AHA executive director James Grossman was quoted in a Washington Times article by Sean Salai about the upcoming celebration of Ulysses S. Grant’s 200th birthday, including Grant’s changing legacy over the years. Historians, Grossman explained, have come to see the Civil War as a “war of liberation, rather than a tragic and preventable conflict in which both sides had honorable goals. … Grant becomes the leader of an army of liberation. He also, as president, is increasingly understood as attempting to enforce the implications of that victory, rather than oppressing a victimized region struggling to redeem its governments from the alleged excesses of Reconstruction.”