The Freckled Historian

Co-authored with Susannah J. Ural and published in Enslaved: Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation 5, no. 3 (2024): 48–58.

This article & its corresponding dataset dataset focus on four subject tags that relate directly to African American experiences that can be found in our much larger collection of over 20,000 documents from Mississippi's Civil War and Reconstruction-era governors' papers. By selecting subject tags relating to African American experiences, users can explore cooccurrences (or closely related subject tags) to that term and narrow the data by region, date, or other terms such as the U.S. Army.

Published in Journal of War & Society 42, no. 3 (August 2023): 233–250

This article examines how white Kansan Union veterans and their families commemorated the American Civil War throughout the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Kansans’ post-war narratives, including a monument erected to Gen. James B. McPherson in 1917, constructed a legacy of the war that asserted the Union war effort preserved the trans-Mississippi West for free-labour and celebrated veteran-pioneers for fulfilling the promise of a free-labour American empire by migrating to Kansas post-war. Distinct from their eastern counterparts, Kansan Union veterans and their families wielded collective memories of the Civil War as a tool of colonisation in the American West.

in Teaching Gradually: Practical Pedagogy for Graduate Students, by Graduate Students (Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing, 2021)

This essay engages directly with the challenge that students from a dominant cultures may be resistant to entertaining alternative perspectives, and it offers several solutions to graduate student teachers for creating an inclusive classroom that emphasizes women and people of color without alienating white male students. It also presents solutions that worked for me in multiple courses with diverse student groups, beginning with my decision to structure my classes around a single, open-ended central question and holding frequent in-class discussions to answer that question from multiple intersectional points of view.

Published in Civil War History 68, no. 4 (December 2022): 373–396

“Jennie” Wade was the only recorded civilian casualty during the Battle of Gettysburg and sister of prominent Iowa Woman’s Relief Corps (WRC) leader, “Georgia” Wade McClellan. Little had been done to memorialize Wade in the thirty-six years since her death because the Gettysburg community believed she had failed to obey rigid nineteenth-century gender roles. The Iowa WRC, however, enthusiastically commemorated Wade to bring recognition to Iowa women’s work for the Union cause and its remembrance. Iowa WRC women’s efforts to commemorate Wade reveal that place and region impacted how northerners decided who was deemed worthy of commemoration in the Civil War North.

Published in Muster, the Journal of the Civil War Era’s Blog, May 14, 2024

While pondering the future of digital history, historian Edward L. Ayers argues the field should not only replicate archives and build new tools. It must also feature interpretation, explanation, and explication, and when it accomplishes these things, it can contribute original knowledge and perform a democratic service in meaningful and enduring ways. Digital history, therefore, presents a unique opportunity and responsibility to preserve, interpret, and disseminate historical resources to scholars and the public alike, an especially important goal to the recovery work of Black voices during the Civil War era….

Published in Middle West Review 3, no. 1 (Fall 2016): 49–70

Throughout the American Civil War, Iowan women performed relief work for soldiers and their families on the home front in Local Ladies’ Aid Societies. Iowan women believed their wartime benevolent work augmented their relationship with the national government and served as evidence of their greater patriotism and loyalty to the cause. As frontier residents Iowans shared dual loyalties to supporting the Union and developing their state. Although their efforts were often similar to eastern women’s, women in aid societies in Iowa viewed the added burden of frontier life as a testament to their loyalty and patriotism.