This week, we hear from Christy Coleman, CEO of the American Civil War Museum in Richmond, Virginia. Coleman is a public historian. As you’ll hear in her lecture, her work is to take the findings, the interpretations, of academic historians and bring them to life for the public—as she says, to make the work relevant to contemporary audiences. She says in her talk that, inevitably, new generations will make new meanings of past events: Baby Boomers will understand the causes and significance of the Civil War differently than will millennials.

In her talk, Coleman addresses some of these changes. She starts by considering the ways in which the causes of the civil war have been vastly misunderstood: she helps make sense of that old refrain you used to always hear from self-appointed civil war buffs, that the war was really about states rights after all. Coleman addresses that reading, and then talks about her work at the civil war museum.