The Butler County Historical Society is having a special guest and speaker at its meeting Sunday.

At 2 p.m. in City Hall, Linda Green, Lt. Col., U.S. Army, retired will discuss her book, First, for the Duration.

The book discusses the Confederate Army, and specifically the Eighth Alabama Infantry and includes the story of the Greenville Guards.

“I will discuss the book and the first part of the book is what I call the most boring part f the book,” Green said. “It covers the 10 companies that made up the Eighth Alabama Infantry. Then I move into second a part of the book, which is basically chapter two. I discuss what happened to the Eighth Alabama Infantry, the hardships that they have faced the losses that they faced and a great deal about who the members were.”

Herbert Morton, program chairman of the group, said the book is written about the first regiment.

“When they joined up, they were going to sign up for the duration of the war instead of 90 days or one year,” he said. “Locally, what we call the National Guard unit, we call the Greenville Guard who already had been in service for the state at Pensacola.”

Green will be discussing the Hillary Herbert Unit that left Greenville in 1861 and talk about the different places it was assigned to during the war, Historical Society President Barbara Middleton said.

“There’s a plaque from when the unit left the depot in 1861,” Middleton said. “It had been taken down years ago, it was lost and it was recovered. The Father Ryan chapter originally put the plaque up, we gave it to them and they put it back at the depot.”

Green graduated from East Carolina University in Greenville, N.C. After earning a BA and MA in American Civil War, she received a direct commission as a 1st Lt. in the Army Ordinance Corps and served two years in Germany before returning to the U.S. She worked at West Point as an assistant professor of American history and is the author of more than 60 books.

“I wrote the manuscript 17 years ago, it was a put on the back burner because I moved to Washington, D.C. and never had time to get to it,” Green said. “When I came to Alabama, I took the old manuscript with me, and I read that manuscript one night, and I never would have envisioned that I could have put those words to paper. I was crying at the end of reading my manuscript.”

Morton encourages the community to come to the event.

“This lady is quite a scholar and has done some other things with historians in their research particularly interesting,” Morton said. “She will be selling [her book] at a discount for those that come Sunday.”

The meeting will be held at 2 p.m. at the Greenville City Hall.