About the event
4th Annual John Patrick Diggins Memorial Lecture
Civil war is like pornography--we think we know it when we see it. Yet ideas of civil war have a long and contested history with multiple meanings and contested applications. Join David Armitage, the Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History and Chair of the Department of History at Harvard University, for a lecture that offers a critical history of conceptions of civil war from ancient Rome to recent events in Iraq and Syria, with special attention to American debates in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twenty-first centuries.
