The Society of Nineteenth Century Historians is pleased to announce that Dr. Angela M. Zombek, Ph.D., Associate Professor of History, Civil War Era at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, will deliver the Hazel Dicken-Garcia annual address at the 33rd annual Sachsman Symposium on the 19th Century Press, Nov. 13-15, 2025, at Augusta University.
Dr. Zombek, an award-winning authority on the Civil War prisoner experience and the popular press, is the author of Penitentiaries, Punishment, and Military Prisons: Familiar Responses to an Extraordinary Crisis during the American Civil War, [2018, Kent State University Press], an Honorable Mention selection of the Civil War Monitor’s Best Civil War Books. In addition, she has authored numerous journal articles and chapters for essay collections that survey and document the dynamics of Union and Confederate soldiers’ captivity during the conflict.
An editor of Kent State University Press’ Interpreting the Civil War series, she also served as a Copie Hill Civil War Fellow of the American Battlefield Trust.
“It’s an honor to join the Sachsman Symposium on the 19th Century Press, the Civil War, & Free Expression as the 2025 Hazel Dicken-Garcia Lecturer,” says Dr. Zombek. “Dr. Dicken-Garcia’s work illuminated how the press evolved in the young American republic, and the Symposium continues her legacy of illustrating how newspapers and journalists adapted to the rapidly changing circumstances of technological growth, urbanization, sectional division, war, and the particular challenges that wartime often posed to the freedoms outlined in the First Amendment.”
Sponsored by the Society of Nineteenth Century Historians and Augusta University’s Pamplin College of Arts, Sciences, and Humanities, the Symposium invites panel and paper submissions dealing with any topic related to the media in the nineteenth century. Of particular interest this year are studies related to 19th century minority and foreign language press. Other recent conferences have included studies of political and sports reporting, reporting on slavery and abolition, the illustrated press, sensationalism, and reporting on the arts.
A sampling of highlights from the 2024 conference is available on C-SPAN’ Civil War Press broadcasts at https://www.c-span.org/program/the-civil-war/civil-war-era-press/657383
Submissions for this year’s conference formatted as Word attachments are due August 25, 2025 and may be forwarded to 19thcenturyhistorians@gmail.com. Students are encouraged to submit their research work as well.
For more information, including the 2025 Call for Papers, please visit the Society’s website at 19thcenturyhistorians.org