Is this sentence grammatically correct? "i was typing a memo when my boss requested a meeting".

No. The correct way is, "I was typing a memo when my boss requested a meeting." The I needs to be capitalized and the period goes inside the quotations marks.

Despite the overwhelming body of academic work on the civil war produced in the united states (and beyond) most of the american public (as well as the international audience) has been exposed to it through cultural texts such as novels, poems, songs, motion pictures, tv series, and documentaries.