William Blair is Director of the Richards Civil War Era Center at the Pennsylvania State University and editor of Civil War History, the premiere journal on the history of the “middle period.” His dissertation, written under the direction of Gary Gallagher at Penn State, won the Allan Nevins Prize for Best Dissertation in American History from the Society of American Historians.
He has also received the Philip S. Klein Award for Pennsylvania History and been named a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians. In addition to numerous articles and chapters in books, Blair has written Virginia’s Private War: Feeding Body and Soul in the Confederacy, 1861-1865 (1998) and co-edited The Making and Remaking of Pennsylvania’s Civil War (2001). He is the author of the soon-to-be published Cities of the Dead: Contesting the Memory of the Civil War in the South, 1865-1914.