Remembering Arthur Bergeron
Arthur W. Bergeron Jr., PhD, age 63, of Shippensburg, Pennsylvania, passed away on Monday, February 8, 2010, at Carlisle Regional Hospital, Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Arrangements are under the direction of John Kramer & Son.
Bergeron was a reference historian with the United States Army Military History Institute at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania, where he had 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 and, from 1987 to 1996, chief of interpretive services for the Louisiana Office of State Parks. From 1981 to 1986, he was historian at the Port Hudson State Historic Site, a Civil War battlefield site in Jackson, Louisiana. Born in Alexandria, Louisiana, in 1946, Bergeron received his bachelor’s, master’s, 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. A United States Army veteran, Bergeron served in the Republic of Vietnam from 1969 to 1970. He was a member of the Louisiana Historical Association (former president; Fellow of the Association), the Society of Civil War Historians, the Blue & Gray Education Society, and the Harrisburg Civil War Round Table, as well as a past president of the Richmond and Baton Rouge Civil War Round Tables.
Bergeron was the author, coauthor, editor, or coeditor of fourteen 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 (2002); The Civil War in Louisiana, Part A: Military Activity (2002); and The Civil War in Louisiana, Part B: The Home Front (2004), the last two of 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 was A Thrilling Narrative: The Memoir of a Southern Unionist (2006). With Lawrence Lee Hewitt, he coedited Confederate Generals in the Western Theater, volume 1, Classic Essays on America’s Civil War and Confederate Generals in the Western Theater, volume 2, Essays on America’s Civil War, both of which will be published this spring by the University of Tennessee Press. Two other collaborations with Hewitt—Confederate Generals in the Western Theater, volume 3, Essays on America’s Civil War and Confederate Generals in the Trans-Mississippi, volume 1, Essays on America’s Civil War—are scheduled for publication in 2011. 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 Journal of Confederate History.
Among Bergeron’s other publications were essays or chapters in the following: Encyclopedia of the Confederacy (1994); Leadership during the Civil War: The 1989 Deep Delta Civil War Symposium, Themes in Honor of T. Harry Williams (1992); The Confederate General (1991–92); 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 was 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.
Besides additional volumes on Confederate generals in the Western Theater and Trans-Mississippi, at the time of his death Bergeron was conducting research for biographies of Union general Godfrey Weitzel and Confederate general John Rogers Cooke.