In this new lecture from the Seward House, Professor Robert May, Emeritus at Purdue University, discusses his latest book, “Debunking the Yule Log Myth.” May explores how the story of the Yule Log became a propaganda tool for Lost Cause writers attempting romanticize the slave South.

Reviewers have praised May’s work, calling it “a powerful new book that corrects a false myth in African American history” and an antidote to “post–Civil War creations told to romanticize enslavement and obliterate its evils.”