Park University's Spencer Cave Black History Month Lecture Series will host Chandra M. Manning, Ph.D., as its honored lecturer in the 11th annual installment of the program on Tuesday, Feb. 28, 2012. The lecture, which is free and open to the public, will be held in the McCoy Meetin' House on the University's Parkville Campus beginning at 7 p.m. Manning will present her lecture on the topic "Contraband Camps: Slaves, Union Soldiers and the Uncertain Beginnings of Freedom."

Manning, an associate professor of history at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., teaches 19th century U.S. history and co-directs the Georgetown Workshop in 19th Century U.S. History. Her first book, What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery and the Civil War (2007), won the Avery Craven Prize awarded by the Organization of American Historians; earned honorable mention honors for the Lincoln Prize, the Jefferson Davis Prize and the Virginia Literary Awards for Non-Fiction; and was a finalist for the Frederick Douglass Prize. Currently, she is working on a book about Civil War contraband camps, freed people's post-Civil War migration and the struggle over the meaning of citizenship in the 19th century United States.

Manning researches and writes about 19th century U.S. history with a focus on the growing sectional tensions of the antebellum period, the Civil War and Reconstruction. She is particularly interested in ordinary Americans' ideas about slavery, civil rights, citizenship, Republicanism and the legacy of the American Revolution. Her published work to date has focused largely on Union and Confederate soldiers' changing attitudes toward slavery and race during the Civil War. Her new work will take up questions of white northern soldiers' and civilians' notions of and attitudes toward racial equality and black rights during and after the Civil War, as well as freed slaves' ideas about freedom and citizenship. She is also interested in how Americans' cultural attitudes and values responded to and shaped the U.S. transition in the 19th century from an agrarian republic to an urban, industrial nation.

Manning earned her Ph.D. in history in 2002 from Harvard University and her Master of Philosophy degree in Irish history and literature in 1995 from University College, Galway, Ireland. She received a Bachelor of Arts degree in history, graduating summa cum laude in 1993 from Mount Holyoke College.