Of art and the Civil War
At a luncheon Thursday in Washington, D.C., Harvard joined three other universities and five performing arts organizations in launching the National Civil War Project. The multiyear, multicity collaboration is designed to use the arts to reimagine America’s transformative clash of 150 years ago. New plays and other performances will be commissioned through the project, organizers said, and the member universities will create related academic courses, lecture series, and other programs. Collaborators on the project will convene national conferences, expert roundtables, community programs, and public discussions. There also will be student exhibitions and playwriting projects. The Harvard-affiliated American Repertory Theater will take part. Artistic director Diane Paulus praised the “opportunity to explore the American Civil War, and the civil war as it continues in our world today.” The project’s core idea is to use the lens of the arts to look back at the period that brought slaver to an end, spawned some of the...