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About Me

After receiving my doctorate from Johns Hopkins University in 2002, I worked for a year as a researcher for the American Historical Association in Washington D.C. In 2003, I took up a lectureship in the University of Sydney’s History Department. Since that time, I have taught courses on a range of topics in U.S. history, from the colonial era through to the early twentieth century. My research specialties include the history of the American Civil War and Reconstruction era; war, memory, and trauma; the history of childhood; and the social, cultural, and political history of the nineteenth-century U.S. My first book, War Stories: Suffering and Sacrifice in the Civil War North (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), jointly won the AHA’s biennial Hancock prize for the best first book in any field of history. I subsequently began a series of collaborations with Associate Professor Rebecca Jo Plant (UCSD), first to write about the racial politics of war memory in the interwar U.S. and, more recently, to examine debates over youth enlistment in post-Revolutionary America. In the recent past, we have been writing a book that examines debates over the enlistment age in nineteenth-century America. We are also developing a study that examines the roots and functioning of America’s military justice system from its founding in the 1770s to its transformation in the 1980s.

Recent Publications

Books

Co-authored with Rebecca Jo Plant, Boys Among Men: The Dilemma of Underage Soldiers in Civil War America (forthcoming, 2019). 

War Stories: Suffering and Sacrifice in the Civil War North (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). Winner of the Australian Historical Association’s Biennial Hancock Award for the best first book in any field of history.

Co-edited with Fitzhugh Brundage, Clare Corbould and Michael McDonnell, Memory, History, and Nation-Making in the United States from the Revolution to the Civil War (Cambridge: Massachusetts University Press, 2014).

Articles

“At Nathaniel Bowditch’s Grave,” in Civil War Places, ed. Gary Gallagher and Matthew Gallman (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, forthcoming 2018).

With Rebecca Jo Plant, “Studying Underage Enlistment in the American Civil War,” Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 11:1 (2018): 47-52.

With Michelle Moyd, and Rebecca Jo Plant, “Moral Panic versus Moral Blindness: Responses to Children’s Militarization in Uganda and the United States,” Micol Siegel, ed., Panic, Transnational Cultural Studies, and the Affective Contours of Power (New York: Routledge, 2018), chap. 2.

With Rebecca Jo Plant, “No Minor Matter: Underage Soldiers and the Nationalization of Habeas Corpus in Nineteenth Century America,” Law & History Review 35:4 (2017): 1-47.  Winner of the CCWH’s Carol Gold Award for the best article in a peer-reviewed journal in any field in the preceding year for a scholar at or above Associate Professor level.

“Feeling the Pain: Coming to Terms with Suffering in America’s Civil War,” J19: The Journal of Nineteenth Century History, 4:1 (2016): 181-221.

With Rebecca Jo Plant, “‘The Crowning Insult’: Federal Segregation and the Gold Star Mothers Pilgrimages of the Early 1930s,” Journal of American History 202:1 (Sept 2015): 406-432. Winner of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians’ Article Prize for the best article in the field of the history of women, gender or sexuality, and the Association of Black Women Historian’s Letitia Woods Brown Article Prize.

“Old Fashioned Tea Parties: Revolutionary Memory in the Civil War,” in Memory, History, and Nation-Making in the United States from the Revolution to the Civil War, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Massachusetts University Press, 2014).

With Michael A. McDonnell, Clare Corbould, and W. Fitzhugh Brundage, “The Revolution in American Life from 1776 to the Civil War,” in Memory, History and Nation-Making in the United States from the Revolution to the Civil War (Cambridge: Massachusetts University Press, 2014), 1-18.

“Forgetting the Women: Debates Over Female Patriotism in the Civil War North,” Journal of Women’s History 23:2 (Summer 2011), 64-86.

“So Lonesome I Could Die: Nostalgia and Debates over Emotional Control in the Civil War North,” 41:2 Journal of Social History (December 2007): 253-83.

“‘Let All Nations See’: Civil War Nationalism and the Memorialization of Wartime Voluntarism,” Civil War History 52:1 (March 2006): 66-93.

“‘Honorable Scars’: Northern Amputees and the Meaning of Civil War Injuries,” in Paul A. Cimbala and Randall M. Miller, eds., Union Soldiers and the Northern Home Front: Wartime Experiences and Postwar Adjustments (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002).

 

Media Coverage

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Country Focus

Expertise by Geography

United States

Expertise by Chronology

19th century

Expertise by Topic

American Civil War, Children & Youth, Emancipation, Gender