2018 Presenters and Guides

Presenters:

Scott C. Patchan

Scott C. Patchan is a graduate of James Madison University in the Shenandoah Valley. He is the author of many articles and books, including The Forgotten Fury: The Battle of Piedmont (1996), Shenandoah Summer: The 1864 Valley Campaign (2007), Second Manassas: Longstreet’s Attack and the Struggle for Chinn Ridge (2011), The Battle of Piedmont and Hunter’s Raid on Staunton (2011), and The Last Battle of Winchester: Phil Sheridan, Jubal Early and the 1864 Shenandoah Valley Campaign (2013). He has also written feature essays for Blue and Gray Magazine on Cool Spring, Rutherford’s Farm and Second Kernstown; Third Battle of Winchester, Fisher’s Hill, Cedar Creek and two volumes on Second Bull Run. He has also written extensively for Civil War Magazine, North South, America’s Civil War and other historical publications. Scott has twice served as President of Bull Run Civil War Round Table, a member of the Kernstown Battlefield Association’s board of directors from 2000-2014, and worked extensively on the interpretation of the Third Winchester battlefield for the Shenandoah Valley Battlefield Foundation. He is currently editing the journal of Colonel Joseph Thoburn and continuing his work on the Valley Campaigns. He is also a much sought tour guide at both Civil War and Revolutionary War era sites from New York to Georgia.

Michael Block

Mike is on the Board of Directors of the Friends of Cedar Mountain Battlefield, and currently serves as its Vice-President. He has also served on the Board of the Brandy Station Foundation and on both the Culpeper and Fauquier Sesquicentennial Committees. Mike served for 20 years in the United States Air Force; being stationed at locations in Europe, Asia and in the United States, retiring in 2001. He continues to support the United States U.S. Government as a contractor for Booz Allen Hamilton. Part of his work includes being a Gettysburg Staff Ride Instructor for Government Intelligence Analysts, focusing on the geospatial and intelligence aspects of the battle. In 2016, he wrote the primary article in Blue and Gray Magazine on the Battle of Cedar Mountain. The Emerging Civil War Series will be publishing his first book, “The Carnage was Fearful: The Battle of Cedar Mountain,” in 2018.

Dr. John Matsui

Dr. Matsui is assistant professor of history at the Virginia Military Institute. He holds a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of the acclaimed “The First Republican Army: The Army of Virginia and the Radicalization of the Civil War”. Pulitzer prize winning historian James McPherson wrote, “This thought-provoking and original study analyzes the political culture of citizen soldiers in the Union Army of Virginia and the Army of the Potomac. Led by Democrat George B. McClellan in 1861–62, the Potomac army resisted the growing pressure for an antislavery war policy, while General John Pope's short-lived Army of Virginia paved the way toward an antislavery ‘hard war’ in congruence with the demands of radical Republicans. As John Matsui makes clear, the absorption of the Army of Virginia into the Army of the Potomac after the Second Battle of Bull Run leavened the North's principal army with a growing commitment to emancipation”.