ARTHUR W. BERGERON, JR.
Bergeron is a Reference Historian with the United States Army Military History Institute at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania, where he has worked since February 2004. He was the Historian at Pamplin Historical Park & The National Museum of the Civil War Soldier near Petersburg, Virginia, from 1996 to 2003. Bergeron was Chief of Interpretive Services for the Louisiana Office of State Parks from 1987-1996. From 1981-1986, he was Historian at the Port Hudson State Historic Site, a Civil War battlefield site. Born in Alexandria, Louisiana, Bergeron received his bachelor’s, masters, and doctoral degrees in American history from Louisiana State University, where he studied under the late Professor T. Harry Williams and Professor William J. Cooper, Jr. Bergeron is a veteran of the United States army and served in the Republic of Vietnam from 1969-1970. He is a member of the Louisiana Historical Association (former president; Fellow of the Association), Society of Civil War Historians, Blue & Gray Education Society, and Harrisburg Civil War Round Table. Bergeron is a past president of the Richmond and Baton Rouge Civil War Round Tables.
Bergeron is the author, co-author, or editor of nearly a dozen books, including the following: Guide to Louisiana Confederate Military Units, 1861-1865 (1989); Confederate Mobile, 1861-1865 (1991); The Civil War Reminiscences of Major Silas T. Grisamore, CSA (1993); Louisianians in the Civil War, co-edited with Lawrence L. Hewitt (2002); The Civil War in Louisiana, Part A: Military Activity (2002) and The Civil War in Louisiana, Part B: The Home Front (2004), which make up Volume V of the Louisiana Purchase Bicentennial Series in Louisiana History, published by the Center for Louisiana Studies. The second and third books listed above were selections of the History Book Club. His most recent publication is A Thrilling Narrative: The Memoir of a Southern Unionist, published by the University of Arkansas Press in April 2006. Bergeron’s articles and book reviews have appeared in such scholarly journals as Civil War History, Civil War Regiments, Louisiana History, Alabama Historical Quarterly, Columbiad, and The Journal of Confederate History.
Among Bergeron’s other publications are essays or chapters in the following books: Encyclopedia of the Confederacy (1994), The Confederate General (1991-1992), Civil War Battlefield Guide: America’s Hallowed Ground (1990; second edition, 1998), Dictionary of Louisiana Biography (1988), and Dictionary of American Military Biography (1984). He is on the Board of Editors of Military History of the West and served in the same capacity for Civil War Regiments until that journal ceased publication in 2000.
Currently, Bergeron is conducting research for biographies of Union general Godfrey Weitzel and Confederate general John Rogers Cooke.
Bergeron's subject for the September 3, 2009 meeting will be "The Louisiana Brigade at Perryville and Murfreesboro" .