Friday, October 11, 2019
The Battle of Spotsylvania Court House
Presented by Robert Lee Hodge
Born on Stonewall Jackson’s birthday, Robert Lee Hodge has had a keen interest in America’s Civil War history since age 4. Over the course of more than 30 years, Hodge has worked on several history-based films—from dramas like ABC’s North and South and TNT’s Gettysburg and Andersonville, to many programs on The History Channel, Arts and Entertainment Channel, and the National Geographic Channel, to his own Civil War documentaries, which have won 5 Telly awards and a regional Emmy in 2007. Hodge has been featured on National Public Radio’s Talk of the Nation and Soundscapes, NBC’s Late, Late Show, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, the PBS program Going Places, and C-SPAN II’s Book TV. Robert has also written for The Nashville Tennessean, Civil War Times, America’s Civil War, The Washington Post, and North and South magazine. He played a major role in, and appears on the cover of, the New York Times’ 1999 best-seller Confederates in the Attic—hosting Pulitzer Prize-winning author Tony Horwitz on an eclectic and memorable Civil War tour-de-force of historic sites. Robert has been a historical researcher, primarily at The National Archives and Library of Congress, working with nationally-recognized experts. He also was principle researcher on Time-Life Books 18-volume series Voices of the Civil War and The Illustrated History of the Civil War. Hodge’s interest became preserving historic green space when he interned with the National Park Service’s Civil War Sites Advisory Commission in 1992. He has organized battlefield preservation fund-raisers that have garnered over $160,000. He also serves on the board of directors of the Central Virginia Battlefields Trust (the CVBT); an organization that has protected over 1,300 acres at Chancellorsville, Fredericksburg, The Wilderness, and Spotsylvania Court House, Virginia, since 1996. Hodge was featured on the National Geographic Channel and Time magazine in 2011, wrote for The Washington Post during the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, and was a researcher for the U.S. Army in 2013. In 2016 he wrote the script for the film at Andrew Jackson’s Hermitage. In 2017 he appeared in The Wall Street Journal and on National Public Radio’s Kojo Nnamdi Show and Chinese Central Television about Confederate monuments and Civil War memory.
In 2019 Hodge started blogging for the Emerging Civil War. ECW is currently running his “Yellowhammers and Environmentalism” series about Evander Law’s Alabama Brigade’s route of march to Gettysburg. He’s also writing about the loss of historic green space.
