ESU History Professor to Speak as Part of Prestigious ‘Lessons in History’ Series

Michael P. Gray, Ph.D., professor of history at East Stroudsburg University, has been selected to participate in The National Civil War Museum’s 2020 Lessons in History Speaker Series. The topic of Dr. Gray’s lecture on Saturday, April 4 at 1 p.m., is “Crossing the Deadlines: The Rise of Civil War Prisons as Dark Tourist Destinations.”

According to Dr. Gray, students of the Civil War might be surprised that its prison camps have become a central stop in the burgeoning field of “dark tourism”. His presentation will focus on how prison camps witnessed an expansive number of “viewing episodes” that advanced capitalistic patterns of competition, resulting in some prisons evolving into local tourist attractions—at the expense of prisoners and to the profit of businesspersons. Gray adds that contrary to many popular dark tourist stops in 19^th century America, these Civil War prison locales, carefully overseen by the military, condoned the actions of civilians who participated in the war by “acting out” against prisoners through a variety of demonstrations.

The year-long Lessons in History Program at The National Civil War Museum in Harrisburg, Pa., is open to the general public at no cost – however, regular admission applies for entrance to the Museum galleries. According to its website, The National Civil War Museum is “the only museum in the U.S. that portrays the entire story of the American Civil War.”  The museum is one of only eight museums in Pennsylvania to be a member of the Smithsonian Institution Affiliations Program, which enables it to incorporate artifacts from the Smithsonian collection into its own exhibits.

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