Publications

Southern Black Women and Their Struggle for Freedom during the Civil War and Reconstruction is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press in January 2024.  This collection of essays provides original and innovative perspectives on both traditional and relatively unstudied issues of Black women during the Civil War and Reconstruction period.  It explores the ways in which Black women, from diverse regions of the American South, employed various forms of resistance and survival strategies to navigate one of the most tumultuous times in American history.  This edited work is a collection of case studies of Black women’s lived experiences in the Confederate South and border regions of the U.S.  It highlights the complexity of Black women’s wartime and postwar experiences and provides important insight into the contested spaces they occupied. Contributors to this volume include Katherine Chilton (San Jose State University); Arlisha Norwood (University of Maryland, Eastern Shore); Felicia Jamison (University of Louisville); Karen Cook Bell (Bowie State University); Kaisha Esty (Wesleyan University); Crystal Feimster (Yale University); Kelly Jones (Arkansas Tech University); Brandi Brimmer (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill); Hilary Green (Davidson College).

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Additional Readings

Blair, William A. and Karen Fisher Younger, eds. Lincoln’s Proclamation: Race, Place, and the Paradoxes of Emancipation. 2009.

Blight, David.  Race And Reunion : The Civil War In American Memory. 2001. 

Blight, David and Jim Downs eds. Beyond Freedom: Disrupting the History of Emancipation. 2017.

Brimmer, Brandi. Claiming Union Widowhood: Race, Respectability, and Poverty in the Post-Emancipation South, 2020.

Cook Bell, Karen. Claiming Freedom: Race, Kinship, and Land in Nineteenth Century Georgia. 2018.

Cook Bell, Karen ed. Southern Black Women and Their Struggle for Freedom during the Civil War and Reconstruction. 2024.

Creighton, Margaret. The Colors of Courage: Gettysburg’s Forgotten History:  Immigrants, Women, and African Americans in the Civil War’s Defining Battle. 2005.

Davis, Thulani. The Emancipation Circuit: Black Activism Forging a Culture of Freedom. 2022.

Downs, Jim. Sick From Freedom: African American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction. 2012.

DuBois, W.E.B. Black Reconstruction in America. 1935. 

Edwards, Laura. Gendered Strife & Confusion : The Political Culture Of Reconstruction. 1997. 

Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution. 1863-1877. 1988. 

Forbes, Ella.  African American Women during the Civil War. 1998.

Faulkner, Carol. Women’s Radical Reconstruction: The Freedmen’s Aid Movement. 2007.

Feimster, Crystal. Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching. 2009.

Frankel, Noralee. Freedom’s Women: Black Women and Families in Civil War Era Mississippi. 1999. 

Glymph, Thavolia. The Women’s Fight: Civil War Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation. 2020.

_______________. “Rose’s War and the Gendered Politics of a Slave Insurgency in the Civil War.” Journal of the Civil War Era 3, no. 4 (December 2013):501-32.

Gillin, Kate Cote, Shrill Hurrahs, Women, Gender, and Racial Violence in South Carolina, 1865-1900. 2013. 

Green, Hilary. Educational Reconstruction: African American Schools in the Urban South, 1865-1890. 2016.

Hahn, Steven. A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration. 2005.

Hine, Darlene Clark. Hinesight: Black Women and the Reconstruction of American History. 1994.

Kaiser, Mary Farmer. Freedwomen and the Freedmen’s Bureau: Race, Gender, and Public Policy in the Age of Emancipation. 2010.

King, Lisa Y. “In Search of Women of African Descent Who Served in the Civil War Union Navy,” Journal of Negro History 83 no. 4 (Autumn 1998): 302-09.

McPherson, James. Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. 1988.

Morgan, Lynda.  Emancipation in Virginia’s Tobacco Belt, 1850-1870. Athens, Ga. 1992.

McCrary, Peyton. Abraham Lincoln and Reconstruction : the Louisiana Experiment. 1978. 

Page, Sebastian. Black Resettlement and the American Civil War. 2021. 

Pinheiro, Holly. The Families Civil War: Black Soldiers and the Fight for Racial Justice, 2022.

Ransom, Roger and Richard Sutch. One Kind Of Freedom : The Economic Consequences Of Emancipation.1977. 

Reidy, Joseph P. Illusions of Emancipation: The Pursuit of Freedom and Equality in the Twilight of Slavery. 2019. 

Roark, James L. Masters Without Slaves : Southern Planters In The Civil War And Reconstruction. 1977. 

Rosen, Hannah. Terror in the Heart of Freedom: Citizenship, Sexual Violence, and the Meaning of Freedom in the Post-Emancipation South. 2009.

Taylor, Amy Murrell.  Embattled Freedom: Journeys Through the Civil War’s Slave Refugee Camps. 2018.

Williams, David. I Freed Myself: African American Self-Emancipation in the Civil War Era. 2014.

Williams, Heather Andrea. Help Me Find My People: The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery. 2012. 

Williams, Kidada E. They Left Great Marks on Me: African American Testimonies of Racial Violence from Emancipation to World War I. 2012.

Williams, Kidada E. I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror and Survival in the War against Reconstruction. 2023.