Lorien Foote was the 2019 Brose Distinguished Lecturer at the Richards Civil War Era Center at Penn State. She gave a three-night lecture series entitled “Civilization and Savagery in the American Civil War: Retaliation and the Conduct of Campaigns.” During the Civil War, Union and Confederate officials used retaliation in every military campaign to negotiate what “civilized” war should look like in practice. The series illuminated how Americans conceived civilization and how the ritual of retaliation shaped the behavior of combatants.
