An Evening With Robert Hicks, Ph.D.

Join us as we welcome Robert Hicks to present Wounded for Life: The Post-War Journey of Two Union Soldiers.

Many Civil War books discuss the mortality due to bullets and diseases but very few explore the postwar lives of wounded warriors. Based on his new book, Wounded for Life: Seven Union Veterans of the Civil War, Dr. Robert Hicks examines two Union veterans, Presley Dawson and Henry Huidekoper. Dawson, an African American private, was lamed by collapsed earthworks under fire and contracted malaria. Huidekoper, a lieutenant colonel, was shot twice at Gettysburg and suffered an amputated arm. Both men worked, married, and had children, yet the war changed their bodies. Dr. Robert Hicks looks at how they constructed new identities after the trauma of the battlefield.