Symposium Spotlight: Meg Groeling

Welcome back to our yearly spotlight series, highlighting speakers and topics for our upcoming symposium. Over the coming weeks, we will continue to feature introductions of all of our speakers for the 2020 Emerging Civil War Symposium, as well as give you a sneak peak of their talks. We’ll also be sharing suggested titles that you may want to read in preparation for these programs. Those titles will make for great holiday gifts! This week we feature longtime ECW member Meg Groeling.

Meg currently teaches math at Brownell Middle School, named for E. E. Brownell, a California educator who was named for Colonel Elmer Ellsworth and is related to Corporal Francis Brownell, the man who shot the man who killed Ellsworth. She has also taught at other public schools in California and Maryland.  She contributes to World At War and Strategy and Tactics, history and war-gaming magazines.  Her undergraduate degree in Liberal Studies with a minor in American History was from California State University, Long Beach, and she is preparing to earn a Masters degree in History, with a Civil War emphasis.

She has been working for over a year on First Fallen: the Life and Times of Colonel Elmer Ellsworth, the only biography written about Ellsworth since Ruth Painter Randall’s, published in 1960.  It should be ready to find a publisher soon.  In it, she challenges some of the assumptions made about Ellsworth, and uses his life as a lens through which to view the attitudes and events of the urban North prior to the Civil War.

Have you purchased your 2019 Emerging Civil War Symposium tickets yet? If not, take advantage of our early bird rate by clicking here.