Mr. Chris Kolakowski
Recording history!
Christopher L. Kolakowski is the Director of the Wisconsin Veterans Museum, an educational activity of the Wisconsin Department of Veteran Affairs. As the Director he is responsible for the award-winning museum and research center that acknowledges, commemorates, and affirms the role of Wisconsin veterans in the United States of America’s military past and present.
Chris has his BA in History and Mass Communications from Emory & Henry College and his MA in Public History from the State University of New York at Albany. He is a proud descendent of Wisconsin Veterans from the Civil War through the Cold War.
Chris has spent his career interpreting and preserving American military history with the National Park Service, New York State government, the Rensselaer County (NY) Historical Society, the Civil War Preservation Trust, Kentucky State Parks, and the U.S. Army. He has written and spoken on various aspects of military history and leadership from 1775 to the present. He published numerous books: The Civil War at Perryville: Battling For the Bluegrass, The Stones River and Tullahoma Campaigns: This Army Does Not Retreat, Last Stand. In 2016 the U.S. Army published his volume on the 1862 Virginia Campaigns as part of its sesquicentennial series on the Civil War. His most recent book, on the 1944 India-Burma Campaigns, Nations in the Balance, was released in 2022.