Speaker/Host: Gene Schmiel

Presented by the Lifelong Learning Institute, Manassas

This event is open to the public. For more information about the Lifelong Learning Institute, Manassas, visit lli-manassas.org

After the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, the greatest real estate deal in history, the United States gained control of one of nature’s most beautiful and economically bountiful features, the Mississippi River. Soon steamboats by the hundreds were transporting goods and people up and down that 2,000 mile waterway. Later, a boy from Hannibal, Missouri named Samuel Clemens, aka Mark Twain, instilled a love of “Old Man River” into America’s literature and history. Gene Schmiel’s talk will cover that history as well as how the course of the river and modern boats/transports continue to make the “Father of Waters” a key element of American life today.

Gene Schmiel is a retired U.S. Department of State foreign service officer, who was also an assistant professor of history at St. Francis University in Loretto, Pennsylvania. He holds a doctorate in history from The Ohio State University and has written over 20 books about the Civil War. His first, Citizen-General: Jacob Dolson Cox and the Civil War Era, was published in 2014 by Ohio University Press. A companion book, My Dearest Lilla: Civil War Letters Home by General Jacob D. Cox, was published in the fall of 2022 by the University of Tennessee Press. Gene has presented three classes to LLI on Civil War topics.