The Harrisburg Civil War Round Table will celebrate its 65th anniversary on Friday, May 17, at the Central Penn College Conference Center, 600 Valley Road, Enola. Doors will open at 5:30 p.m., and a buffet dinner will be served at 6 p.m. Anyone wishing to attend the lecture only should arrive by 7 p.m. This lecture will not be broadcast via Zoom.

C.W. Goodyear will explore the Civil War military service of Maj. Gen. James A. Garfield, who went on to serve in Congress and become the 20th president of the United States. In his biography "President Garfield: From Radical to Unifier," Goodyear charts the life and times of Garfield, who was a progressive firebrand and conservative compromiser, a Union war hero, the founder of the first Department of Education, a Supreme Court attorney, an abolitionist preacher, a mathematician, a canal man, an election-fixer and a clean-government champion, a gentleman farmer, the last president to be born in a log cabin, and the second president to be assassinated. Over nearly two decades in Congress during a polarized era - Reconstruction and the Gilded Age - Garfield served as a peacemaker in a nation and Republican Party defined by divisions. He was elected president to overcome them, and he was killed while trying to do so.

Goodyear is an author and historian based in Washington, D.C. He was born in New Orleans and grew up abroad before graduating from Yale University. He has been featured on the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History's "Book Breaks" program with Gina Oppenheim; at the Midtown Scholar bookstore with National Civil War Museum CEO Jeffrey Nichols; at the Politics & Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C., with retired Gen. Stanley McCrystal; and on PBS with Christiane Amanpour.

The program is open to the public. The lecture is free, and there is a fee for the dinner, payable at the door. To make reservations for the dinner by noon on Monday, May 13, contact Brian Foster at hcwrt.membership@gmail.com or 717-962-6122 or visit https://harrisburgcwrt.org.

For more information, contact programs chair Stephen Smith at 717-433-0209.