Since arriving on campus five years ago, the David H. and Ann L. Hinchcliff Professor of History has published a book on the Lost Cause and has served as vice chair of the U.S. Army’s Renaming Commission. Both endeavors have positioned him as an expert commentator on many recent topics in the news. These have included President Trump’s decision to revert army base names back to their original names, the Washington D.C. parade honoring the army, the possible reinstatement of Confederate monuments previously removed, and changes at the Pentagon, among others.
In January, Seidule spoke to the non-profit Mississippi Today for an article titled “Mississippi still officially celebrates Robert E. Lee on MLK Day. It’s beyond time to stop.” The vice chair of the U.S. Naming Commission, Seidule co-wrote a Washington Post opinion piece in February titled “Fort Bragg is back. Stop the re-renaming of Army bases there.” And in a related article also in the Washington Post titled “How Trump uses the power of names to impose his history of America,” Seidule said, “I can’t look into Secretary Hegseth’s heart and say, ‘Is this a wink and a nod to the Confederates?’ I can’t say that. [But] is it really going to be surname over service?” In another March Washington Post article about the Defense Department’s erasure of the Navajo Code Talkers, he posited, “The reason they were chosen was based on their ethnicity. … It’s impossible to disentangle their ethnicity from their mission success.” In yet another Post article in April on the renaming of Army bases, Seidule was again quoted, “Hegseth just undid all of that work with a stroke of a pen, and now we’re going to value surname over service.”
Seidule was quoted by Politifact in March in an article titled “Hegseth says leaked Signal group text didn’t have ‘war plans’. But screenshots show attack details.” He said, “The text messages did not amount to an OPLAN, but rather the ‘Cliffs Notes’ version, with all the important details of a military operation and clearly a security breach of the first order.”
Other articles about the army base name changes, Hegseth, and the military parade in Washington, D.C., continued quoting Seidule through the spring and summer. They appeared in The Washington Post (“Hegseth is in over his head. No wonder the Pentagon is a mess.”) and in Politico (“Trump reverses Army base names in latest DEI purge”). Seidule co-authored another opinion piece, this time for The Hill titled “Hegseth subverts Congress by ordering racist Confederate monument’s return to Arlington” in August.
CNN called upon Seidule during the summer to comment on various national and international situations including the military strike on Iran, the war in Ukraine, and the reinstallation of the portrait of Robert E. Lee at West Point. And he served as an analyst for ABC’s coverage of the 250th Army birthday parade in June. In early September, Seidule appeared on NBC to discuss the Army’s reversal of its plans to hold a parade in honor of Tom Hanks at West Point.
Other media engagements have continued in the fall, including comments in a widely distributed Associated Press story about West Point’s remounting of Robert E. Lee’s portrait, an interview on Here & Now on public radio on the Confederate monument in Arlington cemetery, and an interview with the BBC on the U.S. Department of War.
Besides speaking with the media, Seidule continues to address groups around the country. At the first John Woodruff Lecture at Fort Ontario in Oswego, he spoke primarily about his book, Robert E. Lee and Me – A Southerner’s Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause. “History can be dangerous, because it challenges our myths and our identities,” Seidule told the crowd, “and, boy, did I find that out. I also found out that in our nation, many still believe in something I grew up believing as a child.”
Seidule’s next book, A Promise Delivered, will be published next month.
Posted October 23, 2025
