UNC-W's Zombek to highlight the Sachsman Symposium at AU

By Hub Burton | Special to the Bell Ringer

Associate professor Angela M. Zombek of the University of North Carolina at Wilmington will deliver the Hazel Dicken-Garcia Lecture at the Sachsman Symposium on the Nineteenth Century Press, the Civil War and Free Expression on Nov. 14, 2025, at Augusta University’s Jaguar Student Activities Center.

The lecture will be held in the Williams Ballroom at 12:30 p.m. It is open to the public. Kim Davies, the dean of Pamplin College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, will speak before the DIcken-Garcia Lecture.

Zombek, an award-winning authority on the Civil War prisoner experience and the popular press, is the author of Penitentiaries, Punishment, and Military Prisons: Familiar Responses to an Extraordinary Crisis during the American Civil War, [Kent State University Press, 2018], an Honorable Mention selection of the Civil War Monitor’s Best Civil War Books. She is currently at work on her second book, Stronghold of the Union: Key West Under Martial Law under contract with the University of Florida Press and has authored numerous journal articles and chapters for essay collections that survey and document the dynamics of Union and Confederate soldiers’ captivity during the conflict.

Writing in the Journal of Southern History, reviewer Sarah Purcell praises Penitentiaries, Punishment, and Military Prisons for its potential to foster fresh perspectives on the topic. “Zombek’s tightly written and argued account will be required reading for anyone interested in the penal system and should appeal to anyone open to seeing Civil War prisons in a new way.”

An editor of Kent State University Press’ Interpreting the Civil War series, Zombek has also served as a Copie Hill Civil War Fellow of the American Battlefield Trust.

The lecture is named in honor of the late Hazel Dicken-Garcia, a journalism historian at the University of Minnesota who was highly recognized for her study of 19th-Century press ethics. Dicken-Garcia was one of the original founders of the Symposium and one of the country’s leading authorities on 19th-century journalism history.

“It's an honor to join the Sachsman Symposium on the Nineteenth Century Press,” Zombek said. “Dr. Dicken-Garcia’s work illuminated how the press evolved in the young American republic, and the Symposium continues her legacy of illustrating how newspapers and journalists adapted to the rapidly changing circumstances of technological growth, urbanization, sectional division, war, and the particular challenges that wartime often posed to the freedoms outlined in the First Amendment.” 

Sponsored by the Society of Nineteenth Century Historians and Augusta University’s Pamplin College, the 2025 conference features informative paper presentations and thoughtful panel discussions. A program schedule is available for preview on the Society’s website at 19thcenturyhistorians.org and the public is invited to register to join the Symposium by completing the sign-up form available on the organization’s home page.

This is the 33rd Symposium. It is named in the honor of its founder, professor David Sachsman of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. He died in 2022.

Provost Maggy Tomova will open the conference on Wednesday, Nov. 13, at 3 p.m. in the Williams Ballroom.

Note: At the top of the page, Angela M. Zombek of UNC-Wilmington will be the keynote speaker at this year’s Sachsman Symposium on the Nineteenth Century Press.

Contact Hub Burton at burtonhub@gmail.com.