19th Century U.S. History

The History Department’s staffing and resources are especially strong in the field of 19th-century America, an area in which it has long excelled.  Core faculty in this period include Professors Stephen V. Ash in Civil War, Daniel Feller in the Jacksonian era, and Ernest Freeberg in religion and culture.  The field is anchored chronologically and thematically by Professors Lorri Glover in the early national era, Robert J. Norell in post-emancipation race relations, Lynn Sacco in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era and in gender and sexuality, and Kurt Piehler in military history.  Twelve students are currently pursuing PhDs in the field, with dissertations on such topics as New Orleans in the territorial period, the tariff in antebellum politics, the Ohio River valley in the secession crisis, and black Union Army veterans in post-Civil War Tennessee.

The Department hosts two major historical editing projects, The Papers of Andrew Jackson and The Correspondence of James K. Polk, in which several graduate students are employed.  The Department also co-sponsors the Center for Jacksonian America at UT to promote scholarship and public education on the Jacksonian era.  Campus library resources for 19th-century topics are outstanding, including original manuscript collections, extensive monographic and microfilm holdings, and full access to searchable electronic archives such as Early American Imprints, the American Periodical Series, Lexis/Nexis, Sabin Americana, Readex’s Early American Newspapers, and Thomson Gale’s 19th Century U.S. Newspapers.  UT is one of only a few institutions in the country to have acquired all these databases.

Students in the program produce publishable scholarship both before and after earning their degrees.  Publications by current students include three books on Cherokee history by Vicki Rozema and journal articles in American Nineteenth Century History and in Civil War History by William K. Bolt and William Hardy.

Books by recent Department graduates include:

• Kent T. Dollar, Soldiers of the Cross: Confederate Soldier-Christians and the Impact of War on Their Faith (Mercer University Press, 2005)
• John D. Fowler, Mountaineers in Gray: the Nineteenth Tennessee Volunteer Infantry Regiment, CSA (UT Press, 2004)
• Connie L. Lester, Up from the Mudsills of Hell: The Farmers’ Alliance, Populism, and Progressive Agriculture in Tennessee, 1870–1915 (University of Georgia Press, 2006)
• Victoria E. Ott, Confederate Daughters: Coming of Age During the Civil War (Southern Illinois University Press, 2008)
• Ben H. Severance, Tennessee’s Radical Army: The State Guard and its Role in Reconstruction (UT Press, 2005)
• Nineteenth-Century America: Essays in Honor of Paul H. Bergeron (2005), containing chapters by seven UT PhDs.

New books on nineteenth-century America by Department faculty include:

• Stephen V. Ash, Firebrand of Liberty: The Story of Two Black Regiments that Changed the Course of the Civil War (W. W. Norton, 2008)
• Lorri Glover, Southern Sons: Becoming Men in the New Nation (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007)
• Daniel Feller et al., The Papers of Andrew Jackson, Volume VII: 1829 (UT Press, 2007)

Contact Information

Department of History
915 Volunteer Blvd.
6th Floor Dunford Hall
Knoxville, TN 37996-4065

Phone: (865) 974-5421
Fax: (865) 974-3915
Email: kharriso@utk.edu