“Women in the American Civil War” will be the topic of the Wednesday, July 15, public presentation by the Kennebec Historical Society. Elizabeth D. Leonard, the John J. and Cornelia V. Gibson Professor of History at Colby College in Waterville, will speak, according to a news release from the historical society. The event will take place at 6:30 p.m. at South Parish Congregational Church, 9 Church St., Augusta.

According to the release, the scope, details and significance of men’s political and military involvement in the American Civil War have been the subject of countless studies over the course of the 150 years since Appomattox. Similarly, historians have devoted considerable attention to men’s experience of the war on both sides of the conflict. In contrast, until quite recently historians have ignored the wartime experiences and contributions of American women, North and South, on the mistaken principle that war is (or at least was, in the 19th century) men’s work alone, and that the battle front was distinguishable from the home front and also mattered far more. This talk by the author of two books on the topic begins to restore women to their important place in the story of America’s great national struggle.

Leonard, a native of New York City, earned her Ph.D. in U.S. history from the University of California, Riverside, in 1992. She is the author of several articles and five books on the Civil War-era: “Yankee Women: Gender Battles in the Civil War” (1994); “All the Daring of the Soldier: Women of the Civil War Armies” (1999); “Lincoln’s Avengers: Justice, Revenge, and Reunion after the Civil War” (2004); “Men of Color to Arms! Black Soldiers, Indian Wars, and the Quest for Equality” (2010); and “Lincoln’s Forgotten Ally: Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt of Kentucky” (2011), which was named co-winner of the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize in 2012. She currently is engaged in research for a new project, which weaves together a deeper study of Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt’s transformation from slaveholder to willing advocate and enforcer of President Abraham Lincoln’s emancipation policies, and the story of the lived experience of enslaved men from the region of Kentucky where Holt was raised — including one of Holt’s own former slaves — as they ran from slavery to fight for freedom in the Union army and then returned to try and claim the promises of Emancipation.