John David Smith

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Books Since 2002

  • Editor, New Perspectives on Civil War-Era Kentucky.  Lexington:  University Press of Kentucky, 2023.
  • Editor, Grant, Lincoln and the Freedmen by John Eaton (1907).  Knoxville:  University of Tennessee Press, 2022 (with Micheal J. Larson).
  • Editor, The Long Civil War:  New Explorations of America’s Enduring Conflict.  Lexington:  University Press of Kentucky, 2021 (with Raymond Arsenault).
  • Black Judas: William Hannibal Thomas and The American Negro. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000; Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2002; third edition with a New Preface, University of Georgia Press, 2019, pp. ix-xxix.
  • Editor, Dear Delia:  The Civil War Letters of Captain Henry F. Young, Seventh Wisconsin Infantry.  Madison:  University of Wisconsin Press, 2019 (with Micheal J. Larson).
  • Editor, Interpreting American History:  Reconstruction. Kent: Kent State University Press, 2016.
  • We Ask Only for Even-Handed Justice:  Black Voices from Reconstruction, 1865–1877.  Amherst:  University of Massachusetts Press, 2014.
  • Soldiering For Freedom:  How the Union Army Recruited, Trained, and Deployed the U.S. Colored Troops.  Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014 (with Bob Luke).
  • Lincoln and the U.S. Colored Troops.  Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2013.
  • Editor, Race and Recruitment: Civil War History Readers, Volume 2.  Kent: Kent State University Press, 2013.
  • Editor, The Dunning School: Historians, Race, and the Meaning of Reconstruction.  Lexington:  University Press of Kentucky, 2013 (with J. Vincent Lowery).
  • Editor, A Just and Lasting Peace:  A Documentary History of Reconstruction.  New York:  Signet Classics/New American Library/Penguin, 2013.
  • Seeing the New South: Race and Place in the Photographs of Ulrich B. Phillips.  Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2013 (with Patricia B. Bixel).
  • Guest Editor, New Perspectives on Civil War-Era Kentucky.  Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 110 nos. 3&4 (Summer/Autumn 2012):  231-647.
  • Editor, Undaunted Radical: The Selected Writings and Speeches of Albion W. Tourgée. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010 (with Mark Elliott).
  • An Old Creed for the New South: Proslavery Ideology and Historiography, 1865-1918, third edition with a New Preface. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008.
  • Editor, History Teaches Us to Hope: Reflections on the Civil War and Southern History by Charles P. Roland. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2007.
  • Editor, The Flaming Sword by Thomas Dixon. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2005.
  • Editor, The Negro in the American Rebellion by William Wells Brown. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003.
  • Editor, My Bondage and My Freedom by Frederick Douglass. New York and London: Penguin Classics, 2003.
  • Editor, Black Soldiers in Blue: African American Troops in the Civil War Era. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002, 2004.

Selected Articles and Review Essays Since 2002

  • “’This incredibly fast upswing of the American Negroes’:  Felix von Luschan’s ‘Die Neger in den Vereinigten Staaten’ (1915).”  In Lest We Forget:  Recovering Ancestors in Anthropological Traditions, ed. Regna Darnell and Frederic Wright Gleach (Lincoln:  University of Nebraska Press, forthcoming) (with Sylvia Angelica Smith). 
  • “‘The greatest event of the Twentieth Century so far’:  The First Universal Races Congress and its Meaning Today.”  The Midwest Quarterly:  A Journal of Contemporary Thought 63, no. 3 (Spring 2022):  217-26.
  • “Something About Eaton Won Lincoln’s Trust.”  The Lincoln Forum Bulletin, no. 51 (Spring 2022), 9, 11 (with Micheal J. Larson).
  • “Editing the Letters of a Midwesterner in the Civil War:  The Making and Meaning of Dear Delia.”  Ohio Valley History 19 (Winter 2019):  72-87 (with Micheal J. Larson).
  • “‘Like the baseless fabric of a vision’:  Thad Stevens and Confiscation Reconsidered.” In The Worlds of James Buchanan and Thaddeus Stevens: Place, Personality, and Politics in the Civil War Era, ed. John Quist, Randall M. Miller, and Michael Birkner (Baton Rouge:  Louisiana State University Press, 2019), pp. 185-214.
  • “Faculty Picks.”  Choice (January 2019): http://www.choice360.org/blog/faculty-picks-january-2019 .
  • “Glory:  ‘heroism writ large, from people whom history had made small.’” In Writing History with Lightning: Cinematic Representations of Nineteenth-Century America, ed. John C. Inscoe and Matthew C. Hulbert (Baton Rouge:  Louisiana State University Press, 2019), pp. 162-71.
  • “Abraham Lincoln and Karl Marx in Dialogue.”  Civil War Book Review 20, no. 2 (Spring 2018):  Article 11, https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3275&context=cwbr .
  • “‘Stern Champion of the Human Race, of Man as Human’:  Alexander F. Chamberlain and Reform in the Age of Imperialism and Jim Crow.” Journal of American Studies 51 (August 2017):  833-64.
  • “Review Essay:  America’s Western Middle Border Region and Its Inner Civil Wars.” Ohio Valley History 16 (Winter 2016): 64-68.
  • “‘As firmly linked to ‘Africanus’ as was that of the celebrated Scipio’:  Abraham Lincoln, Emancipation, and the U.S. Colored Troops.”  In Democracy and the American Civil War:  Race and African Americans in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Kevin Adams and Leonne Hudson.  Kent:  Kent State University Press, 2016, pp. 27-46.
  • “Review Essay:  Probate Law and Proslavery Religious Polemics in Nineteenth-Century Kentucky.” Ohio Valley History 14 (Winter 2014):  75-81.
  • “Finding ‘pax plantation’ at Camp Gordon, Georgia:  Historian Ulrich Bonnell Phillips and World War I.” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 13 (October 2014):  564-99.
  • “What Did the Civil War Smell Like?” The Chronicle of Higher Education, October 17, 2014, p. B16, http://chronicle.com/article/Book-Review-States-of-Decay/149257/ .
  • “Whither Kentucky Civil War and Reconstruction Scholarship?” Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 112 (Spring 2014):  223-47.
  • “Introduction.” In Charles S. Sydnor, Slavery in Mississippi.  Columbia:  University of South Carolina Press, 2013, pp. xi-xxxix.
  • “Two  Stellar Reference Books on Slavery.” Slavery & Abolition 34 (March 2013):  166-72.
  • “‘I was raised poor and hard as any slave’:  African American Slavery in Piedmont North Carolina.” North Carolina Historical Review 90 (January 2013):  1-25.
  • “Introduction to the Fordham University Press Edition.”  In George Washington Williams, A History of the Negro Troops in the War of the Rebellion, 1861-1865.  The Bronx:  Fordham University Press, 2012, pp. ix-xxxvi.
  • “Continuity v. Discontinuity Redux:  Life, Labor and Law in Jim Crow-Era Mississippi.”  Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 11 (July 2012):  445-51.“
  • Albion W. Tourgée in North Carolina Historiography and Historical Memory.” Carolina Comments 60 (January 2012):  29-33.
  • “The Study of Slavery at the Johns Hopkins University, 1889-1914.”  Maryland Historical Magazine 106 (Fall 2011):  316-43.
  • “Civil War History:  An Intervention.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 19, 2011, http://chronicle.com/article/Civil-War-History-an/127926/.
  • “Transatlantic Anthropological Dialogue and ‘the other’:  Felix von Luschan’s Research in America, 1914-15.” In Racism in the Modern World:  Historical Perspectives on Cultural Transfer and Adaptation, ed. Manfred Berg and Simon Wendt.  New York:  Berghahn Books, 2011, pp. 140-62.
  • “U.B. Phillips, the North Carolina State Literary and Historical Association, and the Course of the South to Secession.” North Carolina Historical Review 87 (July 2010):  253-82.
  • “Review Essay:  ’The World Never Saw Such a War’:  How Civil War Deaths Brought Life to the Union.“  North Carolina Historical Review 86 (October 2009):  437-44.
  • “‘I would like to study some Problems of Heredity’:  Felix von Luschan’s Trip to America, 1914-1915.”  In Felix von Luschan (1854–1924):  Leben und Wirken eines Universalgelehrten, ed.  Peter Ruggendorfer and Hubert D. Szemethy.  Wien:  Böhlau Verlag Wien, 2009, pp. 141-63.
  • “‘Gentlemen, I too, am a Kentuckian’:  Abraham Lincoln, the Lincoln Bicentennial, and Lincoln’s Kentucky in Recent Scholarship.” Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 106 nos. 3 & 4 (Summer/Autumn 2008):  433-70.
  • “Keeping Your Promises?  African Americans, Contingency, and Lincoln’s America.”  Lincoln Lore, no. 1893 (Summer 2008):  2-7.
  • “Introduction.”  In Life and Labor in the Old South by Ulrich Bonnell Phillips.  Columbia:  University of South Carolina Press, 2007, pp. xvii-lv.
  • “’Not as this chile knows of’:  Myth and Reality in the Black Confederates Thesis.”  Lincoln Lore, no. 1889 (Summer 2007):  5-10.
  • “The Evil That Americans Did.”  The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 9, 2007, B9.
  • “High Authority or Failed Prophet?  Alfred Holt  Stone and Racial Thought in Jim Crow America.”  Journal of Mississippi History 68 (Fall 2006):  195-211.
  • “‘My books are hard reading for a Negro’:  Tom Dixon and his African American Critics, 1905-1939.”  In Thomas Dixon Jr. and the Making of Modern America, ed. Michele Gillespie and Randal L. Hall.  Baton Rouge:  Louisiana State University Press, 2006, pp. 46-79.
  • “New Introduction to the University Press of Florida Edition.”  In Florida Plantation Records from the Papers of George Noble Jones, ed. Ulrich Bonnell Phillips and James David Glunt.  Gainesville:  University Press of Florida, 2006, pp. v-xl.
  • “‘To hue the line and let the chips fall where they may’:  J. Winston Coleman’s Slavery Times in Kentucky Reconsidered.”  Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 103 (Autumn 2005):  691-726.
  • “Anthropologist Felix von Luschan:  Self-contradictions, Science, and America’s Perplexing Race Problem.” The Funnel (Berlin), 41 (Summer 2005):  47-48.
  • “Armed, Confederate and Black?  Not Likely.”  Raleigh News and Observer, February 4, 2005, p. 17A.
  • “Alfred Holt Stone and Conservative Racial Thought in the New South.”  In The Human Tradition in the New South, ed. James C. Klotter.  Lanham, MD:  Rowman & Littlefield, 2005, pp. 47-65.
  • “Frederic Bancroft’s ‘Notes Among the Negroes’:  Writing Contemporary History in Bourbon-Era Mississippi.”  Journal of Mississippi History 66 (Fall 2004):  227-64.
  • “The Lawyer vs. the Race Traitor:  Charles W. Chesnutt, William Hannibal Thomas, and The American Negro.” Journal of the Historical Society 3  (Spring 2003):  225-248.
  • “Slavery Ideology and the Underground Railroad in Kentucky:  A Review Essay.”  Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 101 (Winter/Spring, 2003):  93-108.
  • “The Enduring Myth of ‘Forty Acres and a Mule.’”  The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 21, 2003, B11.
  • “William Hannibal Thomas, ‘Schuld,’ and the Writing of The American Negro.”  In Schuld en Cultuur, ed. Marijke Wubbolts.  Publicatiereeks Onderzoekschool Rudolf Agricola, deel 5.  Groningen, The Netherlands:  Groningen School for the Humanities, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, 2002, pp. 9-29.
  • “Selling the Civil War in Art and Memoir.” Documentary Editing 24 (September 2002): 74-76.
  • “W.E.B. Du Bois, Felix von Luschan, and Racial Reform at the Fin de Siècle.” Amerikastudien / American Studies (Heidelberg) 47 (2002):  23-38.
  • “Anthropologist Felix von Luschan and Trans-Atlantic Racial Reform.” Münchner Beiträge zur Völkerkunde (München) 7 (2002):  289-304.

Research Interests

  • Civil War and Reconstruction
  • Abraham Lincoln
  • Slavery, abolition, and emancipation
  • Southern History
  • Racial thought
  • Documentary editing and publishing
  • Historiography
  • History of Anthropology
  • Imperial Germany

Monograph Series Edited

  • The American Ways Series (Rowman & Littlefield)
  • The Library of African American Biography (Rowman & Littlefield)
  • American Abolitionism and Antislavery (Kent State University Press)
  • New Studies in Southern History (Lexington Books)
  • Other Southerners (University Press of Florida)*
  • Reflections on the Civil War Era (Praeger)*
  • Battles and Leaders of the American Civil War (Praeger)*
  • New Perspectives on the History of the South (University Press of Florida)*
  • Studies in Historiography (Greenwood Press)*

*presently not accepting book proposals

Courses Taught

  • HIST 2000, Old South
  • HIST 2105, American Slavery & Emancipation
  • HIST 2600, Historical Methods Seminar (various topics)
  • HIST 3211, Civil War & Reconstruction
  • HIST 3212, History of the Old South
  • HIST 3795, Davenport Honors Seminar
  • HIST 4000-5000 (various topics)
  • HIST 4600, Senior Research Seminar (various topics)
  • HIST 6000, Documentary Editing
  • HIST 6001, Graduate Colloquium: U.S. History to 1877 (graduate reading seminar)
  • HIST 6000, Reconstruction (seminar)
  • LBST 2101, The American Civil War:  Race, Rebellion, Reconstruction (large lecture course)

Education

A.B., cum laude, Baldwin-Wallace College, 1971
A.M., Ph.D., University of Kentucky, 1973, 1977

Graduate Students Currently Supervised

  • Nathan Robert Joffe,  BA, Clemson University:  “W.E.B. Du Bois and the Jewish Intellectuals, Activists, and Philanthropists of the NAACP, 1910-1934”

Master’s Theses Recently Completed Under My Supervision

  • Maverick Huneycutt, BA, University of North Carolina at Charlotte:  “Memories of Enslavement and the North Carolina WPA Ex-Slave Narrative Collection” (2024)
  • Brian Cullinan, BA, University of North Carolina at Charlotte:  “‘Not Negroes nor Slaves but Free People’:  Free People of Color in the Colonial Southeast Indian Trade” (2023)
  • Paul Kinny, BA, University of Kentucky; BA, University of North Carolina at Charlotte; JD, Hastings College of Law, University of California San Francisco:  “The New Orleans Citizens Committee: Unheralded Activists who Challenged Jim Crow in Plessy v. Ferguson” (2022)
  • Niles Sorensen, BS, Indiana University:  “The New World Meets the Old:  German-Americans and the Temperance Struggle in Ohio, 1870-1875” (2021)
  • Richard Charles Baisley, BA, Winthrop University:  “Civilian Religious Belief in North Carolina over the Course of the Civil War” (2020)
  • J. Thomas Warlick, BA, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; JD, Emory University School of Law; LLM, John Marshall Law School:  “‘What’s Past is Prologue’:  North Carolina’s Forgotten Black Code” (2020)
  • Rachel Ruth McManimen, BA, University of North Carolina at Charlotte:  “Rebellious and Reserved:  The Fluidity of African American Slave Masculinity” (2019)
  • Larry McIntyre, BA, MPH, West Virginia University:  “The South Carolina Black Code and Its Legacy” (2016)