2021 Symposium Spotlight: Meg Groeling

We’re excited to re-introduce the speakers for ECW’s 2021 Symposium. We hope you’ll enjoy “meeting” the speakers again on the blog, and we’ll be spotlighting their topics more specifically later on.

Yes, the event is currently on the calendar for August 6-8, 2021, and the planners will be keeping a close eye on health guidelines in the coming months.

Our first speaker to spotlight this year has been with ECW for many wonderful years and is definitely looking forward to getting back to Virginia from California…and hopefully bringing her long-awaited book with her!

Meg Groeling has retired from teaching 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 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, and reviews many Civil War books.

Her undergraduate degree in Liberal Studies with a minor in American History was from California State University, Long Beach, and she has also earned a Masters degree in History, with a Civil War emphasis.

She has spent years researching and writing First Fallen: The Life of Colonel Elmer Ellsworth, The North’s First Civil War Hero, the only biography written about Ellsworth since Ruth Painter Randall’s, published in 1960. It is highly anticipated to be published in 2021! 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.



2 Responses to 2021 Symposium Spotlight: Meg Groeling

  1. In the interest of truth and transparency, my hair is now all very pale purple. Hope to see you in August! REMEMBER ELLSWORTH!!

Leave a Reply to Chris MackowskiCancel reply