Today and tomorrow (May 18th and 19th), the University of Tulsa and Gilcrease Museum will host a two-day symposium to announce the now-being-planned Helmerich Center for American Research, a new scholarly resource to be constructed on the grounds of the museum. The symposium is entitled "Material Memory" (and you can learn all about it at this link). Our guest on this edition of StudioTulsa is the award-winning Civil War historian, David W. Blight, a Professor of American History and the Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University. Professor Blight will be a keynote speaker at the "Material Memory" conference; his free-to-the-public address, which happens at 7pm tonight (Friday the 18th) at the Gilcrease Auditorium, is entitled "The Memory Boom in Public History at the Civil War Sesquicentennial." He joins us by phone to discuss the various ways in which Americans have remembered, romanticized, re-enacted, reflected on, and reacted to the Civil War in the 150 years since it occurred.