Brown 2026 Reads at the JCB: Michael Vorenberg

Join us on October 20, 2026 at 3 p.m. for a discussion of Michael Vorenberg's Lincoln's Peace: The Struggle to End the American Civil War (Penguin, March 2025). This event is part of Brown 2026 Reads, and is one of four such events to be held during the fall 2026 semester.About Brown 2026 Reads With support from the College, Brown 2026 Reads facilitates student reading opportunities and supplies books, with author discussions to follow.

While undergraduates are the primary audience for this series, book talks are open to other members of the Brown community, as well as readers from the surrounding community. Registration will open for fall in August 2026, through the Dean of the College Office.

After they register, students will hear from Dean of the College Office about how to receive their books for free from the Brown Bookstore. Please visit https://brown2026democracy.brown.edu/research-teaching/brown-2026-reads (https://brown2026democracy.brown.edu/research-teaching/brown-2026-reads) for more information about the series.About the book We set out on the James River, March 25, 1865, aboard the paddle steamboat River Queen.

President Lincoln is on his way to General Grant's headquarters at City Point, Virginia, and he's decided he won't return to Washington until he's witnessed, or perhaps even orchestrated, the end of the Civil War. Now, it turns out, more than a century and a half later, historians are still searching for that end.

Was it April 9, at Appomattox, as conventional wisdom holds, where Lee surrendered to Grant in Wilmer McLean's parlor? Or was it ten weeks afterward, in Galveston, where a federal commander proclaimed Juneteenth the end of slavery?

Or perhaps in August of 1866, when President Andrew Johnson simply declared "the insurrection is at an end"? That the answer was elusive was baffling even to a historian of the stature of Michael Vorenberg, whose work served as a key source of Steven Spielberg's Lincoln.

Vorenberg was inspired to write this groundbreaking book, finding its title in the peace Lincoln hoped for but could not make before his assassination. A peace that required not one but many endings, as Vorenberg reveals in these pages, the most important of which came well more than a year after Lincoln's untimely death.

To say how a war ends is to suggest how it should be remembered, and Vorenberg's search is not just for the Civil War's endpoint but for its true nature and legacy, so essential to the American identity. It's also a quest, in our age of "forever wars," to understand whether the United States's interminable conflicts of the current era have a precedent in the Civil War—and whether, in a sense, wars ever end at all, or merely wax and wane.

More at https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/557203/lincolns-peace-by-michael-vorenberg/ (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/557203/lincolns-peace-by-michael-vorenberg/).