Six Bridges Book Festival

Dr. Buckley T. Foster & Dr. Vaughn Scribner

PRESENTERS: Dr. Buckley T. Foster & Dr. Vaughn Scribner
BOOKS: So Great Was the Slaughter & Under Alien Skies
MODERATOR: Tom DeBlack

About the authors:

Buckley T. Foster is a scholar of nineteenth-century Southern and Arkansas history and serves as an assistant professor of history at the University of Central Arkansas. He has published books on the American Civil War and Arkansas history and has written for Arkansas Wildlife, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, the Arkansas Historical Quarterly, and Greenhead Magazine.

Vaughn Scribner is an associate professor of history at the University of Central Arkansas. He is the author of Merpeople: A Human History and Inn Civility: Urban Taverns and Early American Civil Society. He lives in Conway with his wife and dog.

About the books:

So Great Was the Slaughter: Market Hunters, Sportsmen, and Wildlife Conservation in Arkansas is an account of the rise of sportsmen and conservation groups in Arkansas who made common cause to protect the state’s wildlife resources. It reveals the untold story of Arkansas conservation pioneers who tried to save the state’s game and fish populations.

The Revolutionary War is often celebrated as marking the birth of American republicanism, liberty, and representative democracy. Yet for the tens of thousands of British and Hessian troops sent 3,000 miles across the Atlantic Ocean to wage war under alien skies, such a progressive picture, as Vaughn Scribner reveals, could not have been farther from the truth. In Under Alien Skies: Environment, Suffering, and the Defeat of the British Military in Revolutionary America, he illustrates how foreign soldiers’ negative perceptions of the American environment merged with harsh wartime realities to elicit considerable physical, mental, and emotional anguish.