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Book Cover for: The Civil War and the Summer of 2020, Hilary N. Green

The Civil War and the Summer of 2020

Hilary N. Green

Investigates how Americans have remembered violence and resistance since the Civil War, including Confederate monuments, historical markers, college classrooms, and history books.

George Floyd's murder in the summer of 2020 sparked a national reckoning for the United States that had been 400 years in the making. Millions of Americans took to the streets to protest both the murder and the centuries of systemic racism that already existed among European colonists but transformed with the arrival of the first enslaved African Americans in 1619. The violence needed to enforce that systemic racism for all those years, from the slave driver's whip to state-sponsored police brutality, attracted the immediate attention of the protesters. The resistance of the protesters echoed generations of African Americans' resisting the violence and oppression of white supremacy. Their opposition to violence soon spread to other aspects of systemic racism, including a cultural hegemony built on and reinforcing white supremacy. At the heart of this white supremacist culture is the memory of the Civil War era, when in 1861 8 million white Americans revolted against their country to try to safeguard the enslavement of 4 million African Americans.

The volume has three interconnected sections that build on one another. The first section, "Violence," explores systemic racism in the Civil War era and now with essays on slavery, policing, and slave patrols. The second section, titled "Resistance," shows how African Americans resisted violence for the past two centuries, with essays discussing matters including self-emancipation and African American soldiers. The final section, "Memory," investigates how Americans have remembered this violence and resistance since the Civil War, including Confederate monuments and historical markers.

This volume is intended for nonhistorians interested in showing the intertwined and longstanding connections between systemic racism, violence, resistance, and the memory of the Civil War era in the United States that finally exploded in the summer of 2020.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Fordham University Press
  • Publish Date: Apr 2nd, 2024
  • Pages: 208
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 9.00in - 6.00in - 0.56in - 0.92lb
  • EAN: 9781531504991
  • Categories: United States - Civil War Period (1850-1877)Violence in SocietyEssays

About the Author

Johnson, Andre E.: - Andre E. Johnson is a professor of Communication Studies at the University of Memphis. He is the author of three national award-winning books, The Forgotten Prophet: Bishop Henry McNeal Turner and the African American Prophetic Tradition (2012), The Struggle Over Black Lives Matter and All Lives Matter (with Amanda Nell Edgar, Ph.D., 2018), and No Future in This Country: The Prophetic Pessimism of Bishop Henry McNeal Turner (2020). He is also the editor of the forthcoming Speeches of Bishop Henry McNeal Turner: The Press, the Platform, and the Pulpit (2023) and Preaching During a Pandemic: The Rhetoric of the Black Preaching Tradition (with Kimberly P. Johnson, Ph.D., and Wallis C. Baxter IV, Ph.D., 2023).
Bardes, John: - John Bardes is an assistant professor of history at Louisiana State University. His work explores policing and incarceration in the context of slavery and emancipation. He is the author of The Carceral City: Slavery and the Making of Mass Incarceration in New Orleans, 1803-1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2024). His scholarship has appeared in many journals, including the Journal of African American History, American Quarterly, and Journal of Southern History.
Cook Bell, Karen: - Karen Cook Bell, an associate professor of history at Bowie State University, received her Ph.D. in history from Howard University. Her scholarship has appeared in the Journal of African American History, Georgia Historical Quarterly, Passport; U.S. West-Africa: Interaction and Relations (2008), Before Obama: A Reappraisal of Black Reconstruction Era Politicians (2012), Converging Identities: Blackness in the Contemporary Diaspora (2013), and Slavery and Freedom in Savannah (2014). She has published Claiming Freedom: Race, Kinship, and Land in Nineteenth Century Georgia (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2018), which won the Georgia Board of Regents Excellence in Research Award. Her current book, Running from Bondage: Enslaved Women and Their Remarkable Fight for Freedom in Revolutionary America, is under contract with Cambridge University Press.
Cleland, Beau D.: - Beau Cleland is an assistant professor at the University of Calgary. He is also a combat veteran of the US Army who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. His current research focuses on the ties between the Confederacy and the British Empire during the Civil War, and the importance of private citizens in creating and sustaining support for the rebellion in British America. His scholarship has appeared in The Journal of Southern History.
Horne, William: - William Horne is an Arthur J. Ennis Postdoctoral Fellow at Villanova University who writes about the relationship of race to labor, freedom, and capitalism in post-Civil War Louisiana. He holds a Ph.D. in history from The George Washington University and is co-founder and editor of The Activist History Review. His scholarship has appeared in the Journal of Academic Freedom and the Journal of African American History, along with contribution to numerous edited collections.
Dabney, Emmanuel: - Emmanuel Dabney is a public historian based in Virginia. He holds a B.A. in Historic Preservation from the University of Mary Washington and an M.A. in History with a concentration in Public History from UNC-Greensboro. Emmanuel has given numerous presentations and written other essays and book reviews.
Keith, Leeanna: - LeeAnna Keith teaches history at the Collegiate School for Boys in New York City. She is the author of When It Was Grand: The Radical Republican History of the Civil War (Hill & Wang) and The Colfax Massacre: The Untold Story of Black Power, White Terror, and the Death of Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
Lande, Jonathan: - Jonathan Lande is an assistant professor of history at Purdue University. He earned his Ph.D. at Brown University in 2018 and won the Allan Nevins Dissertation Prize from the Society of American Historians and the Cromwell Dissertation Prize from the American Society for Legal History. He is currently completing a book exploring the desertions and mutinies of formerly enslaved men in the Union Army and their trials in the military justice system during the Civil War, which is under contract with Oxford University Press. Lande has published articles in the Journal of American History, Journal of Social History, Journal of African American History, Journal of American Ethnic History, Civil War History, and the Washington Post.
Marshall, Anne: - Anne E. Marshall is an associate professor of history at Mississippi State University. She is the author of Creating a Confederate Kentucky: The Lost Cause and Civil War Memory in a Border State (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010). She is also the author of numerous articles in journals and collections, including Slavery & Abolition, Agricultural History, and Master Narratives: Storytelling, History, and the Postmodern South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013). In 2011 she won the George and Ann Richards Award for best article in The Journal of the Civil War Era.
Martinez, Jaime Amanda: - Jaime Amanda Martinez is a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke and the author of Confederate Slave Impressment in the Upper South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013).
Turner, Nicole: - Nicole Myers Turner, an assistant professor at Princeton University, is the author of Soul Liberty: The Evolution of Black Religious Politics in Post-Emancipation Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020).
Watts, Samuel: - Samuel Watts received his Ph.D. from The University of Melbourne, researching and writing about Black experiences of Reconstruction in the urban Deep South. He is the managing editor of ANZASA Online, writes for the Australian Book Review, and was recently awarded the Wyselaskie Scholarship for History award.
Slap, Andrew L.: - Andrew L. Slap is a Professor of history at East Tennessee State University. He is the author of The Doom of Reconstruction: The Liberal Republicans in the Civil War Era (Fordham). He is also the editor or co-editor of three volumes on the Civil War era. His current book project is "African American Communities during Slavery, War, and Peace: Memphis in the Nineteenth Century."
Carter, Daryl A.: - Daryl A. Carter is a professor of history in the Department of History and Associate Dean in the College of Arts and Sciences at East Tennessee State University. He is the author of Brother Bill: President Clinton and the Politics of Race and Class (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2016).
Domby, Adam H.: - Adam H. Domby is an associate professor of history at Auburn University. He is the author of The False Cause: Fraud, Fabrication, and White Supremacy in Confederate Memory (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2020). He co-edited Freedoms Gained and Lost: Reconstruction and Its Meanings 150 Years Later (New York: Fordham University Press, 2021). In 2018 he won the John T. Hubble Prize for the best article in Civil War History.
Eatmon, Myisha S.: - Myisha S. Eatmon, an assistant professor of African and African American Studies in the History Department at Harvard University, received her Ph.D. from Northwestern University. Her dissertation, "Public Wrongs, Private Rights: African Americans, Private Law, and White Violence during Jim Crow," traces the history of what Eatmon calls Black legal culture under Jim Crow, examining Black litigation strategies in response to white violence, Black newspapers' coverage of white violence, and Black newspapers and the NAACP's work as legal networkers. She was an ASLH Kathryn T. Preyer Scholar (2018), J. Willard Hurst Fellow (2019), and ACLS/Mellon DCF Fellow (2018-19).
Gannon, Barbara: - Barbara A. Gannon is a professor of history at the University of Central Florida. She is the author of The Won Cause: Black and White Comradeship in the Grand Army of the Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press), which received the Wiley-Silver Prize for the best first book on the Civil War and an honorable mention by the Lincoln Prize Committee 2012, as well as being a finalist for the Jefferson Davis Prize. She has also published Americans Remember Their Civil War (Praeger) and numerous articles.
Hancock, Scott: - Scott Hancock is an associate professor of history and Africana Studies at Gettysburg College. After spending fourteen years working with teenagers in crisis, he switched careers and received a Ph.D. in Early American History in 1999 from the University of New Hampshire. This combination of careers fuels his desire to tell the stories of people whom society and history have tended to discount as troublesome and unimportant. Currently he is exploring how whiteness, white supremacy, and the systemic rejection of Blackness were the unifying features of white American identity and politics across the North-South divide, and how that unity was manifested during the creation of Civil War battlefields. Some of his scholarly work has appeared in the anthologies Paths to Freedom; We Shall Independent Be; Slavery, Resistance, Freedom; and in the journal Civil War History. As part of trying to continue being an activist scholar, he engages in dialogue with visitors to the Gettysburg battlefields and contributes to local and regional newspapers such as the Gettysburg Times and Philadelphia Inquirer or online publications such as CityLab.
Green, Hilary N.: - Hilary N. Green is the James B. Duke Professor of Africana Studies at Davidson College. A distinguished scholar, her research explores the intersections of race, memory, and education in the post-Civil War American South. She is the author of Educational Reconstruction: African American Schools in the Urban South, 1865-1890, co-author of the NPS-OAH Historic Resource Study of African American Schools in the South, 1865-1900, and co-editor of The Civil War and the Summer of 2020 (Fordham).

Praise for this book

Hilary Green and Andy Slap, two extraordinary scholars of the Civil War era, have gathered a diverse group of historians to illuminate anti-Black racism in the past and present. The Civil War and the Summer of 2020 offers a mix of well-established and up-and-coming experts who detail topics that are both familiar and unknown--policing, monuments, sports, religion, resistance, and the Civil War's impact on Australia and its Indigenous peoples. This collection of impressive essays takes a much-needed communal approach by having scholars lead history-curious readers back in time to understand the present. This book is essential reading for anyone who understands the importance of a more accurate, complex, and engaging understanding of history as a resource for building a more just world.---Kidada E. Williams, author of I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror and Survival in the War against Reconstruction, and host of the Seizing Freedom podcast.
Those who are interested in more current affairs connections to Civil War memory and the conflict's present social and political relevance will want to read this book.-- "Emerging Civil War"