If you were casually watching C-SPAN on Thursday, you might have noticed Yale celeb professor David Blight moderating a panel about — what else? — the Civil War and Emancipation.

The panel — which drew about 100 attendees and was moderated by Blight, a Civil War historian and director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition, — featured author and senior editor for The Atlantic Ta-Nehisi Coates, Columbia professor Andrew Delbanco, University of Virginia professor Gary Gallagher, University of Pennsylvania professor Stephanie McCurry and Yale Law School professor John Witt ’94 LAW ’99 GRD ’00.

Panelists discussed the memory of Civil War and Emancipation, and questioned the role of the war’s memory in present day society.

“For me, one of the features of the Civil War is we’re mesmerized by it because we can’t imagine such a scale of death and destruction,” Delbanco said during the panel. “It was a good preview of some of the problems of the twenty-first century.”