Pulitzer Prize--winning author and Civil War historian James M. McPherson will speak at Cornell University on Tuesday, April 29, at 4:30 p.m. in Room 165 McGraw Hall in a lecture titled "Was Blood Thicker Than Water? Ethnic and Civic Nationalism in the Civil War." The lecture is free and open to the public.

McPherson has been the George Henry Davis Professor of American History at Princeton University since 1991 and has served on Princeton's faculty since 1965. He won the 1989 Pulitzer Prize in history for Battle Cry of Freedom, his history of the American Civil War.

Born in North Dakota, McPherson did his undergraduate work at Gustavus Adolphus College and received his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University.

He has written 12 books concerning the Civil War, including 1988's Battle Cry of Freedom , which in addition to a Pulitzer won the Christopher Award and the American Military Institute's Best Book Award, and For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War, just published this year by Oxford University Press. He also has served as editor for many other authors' books on the Civil War, slavery and Reconstruction.

"James McPherson is one of the outstanding students of the American Civil War writing and teaching today," said Joel Silbey, the President White Professor of History. "Battle Cry of Freedom is the best one-volume history of that conflict, written with grace and verve as well as with the text and texture of the best historical narratives. McPherson has also made major contributions to our understanding of the history of African Americans in the 19th century and to our understanding of Abraham Lincoln as well."

In addition to his public lecture, McPherson will meet with faculty and students during his Cornell stay.

His visit to Cornell is made possible by the Walter LaFeber and Joel Silbey Fund in American History. The fund's sponsor is David F. Maisel '68, who studied under LaFeber during the 1960s, when he also was a political reporter for the Cornell Daily Sun. After graduating, he was an active alumnus and got to know Silbey. Recognizing the impact that LaFeber and Silbey had, and continue to have, on Cornell students, Maisel decided to endow a fund in their name to enhance the teaching of American history at Cornell generally and to allow the history department to bring other outstanding historians to campus to interact with undergraduates.

McPherson will be the second lecturer brought to Cornell through the LaFeber and Silbey Fund. The first is U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, who will give a public lecture titled "A New NATO, A New Europe" on Thursday, April 24, at 1:30 p.m. in Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium in Goldwin Smith Hall.