Todd Arrington
Todd is a career National Park Service historian, park ranger, and manager with more than twenty years of federal service. He has worked in four different historical parks and is currently the Site Manager of James A. Garfield National Historic Site in Mentor, Ohio. He credits his family’s move to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania when he was ten years old with inspiring both his interest in history and his career choice.
Arrington is a United States Army veteran and holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His particular areas of study are the early Republican Party and the political history of the Civil War and Reconstruction eras.
He has spoken to hundreds of groups, academic conferences, education and civic organizations, book clubs, libraries, Civil War round tables, and service organizations during his career. In 2016, he presented one of Gettysburg National Military Park’s annual winter lectures and presented a paper at the annual University of Mississippi Conference on the Civil War. He has been published on such subjects as the Civil War, the Republican Party, westward expansion, African American history, and more.
Arrington is the author of the book The Medal of Honor at Gettysburg and is now at work on a study of the 1880 presidential election. Since moving to Ohio in 2009, he has taught history and humanities courses as an adjunct instructor at Lakeland Community College, Lake Erie College, and John Carroll University.
PUBLICATIONS:
2019 Book ‘The Triumphs of Liberty and Law’: The Presidential Election of 1880 (Forthcoming from University Press of Kansas.)
2016 Essay “Lucy Webb Hayes, Lucretia Rudolph Garfield, and Mary Arthur McElroy,” in A Companion to First Ladies. (Wiley-Blackwell.)
2014-16: Regular contributions on various subjects to We’re History blog, www.werehistory.org.
2011: Essay “Industry and Economy During the Civil War,” in The Civil War Remembered: The Official National Park Service Handbook to the Civil War Sesquicentennial. (Eastern National.)
2010: Essays “Lincoln, Abraham” and “Republican Party” in Encyclopedia of the Early Republic and Antebellum America. (Sharpe Reference.)
2009: Essay “Slavery in Kansas,” in Encyclopedia of Slavery in the Americas. (Facts on File.)
2004: Essay “Exodus: African American Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction,” in The African American Experience: Personal and Social Activism in the 19th and 20th Centuries. (Heritage Books.)
2004: Essay “Southern Exodusters Movement, 1860s-1870s,” in Encyclopedia of American Social Movements. (Sharpe Reference.)
1996: Book The Medal of Honor at Gettysburg. (Thomas Publications.)
