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About Me

Chandra Manning teaches U.S. history, chiefly of the 19th century, including classes on slavery and emancipation, Lincoln, citizenship, the Civil War, the American Revolution, and the History of Baseball (not necessarily in that order). She began teaching at Georgetown in 2005, took leave to serve as Special Advisor to the Dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University from 2015-2017, and returned to Georgetown full time in the fall of 2017. Her most recent book, Troubled Refuge: Struggling for Freedom in the Civil War (Knopf, 2016), tells the story of Civil War emancipation as a migrant and refugee crisis, in which enslaved men, women, and children ran to the Union Army, found imperfect refuge in camps called “contraband camps”  where they altered the course of the war, emancipation, and citizenship in the United States. It won the Jefferson Davis Prize awarded by the American Civil War Museum for best book on the Civil War and was a Lincoln Prize finalist. Her first book, What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War (Knopf, 2007) won the Avery O. Craven Prize awarded by the Organization of American Historians, earned Honorable Mention for the Lincoln Prize and the Virginia Literary Awards for Nonfiction, and was a finalist for the Frederick Douglass Prize and the Jefferson Davis Prize. Eventually she intends to write something that would qualify for a prize not named for a dead Civil War president. A former National Park Service Ranger, she has also advised historical sites, museums, and historical societies, as well as community groups in search of historical perspective. She is in Washington, DC on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays during the academic year, and for the rest of the week (and in the summer) lives with her husband and children outside of Boston. She has a particular interest in neurodiversity. Above all, she is a Red Sox fan.

Recent Publications

BOOKS:

Troubled Refuge: Struggling for Freedom in the Civil War (New  York: Knopf, 2016).

What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War (New York: Knopf, April 2007).

SELECTED RECENT ESSAYS:

“Northern Women and Emancipation” in Judith Giesberg and Randall Miller, eds., Women and the American Civil War: North-South Counterpoints (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2018).

“Military Emancipation Before the Emancipation Proclamation: Overcoming Structural Obstacles,” in Paul Finkelman and Donald Kennon, Congress and the People’s’ Contest: The Conduct of the Civil War (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2018).

“Emancipation as State-Building from the Inside Out” in Jim Downs, ed., Beyond Freedom: Disrupting the History of Emancipation (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 2017).

“We Had Our Own Refugee Crisis. You Know it as the Civil War.” History News Network October 2016, http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/164012.

Media Coverage

Social Media

Country Focus

Expertise by Geography

United States

Expertise by Chronology

19th century

Expertise by Topic

American Civil War, Emancipation, Slavery, Sports