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Biographies of our speakers

 L. D. Clark was born and brought up in North Texas.  He spent over four years in the U. S. Air Force, two of them in combat service. He came home to study literature at Columbia University, from which he holds the B.A, M.A and Ph.D degrees. He then entered a long career as a university professor, scholar, critic and textual editor. He received a William Bayard Cutting Fellowship from Columbia University; a Ford Foundation Publication Grant through the University of Texas Press; and a Fulbright Travel Grant. He traveled and lectured for the U. S. Information Service. He was a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Nice, Kansai University in Japan, and Korea University. He enjoys an international reputation as a D. H. Lawrence critic and editor. All the while he has also been writing fiction, publishing five novels and two books of short stories.

M. Jane Johansson received a doctoral degree in American history from the University of North Texas, a master’s degree in library science from the University of North Texas, and a bachelor’s degree in history from Oklahoma Baptist University. She is the author of Widows by the Thousand: The Civil War Letters of Theophilus and Harriet Perry, 1862-1864 ; and Peculiar Honor: A History of the 28th Texas Cavalry, 1862-1865.  She is an assistant professor in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Rogers State University in Pryor, Oklahoma.
Kip Lindberg has enjoyed a successful career based on his interests in Civil War and military history.  His positions include seasonal park ranger at Wilson’s Creek National Battlefield, Republic, Missouri; Director of the Mine Creek Battlefield State Historic Site, Pleasanton, Kansas; and Archivist for the Lincoln Home National Historic Site, Springfield, Illinois.  He served as OPFOR Simulation Specialist for the Battle Command Training Program, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and as Archivist for the Weapons of Mass Destruction Collection, U.S. Army Chemical School, Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri.  He is currently Curator of  Chemical Corps Museum at Fort Leonard Wood.  Lindberg is the co-author of Sterling Price’s Lieutenants: A Guide to the Officers and Organization of the Missouri State Guard, 1861-1865, a ground-breaking and indispensable reference work.  He is also the author or co-author of articles on the battles of Mine Creek, Baxter Springs, and Lone Jack.  He has an avid interest in 19th century photography, having amassed a collection of over 1500 photos.
Carl Moneyhon received his B.A and M.A. degrees from the University of Texas and his Ph. D. from the University of Chicago.  He is a prize-winning author and a historian of the American Civil War and Reconstruction era. He has written several volumes and is general editor of the well-received Portraits of Conflict series published by the University of Arkansas Press. His most recent publications include Texas After the Civil War: The Struggle of Reconstruction (2004) and “White Society and African American Soldiers,” in Mark Christ, ed., “All Cut to Pieces and Gone to Hell”: The Civil War, Race Relations, and the Battle of Poison Spring (2003). His works focus particularly on the social history of war and post-war years and he currently is researching a book on the impact of military service and war on the citizen soldiers of the South. At present Moneyhon is a professor of history at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.          

Jeffrey L. Patrick is a native of Ligonier, Indiana.  He received his B.A. and M.A. from Perdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana.   He began working for the National Park Service  in 1991, and came to Wilson's Creek National Battlefield the following year.  Patrick became the Battlefield's first full-time librarian in 2003.  He has written numerous articles on various aspects of American military history for popular and scholarly publications.  His most recent work is Fighting for Liberty and Right: The Civil War Diary of William Bluffton Miller, First Sergeant, Company K, Seventy-fifth Indiana Volunteer Infantry, published by the University of Tennessee Press in 2005.
Christopher Phillips specializes in 19th century U.S. social and political history, the history of the American South, and slavery and emancipation. He currently teaches courses on the Civil War and Reconstruction, the American South, and American race relations.  Phillips is the author of four books: The Union on Trial: The Political Journals of Judge William Barclay Napton, 1829-1883; Missouri’s Confederate: Claiborne Fox Jackson and the Creation of Southern Identity in the Border West; Freedom’s Port: The African American Community of Baltimore, 1790–1860; and Damned Yankee: The Life of Nathaniel Lyon, as well as articles in scholarly journals and encyclopedias. He is co-editor of Ohio Valley History, a regional, quarterly history journal.  He has received grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the American Antiquarian Society, the Filson Historical Society, the Kentucky Historical Society, and the State Historical Society of Missouri. Phillips’s current research project, tentatively titled The Rivers Ran Backward: The Civil War on the Middle Border and the Making of American Regionalism, is a social-cultural history of the Civil War experience in the Ohio-Missouri River valleys.  
William Garrett Piston is a native of Johnson City, Tennessee.  He received his B.A. and M.A. from Vanderbilt University and his P.h.D. from the University of South Carolina.  He joined the faculty at Missouri State University in 1988 and teaches courses in military history and the Civil War and Reconstruction.  Piston's scholarship has been honored by the Center for Studies in Military History and the State Historical Society of Missouri.  He serves on the Board of Directors of The Longstreet Society.  His most recent publication is Wilson's Creek, Pea Ridge, and Prairie Grove; A Battlefield Guide, co-authored with Earl Hess, Richard Hatcher, and William L. Shea.

Arnold Schofield was raised in Newton Upper Falls, Massachusetts; served in the United States Army (1960-1966); attended college on the GI-Bill; and is currently the Superintendent of the Marais des Cygnes Massacre State Historic Site and Mine Creek Battlefield in Linn County, Kansas. Before joining the Kansas State Historical Society he retired from forty-three years of federal government service that included twenty-five years as the Historian and Cultural Resource Specialist at Fort Scott National Historic Site. He was and still is a frequent lecturer at universities and public speaker on westward expansion, Kansas history, and the Civil War. He has been actively involved in Civil War Battlefield Preservation for more than thirty years and was in 1999 one of the founders of the Mine Creek Battlefield Foundation, Inc. To date the foundation has raised more than $1,000,000 and purchased three hundred six acres of battlefield land. The objective of this foundation is to assist the State of Kansas in the preservation, protection & interpretation of the Mine Creek Battlefield. Arnold is married to Clara Martens who is the Director of Social Services at Mercy Hospital.  They and their son Austin live in Fort Scott with “Luke” a Yellow Labrador Retriever, and “Mr. Gritts,” their house cat.

 

 William L. Shea is Professor of History at the University at Monticello. A native of Louisiana, he has a B.A. from Louisiana State University and a Ph.D. from Rice University. He has been a Rockefeller Scholar at Colonial Williamsburg, a Fulbright Scholar in China, a consultant for the National Park Service, and a battlefield guide for the Smithsonian Institution. He is author or co-author of numerous books and articles on American military history, especially the Civil War west of the Mississippi River. His books include The Virginia Militia in the Seventeenth Century (LSU Press, 1983), Pea Ridge: Civil War Campaign in the West (University of North Carolina Press, 1992), Vicksburg Is the Key: The Struggle for the Mississippi River (University of Nebraska Press, 2003),  and Wilson’s Creek, Pea Ridge, and Prairie Grove: A Battlefield Guide (University of Nebraska Press, 2006).  His latest book, tentatively titled Fields of Blood: The Prairie Grove Campaign, will be published next year.