Dr. Timothy B. Smith

Dr. Timothy B. Smith
2009 Event Champion Hill Featured Speaker

Dr. Timothy Smith, author and historian, will be the featured speaker at the 146th Anniversary of the Battle of Champion Hill on May 16, 2009, 9:00 a.m. The event will take place on the grounds of the Champion Hill Missionary Baptist Church.

Smith, Civil War author and historian, is a native of Mississippi but now resides in Tennessee, where he teaches history at the University of Tennessee at Martin. Smith received both BA and MA degrees in history from the University of Mississippi and a PhD from Mississippi State University in 2001.

Pursuing his love of history, Smith worked for the National Park Service at the Shiloh National Military Park for seven years, where his interest in the Civil War was intensified. His main area of interest and specialty, besides the Civil War, is the history of Civil War battlefield preservation.

Prior to writing CHAMPION HILL: Decisive Battle for Vicksburg, Smith, guided by Brigadier General Parker Hills and Sergeant Major Ron Graves, visited Champion Hill battlefield and studied the terrain to ensure that his analysis agreed with the ground on which the battle was fought. CHAMPION HILL: Decisive Battle for Vicksburg was published by Savas Beatie Publishers, New York, in September 2004.

Other books by Smith include: Shiloh and the Western Campaign of 1862, co-edited with Dr. Gary D. Joiner of Louisiana State University-Shreveport; This Great Battlefield of Shiloh: History, Memory, and the Establishment of a Civil War National Military Park, 2004; The Untold Story of Shiloh: The Battle and the Battlefield, 2006; and The Golden Age of Battlefield Preservation: The Establishment of America’s First Five Civil War Military Parks, 2008; In addition to the books he has written, Smith has also published articles in history journals including North and South, Civil War Times, Tennessee Historical Quarterly, America’s Civil War, Annals of Iowa, and Journal of Mississippi History.

At present, Smith is working on a history of Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park as well as a study of the home front in Civil War Mississippi for the Heritage of Mississippi Series published by the University Press of Mississippi.

Smith will be available to sign his best selling book, Champion Hill: Decisive Battle for Vicksburg prior to the 9:00 a.m. event on the church grounds and at Matilda’s House during the afternoon.

The Champion Heritage Foundation welcomes Dr. Timothy Smith to Champion Hill as speaker for the 146th Anniversary Event.

"CHAMPION HILL is, unequivocally, the best non-fiction narrative of a Civil War engagement that I've ever read - and that includes works by Shelby Foote and James McPherson. It generally concerns U.S. Major General Ulysses Grant's capture of Vicksburg, but is more specifically about the crucial Battle of Champion Hill on May 16, 1863, which essentially sealed Vicsbu8rg's fate by forcing its defenders back into the city, around which Grant ultimately established siege lines." Joseph Haschka, Glendale, California. Book review from Amazon.com