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. Faculty include Professors Stephen V. Ash in Civil War, Daniel Feller in the Jacksonian era, Ernest Freeberg in religion and culture, Robert J. Norrell 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. Ten students are currently writing doctoral dissertations in the field, on such topics as the removal of the Cherokee Indians from Georgia, the origins of American religious camp meetings, the Ohio River valley in the secession crisis, pacifist networks in the Civil War, and black Union Army veterans in postwar Tennessee.

The Department hosts a major historical editing project, The Papers of Andrew Jackson, in which graduate students are periodically employed. The Department also houses the Center for Jacksonian America and the Center for the Study of War and Society, both of which promote scholarship and public education. 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 Periodicals Series, the U.S. Serial Set, Sabin Americana, Readex’s Early American Newspapers, and Cengage’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 Civil War History by William Hardy and in The Journal of East Tennessee History by Robert Glenn Slater.

Books by recent Department graduates include:

• Kent T. Dollar, Sister States, Enemy States: The Civil War in Kentucky and Tennessee (University Press of Kentucky, 2009)
  
  
• 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)
  
  
• John C. Pineiro, Manifest Ambition: James K. Polk and Civil-Military Relations during the Mexican War (Westport: Praeger, 2007)
  
  
• 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 pertaining to nineteenth-century America by Department faculty include:

• Robert J. Norrell, Up from History: The Life of Booker T. Washington (Belknap Press, 2009)
  
  
• Lynn Sacco, Unspeakable: Father-Daughter Incest in American History (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009)
  
  
• Stephen V. Ash, The Black Experience in the Civil War South (Praeger, 2010)
  
  
• Daniel Feller et al., The Papers of Andrew Jackson, Volume VIII: 1830 (UT Press, 2010)

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