Dr. Megan Kate Nelson will present a talk about her book The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West as part of the State of Arizona Research Library’s 2023 Arizona Author Series. The talk is at 1 p.m. MST, Thursday, January 5th, and will be held virtually on Zoom. Attendees are encouraged to register to receive the link to the presentation. After the talk, there will be time for questions from the audience.

More often than not, the Civil War is remembered as a series of battles between the North and the South, yet the front lines reached as far as present-day Arizona. In The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West, researcher Dr. Megan Kate Nelson introduces readers to nine people whose perspectives and experiences broaden our understanding of the impact this war had on the West. 

The nine individuals are: John R. Baylor, a legislature from Texas responsible for establishing the Confederate Territory of Arizona; Louisa Hawkins Canby, who nursed Confederate soldiers in Santa Fe despite being a Union Army wife; James Carleton, a career soldier who devised campaigns against the Apaches and Navajos; Kit Carson, a frontiersman who led a regiment against the Kiowas, Navajos, Comanches and Texans; Juanita, a weaver of the Navajo Nation who resisted campaigns by the Union Army against her tribe; Bill Davidson, a soldier who fought in all of the Confederacy’s major battles in New Mexico; Alonzo Ickis, a gold miner turned Union Army soldier; John Clark, who became New Mexico's surveyor-general and adopted the Republican vision for the West; and Mangas Coloradas, a revered Chiricahua Apache chief who labored to expand Apache territory in Arizona. 

You can read The Three-Cornered War and many more titles for free on Reading Arizona. 

Megan Kate Nelson is a historian and writer, with a BA from Harvard and a PhD in American Studies from the University of Iowa. She is the author of four books: Saving Yellowstone: Exploration and Preservation in Reconstruction America (Scribner 2022); The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West (Scribner 2020; finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in History); Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War (Georgia, 2012); and Trembling Earth: A Cultural History of the Okefenokee Swamp (Georgia, 2005). She writes about the Civil War, the U.S. West, and American culture for The New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic, Smithsonian Magazine, and TIME. Before leaving academia to write full-time in 2014, she taught U.S. history and American Studies at Texas Tech University, Cal State Fullerton, Harvard, and Brown. She grew up in Colorado but now lives outside Boston with her husband and two cats. 

This event is part of the 2023 Arizona Author Series. This program is supported by the Arizona State Library, Archives & Public Records, a division of the Secretary of State, with federal funds from the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

Arizona Center for the Book, a Library of Congress Center for the Book Affiliate.