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Meeting Location:

Our meetings are held at Judson Manor (the former Wade Park Manor residential hotel), located at the corner of East 107th Street and Chester in downtown Cleveland, just off University Circle and less than two miles from our old meeting location.  Map to Judson Manor | History of Wade Park Manor

Reservations:

You must make a dinner reservation for any meeting you plan to attend no later than the day prior to that meeting (so we can give a headcount to the caterer).  Make your reservation one of three ways:

• Send an email to .
• Click any of the 'Make a Dinner Reservation" links on this page.
• Call 440-449-9311 and leave a message on Dan Zeiser's office voice mail.

September 9, 2009
Eric J. Wittenberg
Plenty of Blame to Go Around
Jeb Stuart's Controversial Ride to Gettysburg
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Eric Wittenberg is an award-winning Civil War author and battlefield guide. His books include:

• Like a Meteor Burning Brightly: The Short but Controversial Life of Colonel Ulric Dahlgren (2009)
• One Continuous Fight: The Retreat from Gettysburg and the Pursuit of Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, July 4-14, 1863 (2008)
• Protecting the Flanks: The Battles for Brinkerhoff's Ridge and East Cavalry
• Glory Enough for All: Sheridan's Second Raid and the Battle of Trevilian Station (2007)
• Plenty of Blame to Go Around: Jeb Stuart's Controversial Ride to Gettysburg (2006)
• The Union Cavalry Comes of Age: Hartwood Church to Brandy Station, 1863 (2006)
• Battle of Monroe's Crossroads and the Civil War's Final Campaign (2006)
• Little Phil: A Reassessment of the Civil War Leadership of Gen. Philip H. Sheridan (2005)
• Field, Battle of Gettysburg, July 2-3, 1863 (Discovering Civil War America) (2002)
• One of Custer's Wolverines: The Civil War Letters of Brevet Brigadier General James H. Kidd, 6th Michigan Cavalry (2000)
• Gettysburg's Forgotten Cavalry Actions (1998)

The following biography is adapted from Mr. Wittenberg's blog, “Rantings of a Civil War Historian”.

Eric Wittenberg grew up in Reading, Pennsylvania, home to many members of the Sixth Pennsylvania Cavalry and is a graduate of Dickinson College, less than an hour from Gettysburg.

Mr. Wittenberg began his career as an author in 1991 and has since published more than fifteen articles that have appeared in various Civil War magazines and 11 books.  His first book, Gettysburg's Forgotten Cavalry Actions, published in 1998, won the Bachelder-Coddington Literary Award as the year’s best new work interpreting the Battle of Gettysburg.  His focus is on Union cavalry operations in the Eastern Theatre of the Civil War, with a special emphasis on the role played by horse soldiers in the Gettysburg Campaign.

In addition to being a prolific Civil War author, Mr. Wittenberg is an attorney in Columbus, Ohio working in the business development and litigation arenas.

September 24 - 27, 2008
CCWRT Annual Field Trip
Richmond, Virginia

The 2009 Roundtable field trip will be to the Richmond, Virginia area and will include visits to the battlefields of the 1862 Peninsula campaign, Cold Harbor, Petersburg, and Five Forks. Other likely stops include: the White House of the Confederacy, the American Civil War Center at Historic Tredegar, Hollywood Cemetery (whose famous residents include Jefferson and Varina Davis, Confederate generals Fitzhugh Lee, Richard Garnett, Henry Heth, John Pegram, George Pickett and JEB Stuart, historian Douglas Southall Freeman, Supreme Court Justices Peter Daniel and Lewis Powell and Presidents James Monroe and John Tyler), Pamplin Park, the National Museum of the Civil War Soldier and City Point.  Trip Itinerary

Our guide will be Dr. Lynn Sims, Professor Emeritus, U.S. Military History, University of Richmond and retired U.S. Army.  A Richmond native, Dr. Sims has had a varied career that included being a historian for the Department of Defense at Fort Lee, Virginia, serving as Director of the Richmond Bicentennial Commission and city historian and serving as a civilian instructor at the Command & General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. He earned his undergraduate degree in history from Wheaton College in Illinois, and his masters and Ph.D. in United States Military history from New York University.  Dr. Sims currently serves as the VP (Programs), Richmond chapter, Sons of the American Revolution.

October 14, 2009
Michael Kraus
Behind the Scenes at a Civil War Movie
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Michael Kraus is Curator of the Pittsburgh Soldiers & Sailors Memorial Hall & Museum. He is a Civil War re-enactor (116th Pennsylvania VI) and sculptor.  He is currently working on a book sponsored by the state of Pennsylvania and due for publication in March 2012 on the contributions of the Commonwealths to the Civil War.

Mr. Kraus has also worked as an advisor on several Civil War films including Cold Mountain, Civil War Minutes and Gettysburg.  His talk will give a personal behind the scenes look at how these films were made and discuss how Hollywood portrays history.

November 11, 2009
Dr. Jennifer L. Weber
The Copperheads: Lincoln’s Opponents in the North
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Jennifer Weber is Assistant Professor of Civil War Studies at the University of Kansas and the author of Copperheads: The Rise and Fall of Lincoln's Opponents in the North  published in 2006 by Oxford University Press. (Click here for a brief interview with Dr. Weber about her book.)  Professor Weber is co-director of the Hall Center's seminar on Peace, War & Global Change. In addition to her work at Kansas, she serves on the advisory panel for the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission.  She is currently working on a children's book about the battle of Gettysburg, to be published by National Geographic; a collection of essays in honor of her graduate adviser, James M. McPherson, to be published by the University of Virginia Press; and a monograph comparing conscription and its consequences in the Union and the Confederacy.

Dr. Weber received a Ph.D. in 2003 and M.A. in 2000, both from Princeton an M.A. from California State University, Sacramento in 1998 and a B.S. from Northwestern University in 1984.  She is a native Californian who worked for several years in her home state as a journalist and political aide before entering graduate school. Her principal interest is the Civil War, especially the seams where political, social, and military history come together. Other fields that attract her attention include 19th century America and war and society.

December 9, 2009
David F. Forte
Three Soldiers and the Negro
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David F. Forte is Professor of Law at Cleveland State University, where he was the inaugural holder of the Charles R. Emrick, Jr.- Calfee Halter & Griswold Endowed Chair. He holds degrees from Harvard College, Manchester University, England, the University of Toronto and Columbia University.

During the Reagan administration, Professor Forte served as chief counsel to the United States delegation to the United Nations and alternate delegate to the Security Council. He has authored a number of briefs before the United States Supreme Court, and has frequently testified before the United States Congress and consulted with the Department of State on human rights and international affairs issues. His Holiness, John Paul II, appointed Dr. Forte as Consultor to the Pontifical Council for the Family, and Pope Benedict XVI has reappointed Dr. Forte. In 2003, Dr. Forte was a Distinguished Fulbright Chair at the University of Trento and returned there in 2004 as a Visiting Professor.

Professor Forte was a Bradley Scholar at the Heritage Foundation and Visiting Scholar at the Liberty Fund. He has served as President of the Ohio Association of Scholars, is on the Board of Directors of the Philadelphia Society, and is also an Adjunct Fellow at the Ashbrook Center for Public Affairs at Ashland University. He has been appointed to the Ohio State Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and is a member of the Board of Directors of the Bishop Gassis Relief Fund dedicated to relieving the war-induced famine in the Sudan. 

Professor Forte is an expert on constitutional law, religious liberty, Islamic law, and family rights and is author of Supreme Court (American Government series) and Studies in Islamic Law.  Additionally, he has edited Natural Law and Contemporary Public Policy and The Supreme Court in American Politics: Judicial Activism vs. Judicial Restraint Professor.  Professor Forte is also an avid Civil War re-enactor (Ohio Light Artillery) and a Merit Badge Counselor for the Boy Scouts.

January 13, 2010
Dick Crews Annual Debate:
After Grant and Lee, William Tecumseh Sherman was the Greatest General of the Civil War
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If not the father of modern warfare, Union general William Tecumseh Sherman certainly possessed an uncanny insight into its future. 

"This war differs from other wars, in this particular. We are not fighting armies but a hostile people, and must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war."

He was smart, resourceful and tough and, after Ulysses S. Grant, generally receives the greatest credit for the final military triumph of the Union over the Confederacy.  With the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln, Sherman was also the most reviled Union figure in the South, largely due to his army's brutal march through Georgia and South Carolina. 

"I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell."

Despite this, the man leading the CSA force in opposition to Sherman's army at war's end, Joseph E. Johnston, considered Sherman's march through the swamps of South Carolina one of the great military feats in all of history and even attended Sherman's funeral to honor his old adversary.

Was Sherman a great military leader or a brutal butcher fortunate to be leading the army with an overflowing supply of men and materiel?  Our debaters will tackle this question in a spirited discussion and prove beyond all doubt that Sherman was...

"I think I understand what military fame is; to be killed on the field of battle and have your name misspelled in the newspapers."

February 10, 2010
Jeff Hill
The 26th Ohio Volunteer Infantry: The "Ground Hog Regiment"
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Jeff Hill is the webmaster of the 26th OVI website.  He is the descendant of two members of the regiment and is writing a history of the regiment which fought at Stones River, Chickamauga, Kennesaw Mountain, Atlanta, Spring Hill, Franklin and Nashville.

March 10, 2010
Nat Brandt
Steps Toward War: Two Dramatic Rescues That Led to It
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Nat Brandt is a veteran journalist/historian who has been a reporter for the Newark Star-Ledger, an editor for the New York Times, managing editor of American Heritage, editor in chief of Publishers Weekly, and a senior newswriter for CBS News. He is the author of eleven nonfiction books—including The Town That Started the Civil War (Oberlin) and In the Shadow of the Civil War: Passmore Williamson and the Rescue of Jane Johnson, as well as two novels.

Mr. Brandt is a recipient of the Douglas Southall Freeman Award for Southern History as well as awards from the Illinois State Historical Society and the New Jersey Press Association.

"Big Day at Oberlin" at the New York Times Book Review

April 14, 2010
Thomas J. Culbertson
Rutherford Hayes and the 23rd Ohio Voluntary Infantry
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Tom Culbertson is the Executive Director of the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center in Fremont, Ohio, where he has curated eleven major exhibits, including “Ohioans in the Civil War” and "Thomas Nast: The Art of Political Cartooning".  He first joined the staff of the Hayes Center in 1988 as Manuscript Curator, later serving as its Director of Museum and Education before assuming his present duties in 2005. 

Mr. Culbertson has served on the boards of several organizations including the Ohio Museums Association, the Society of Ohio Archivists, the Intermuseum Conservation Association, and the Ohio Association of Historical Societies and Museums.

Mr. Culbertson received his BA in History from Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois and an MA in Library Sciences from Syracuse University.  He lives in Fremont.

May 12, 2010
Mel Maurer
John Wilkes Booth: Escape and Capture
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Mel Maurer is the Roundtable’s Historian and Past President. He has presented to the Roundtable several times including on the occasion of its 50th anniversary when he spoke on Lincoln at Gettysburg.  At the Roundtable's January 2009 meeting, he played President Abraham Lincoln to another Past President John Fazio’s Jefferson Davis in an original dramatic production supposing Lincoln and Jefferson had met at the Hampton Roads peace conference in January 1865.

Mr. Maurer is a retired executive of the Dana Corporation. In addition to the Cleveland Civil War Roundtable, he has also served as president of the Philosophical Club of Cleveland and is a member of the Titanic Historic Society. An Abraham Lincoln scholar, Mr. Maurer is a life-time member of the Lincoln Forum, attending its Symposium in Gettysburg every November. 

Mr. Maurer and his wife, Elaine live in Westlake, Ohio. They have four children (his son, Rick, is also a member of the Roundtable) and eight grandchildren. His interests include writing, acting and speaking on community affairs, charitable causes, history and political issues.