Chicago Civil War Round Table Meeting Jan 2021-Jennifer Murray on General George Meade

Dr. Jennifer M. Murray is a military historian, with a specialization in the American Civil War, in the Department of History at Oklahoma State University. Murray's most recent book publication is "On A Great Battlefield: The Making, Management, and Memory of Gettysburg National Military Park, 1933-2013," published by the University of Tennessee Press in 2014. Murray is also the author of "The Civil War Begins," published by the U.S. Army's Center of Military History in 2012. She is currently working on a full-length biography of George Gordon Meade, tentatively titled "Meade at War: George Gordon Meade and the Army of the Potomac." Murray's essay on Meade in "Upon the Fields of Battle: Essays on the Military History of America's Civil War," explores the leadership decisions of Army of the Potomac in the final days of the Gettysburg Campaign. Specifically, Prof. Murray places President Abraham Lincoln's expectations of a decisive victory by Meade over Robert E. Lee's Confederate army within the broader context of military history and argues that battles of annihilation are incredibly rare and thus Lincoln and northern citizens' expectations misplaced. Consequently, General Meade's leadership during the pursuit from Gettysburg, culminating in the actions at Falling Waters, must be understood within the broader contours of the feasibility of annihilating a citizen-soldier army and the rarity of coupling a battlefield victory with an aggressive pursuit of the enemy forces. Prof. Murray's previous experiences include working as a historian for the Department of Defense in the Pentagon for a year before she took a job teaching history at UVa-Wise. Murray worked as a seasonal interpretive park ranger at Gettysburg National Military Park for nine summers (2002-2010). She received her Ph.D. from Auburn University in 2010.