civil War Sites, the organization that became the Civil War Trust and later the American Battlefield Trust. He also served as a member of the Board of the Civil War Trust and has given testimony about preservation before Congressional committees on several occasions.
