The Americas’ Civil War Era: Diverse Histories

Name: The Americas’ Civil War Era: Diverse Histories | The Huntington
Start: Fri, May 30 2025
Location: The Huntington

Event

This two-day conference will bring themes once seen as peripheral to the center of attention, reshaping overall understandings of the Civil War Era.

Conferences

Studies of the American Civil War, argued historian Jim Downs over a decade ago, had become too confined to familiar topics such as military history and the conduct of sectional and national politics. New approaches were needed to reshape and broaden discussion of a crucial period in the history of the Americas. At the same time, as Ta-Nehisi Coates suggested in his important 2012 article “Why Do So Few Blacks Study the Civil War?” scholarly participation in the field was insufficiently diverse. African Americans especially, whose forebears had in so many senses been central to the war, its origins, and its outcomes, were considerably underrepresented amidst the mainly white scholars whose interests and assumptions, perspectives and debates had long dominated Civil War history and its development. In recent years, however, diversity among Civil War era scholars has grown, and new scholarship has been drawing attention to topics and themes once regarded as marginal or peripheral to conventional accounts. This conference offers a timely opportunity to take stock, and to illustrate how this greater diversity of perspectives enhances understanding of the Civil War Era in the United States itself and beyond. Historians and literature scholars in several areas will present recent findings that put African American and Latinx people, women and children, farming families and theatrical performers, at the center of their analyses.

Key Details

Conference registration is good for both days and includes general admission to The Huntington.
Lunch reservations will close on May 27 at 5 p.m. A limited number of lunch tickets will be available for purchase day-of at the conference.

Conference Schedule

Friday, May 30

8:30 a.m. | Registration and Coffee

9 a.m. | Welcome

Sue Juster (The Huntington)
Introduction: Verónica Castillo-Muñoz (University of California, Santa Barbara) and Christopher Clark (University of Connecticut)

9:15 a.m. | Session 1 : Civil Wars: Conflicts, Geographies, Identities

Moderator: Justene Hill Edwards
Sarah Rodriguez (Florida Gulf Coast University), “The Great North American Constitutional Revolution”
Verónica Castillo-Muñoz (University of California, Santa Barbara), “Californios, Baja California, and the Complexities of War”
Jesse Alemán (University of New Mexico), “Latinx Writers and their Civil Wars: The Formation of US Latinidad”

11 a.m. | Break

11:15 a.m. | Session 2 : Gender, Family, and the State of War

Moderator: Ben Davidson
Arlisha Norwood (University of Maryland Eastern Shore), “Union Armies and Black Women”
Brandi Clay Brimmer (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), “Black Women and the US Pension Bureaucracy”

12:30 p.m. | Lunch

2 p.m. | Session 3 : Economy and Society in the Civil War Era

Moderator: Sarah Rodriguez
Justene Hill Edwards (University of Virginia), “The Plight of Black Economic Life in Civil War America”
Edmund Russell (Carnegie Mellon University), “Telegraphing War: Technology and National Expansion”
Christopher Clark (University of Connecticut), “Civil War and Revolution on the Land”

Saturday, May 31

9 a.m. | Session 4 : War, Culture, and Representations

Moderator: Stephen Cushman
Fuson Wang (University of California, Riverside), “Casualties of War: Disability Studies and the early Slave Narratives” 
Ben Davidson (Union College), “Children of War and Freedom”
Dympna Callaghan (Syracuse University), “The Assassin’s Shakespeare”

10:45 a.m. | Break

11 a.m. | Session 5: Legacies of War

Moderator: Brandi Clay Brimmer
Stephen Cushman (University of Virginia), “From U.S. Grant to Taken for Granted: The Civil War and a New Birth of Memoir”
Brenda Stevenson (UCLA), “Civil War, Families, and Freedom”

12:15 a.m. | Lunch

1:30 p.m. | Roundtable discussion

Moderators: Verónica Castillo-Muñoz, Christopher Clark

For questions about this conference, please contact researchconference@huntington.org or (626) 405-3432

Beard, James Carter (1837-1913), The Fifteenth Amendment (Thomas Kelly: 1870). Jay T. Last Collection. | The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens.

Funding provided by The William French Smith Endowment and Anonymous.