Dr. Susannah J. Ural will open the traveling exhibit Freedom: A History of US with her talk Civil War Era Mississippians Debate America’s Founding Principles on Tuesday, April 7 at 12 noon at the downtown branch of the Columbus-Lowndes Public Library System.

The Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi (CWRGM) project is a collection of the state’s governors’ papers that help us understand how Mississippians of all backgrounds debated the founding principles that the Civil War tested. They also show how state leaders interpreted and explained the rights that the Constitution and Declaration of Independence celebrated and protected. In this presentation, Dr. Ural, the Frank and Virginia Williams Chair for Abraham Lincoln & Civil War Studies at Mississippi State University and Co-Director of CWRGM, will share documents from the collection to help audience members understand how Mississippians remembered and fought over the nation’s founding traditions during the Civil War and Reconstruction.

Launched in 2019, the CWRGM has made nearly 14,000 of the 20,000 state governors’ papers freely available online with digitized original documents, transcriptions, annotations, lesson plans, and more.

This program is sponsored by a Mississippi Humanities Council America250 Grant.

For more information, call the CLPLS at 662-329-5300.