Yvonne Pitts, Ph.D., associate professor of history at Purdue University will deliver a lecture on “Lincoln, Martial Law, & Political Dissent During the Civil War” on September 18, 2019 at 7 p.m. in the Driscoll Auditorium at Holy Cross College in commemoration of Constitution Day. The event is free and open to the public. A reception will follow.
“We are pleased to have a scholar of the Constitution with us for this event. Dr. Pitts’ historical insights from the nation’s tragic Civil War are bound to shed light on the strengths and weaknesses of our founding document,” said Holy Cross College history department chair Angel Cortes, Ph.D.
Pitts earned her doctoral degree from the University of Iowa in 2006. She is the author of the book Family, Law, and Inheritance in America: A Social and Legal History of Nineteenth Century Kentucky through Cambridge University Press. Pitts received a Filson Fellowship at the Filson Historical Society in Louisville, Kentucky, and has been a fellow at J. Willard Hurst Summer Institute in Legal History at the University of Wisconsin Law School.
Professor Pitts’ work has been published in the Journal of Women’s History. She is also the recipient of a Library Scholars Grant, which she is using to study the U.S. military’s regulation of prostitution in Civil War era Nashville, Tennessee. She regularly teaches courses in U.S. constitutional history, the history of sexual regulation, race and the law, and American legal culture.
