Executive Director
William E. Hardy is Assistant Professor of History and Lincoln Scholar in the History Department, Paul V. Hamilton School of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at Lincoln Memorial University. He received his B.A. and M.A. in History at the University of Louisville and earned his Ph.D. in 19th Century American History from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Hardy specializes in the political, constitutional, and cultural history of nineteenth-century America and Tennessee history. His teaching and research interests include the life and times of Abraham Lincoln; the American Civil War and Reconstruction eras; nineteenth-century American sports; and military, Southern, and Tennessee History; He has recently completed a history of Civil War era baseball in Tennessee and is currently at work on a study of Tennessee's Reconstruction Era and a destructive fire that destroyed Knoxville, Tennessee's business district at the turn of the twentieth century.