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Tom Chaffin

See Also: Curriculum Vitae

Field Specialties

Dr. Chaffin’s research interests include antebellum and Civil War-era U.S. history, the American South, the American West, environmental history, U.S. expansionism, American literature, and 19th-century British and Irish history. He also serves as Director/Editor of the James K. Polk Correspondence Project. His current book project is entitled “This Pitiless Storm: Six Paths Through Ireland’s Great Potato Famine.” Dr. Chaffin’s writings have appeared in The New York Times, Time, Harper's Magazine and other publications.

Education

Ph. D. Emory University, 1995
M.A., New York University, 1982

Selected Publications

  • The H.L Hunley: The Secret Hope of the Confederacy (Hill and Wang/ Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008).

  • Sea of Gray: The Around-the-World Odyssey of the Confederate Raider Shenandoah (Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006; paperback edition, 2007)

  • Pathfinder: John Charles Frémont and the Course of American Empire (Hill and Wang/ Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002; paperback edition, 2004).

  • Fatal Glory: Narciso López and the First Clandestine U.S. War against Cuba (University of Virginia Press, 1996. Paperback edition, L. S. U. Press, 2003).

  • "Toward a Poetics of Technology: Hart Crane and the American Sublime," The Southern Review 20 (January 1984):  68-81.

  • "'Give Me Faces and Streets': Walt Whitman and the City,"  The Walt Whitman Review  23 (September 1977): 109-120.
Tom Chaffin

Contact Information

Tom Chaffin
Research Professor of History
1401 Cumberland Avenue
Hoskins Library, Room 216
Knoxville, TN 37996

Phone: 865-974-0662