A collaboration between the award-winning historian Ari Kelman and the acclaimed graphic novelist Jonathan Fetter-Vorm, Battle Lines is a completely original graphic history of the Civil War. The novel traces an ambitious narrative that extends from the early rumblings of secession to the dark years of Reconstruction, employing bold graphic forms to illuminate the complex history of this period. Richly detailed and wildly inventive, its stories propel the reader to all manner of unlikely ... view more »
A collaboration between the award-winning historian Ari Kelman and the acclaimed graphic novelist Jonathan Fetter-Vorm, Battle Lines is a completely original graphic history of the Civil War. The novel traces an ambitious narrative that extends from the early rumblings of secession to the dark years of Reconstruction, employing bold graphic forms to illuminate the complex history of this period. Richly detailed and wildly inventive, its stories propel the reader to all manner of unlikely vantages as only the graphic form can: from the malaria-filled gut of a mosquito to the faded ink of a soldier’s pen, and from the barren farms of the home front to the front lines of an infantry charge.
Join us as at Herron School of Art and Design as Professor Ari Kelman shares the experiences of creating Battle Lines, and learn about how writers and artists/illustrators can form exciting collaborations, transforming the written word into unique and compelling visuals.
About the artist:
Ari Kelman is the McCabe Greer Professor of History at Penn State University, where he teaches a wide range of courses, including on the Civil War and Reconstruction, the politics of memory, environmental history, Native American history, and America in the 1960s. He is the author, most recently, of Battle Lines: A Graphic History of the Civil War (Hill and Wang, 2015), as well as A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling Over the Memory of Sand Creek (Harvard University Press, 2013), recipient of the Antoinette Forrester Downing Book Award, the Avery O. Craven Award, the Bancroft Prize, the Tom Watson Brown Book Award, and the Robert M. Utley Prize, and A River and Its City: The Nature of Landscape in New Orleans (University of California Press, 2003), which won the Abbott Lowell Cummings Prize.
Kelman’s essays and articles have appeared in Slate, The Christian Science Monitor, The Nation, The Times Literary Supplement, the Journal of Urban History, The Journal of American History, and many others. Kelman has also contributed to outreach endeavors aimed at K-12 educators, and to a variety of public history projects, including documentary films for the History Channel and PBS’s American Experience series. He has received numerous grants and fellowships, most notably from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Huntington Library.
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