The Freckled Historian

Published in a special issue, “What Is To Be Done? Historians of Crisis in a Moment of Crisis,” of the Journal of the Civil War Era 16, no. 1 (March 2026): 114–123.

This essay analyzes freedpeople's political correspondence to Mississippi's governors during the Civil War and Reconstruction to offer one model for contemporary political engagement—and the importance of its archival preservation—during the Trump administration. Throughout Reconstruction, Black Mississippians wrote directly to their state executives, sharing their fears and frustrations, their hopes and dreams, for the first time. Through this correspondence, they embraced, expanded, and defended their fragile citizenship and, in the process, created an archive that underscores important connections among political correspondence, citizenship, censorship, and government accountability during Reconstruction and today.

Recipient of the 2023 Anthony E. Kaye Memorial Essay Award and published in Journal of the Civil War Era 15, no. 1 (March 2025): 33–54.

In the trans-Mississippi West, white Union veterans and their families commemorated the American Civil War in ways that supported the colonization of American Indians and privileged themselves. This article analyzes the gendered dimensions of this process. In Memorial Day addresses, monument dedication speeches, and GAR and WRC records, western Union veterans celebrated themselves for preserving and expanding free, single-family households west, which they asserted was a legacy of their Civil War military service. Contending Union veterans and their wives best exemplified civilization, they employed Civil War commemorative rituals to argue they were the most deserving of western lands and entitlements

Co-authored with Susannah J. Ural and published in Enslaved: Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation5, no. 3 (2024): 48–58.

This article & its corresponding 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 co-occurrences (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.

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 the 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 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.