UNIT HISTORIES

had only completed his doctorate at Emory University two years before when President John F. Kennedy appointed him executive director of a very troubled U.S. Civil War Centennial Commission in 1961. It proved a wise choice. This, however, was but one, actively engaged with public audiences in person and through various media outlets, and spent four decades teaching the Civil War to more than 20,000 students at Virginia Tech. These endeavors, and his distinguished body of scholarship, earned Robertson well-deserved and universal acclaim as one of the truly great—and personally popular—scholars the field has ever known.