Jim Downs

Gilder Lehrman NEH Chair of Civil War Era Studies and History

Civil War Era Studies

Contact

Email

jdowns@gettysburg.edu

Phone

(717) 337 - 6569

Box

Campus Box 0401

Address

Weidensall Hall
Room 202
300 North Washington St.
Gettysburg, PA 17325-1400

Education

PhD Columbia University, 2005
MA Columbia University, 2001
BA University of Pennsylvania, 1995
Other Harvard University, 2016

Academic Focus

Civil War Era Studies, History of Medicine and Public Health, African-American Studies, and Gender and Sexuality Studies

Jim Downs is the Gilder Lehrman-National Endowment for the Humanities Professor of Civil War Era Studies and History. He is the author of Sick From Freedom: African American Sickness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction (Oxford UP, 2012), Stand By Me: The Forgotten History of Gay Liberation (Basic Books, 2016) and Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine (Harvard UP, 2021) which has been translated into Chinese, French, Korean, Japanese, and Russian.

He has edited several anthologies, including Beyond Freedom: Disrupting the History of Emancipation, coedited with David Blight (University of Georgia Press, 2017) and Connexions: Histories of Race and Sex in North America (University of Illinois Press, 2016) coedited with Jennifer Brier and Jennifer Morgan.

Downs is the co-series editor of History in the Headlines, at the University of Georgia Press, and published Voter Suppression in U.S. Elections, which grew out of a conversation he moderated with Stacey Abrams, Carol Anderson, Kevin M. Kruse, Heather Cox Richardson and Heather Ann Thompson He recently edited January 6th and the Politics of History, which is conversation he moderated with Joanne B. Freeman, Elizabeth Hinton, Jill Lepore, Stephanie McCurry, William Sturkey and Julian E. Zelizer

He has published articles and essays in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Slate, Vice, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The LA TIMES, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The L.A. Review of Books, among others. Downs has published book chapters in number of edited volumes, most recently in Remembering the Memphis Massacre: An American Story (UGA Press, 2020).

Downs is Editor of Civil War History. He was awarded the Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellowship at the Hutchins Center for African and African American History at Harvard University in 2022-23. In 2022, he received a NEH grant to direct a summer institute, Civil War Archives: A New Social and Culture History, for faculty in higher education at Gettysburg College.

In 2023, Downs was elected to was elected to the Society for American Historians in the US, the Royal Historical Society in the UK and to the Executive Council of the Southern Historical Association. In 2024, Downs was named the Director of the Program in African American History at the Library Company of Philadelphia, which was the first Library of Congress founded by Ben Franklin.

He earned his PhD in History at Columbia University, his MA in American Studies also at Columbia University, and his BA in American Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. The Organization of American Historians named him a Distinguished Lecturer in 2014-17, which was then renewed in 2017 and again in 2020 and 2023. In 2015-16, Downs was awarded an Andrew W. Mellon New Directions Fellowship that allowed him to return to graduate school where he gained postgraduate training in medical anthropology and global health at Harvard University.

Courses Taught

Interdisciplinary introduction to the Civil War Era (roughly 1848-1877) in American history. Student is introduced to the basic history of the Civil War, with an emphasis on the fundamental causes of the war, the war years themselves, both at home and on the battlefield, and Reconstruction period. Assigned readings include a mix of primary sources and a basic survey text. History majors may count CWES 205 as a major course.
This course has two objectives: firstly, to conduct an interdisciplinary investigation of the various ways that the medical profession, patients, and the state narrate illness; secondly to chart the history of medicine and public health, paying particular attention to the changing roles of doctors, the history of disease causation, and how these two phenomena overlap especially in the mid to late nineteenth century. While this course covers a broad chronology, it focuses on the Civil War era, which gave rise to sanitary principles and provided the foundation for the bacteriological revolution at the end of the nineteenth century. CWES 212 and HIST 212 are cross-listed.
Despite the ratification of Constitutional amendments after the Civil War, which provided Black people with both citizenship and voting rights, there has been both legal and customary efforts to block Black people from gaining access to these rights. This course examines those prohibitions but it also centers how Black people have responded; and in so doing it charts the rise of Black protest from the Reconstruction period to Black Lives Matter.
Study of the experiences of women and men during the Civil War era (app. 1840-1870s), with particular attention given to the following questions: How did the public role of women evolve during these decades? How did the experiences of women and men vary according to race, class, condition of servitude and location? How did the war illuminate or challenge existing gender roles? How did the military experiences of the war shape notions of masculinity? Offered as staffing permits. CWES 352 and HIST 352 are cross-listed.
This course charts the rise of protest in the United States, paying particular attention to the Civil War Era. It identifies key turning points throughout the mid-19th century--temperance, abolition, suffrage, women's rights, and the labor struggle-- that transformed the meaning of freedom in the U.S. This course also seeks to identify the key tropes and strategies that unite these otherwise disparate movements. Readings will include both primary and secondary sources with many opportunities for students to conduct short primary research projects on topics of their choice.
Study of the experiences of women and men during the Civil War era (app. 1840-1870s), with particular attention given to the following questions: How did the public role of women evolve during these decades? How did the experiences of women and men vary according to race, class, condition of servitude and location? How did the war illuminate or challenge existing gender roles? How did the military experiences of the war shape notions of masculinity? Offered as staffing permits. CWES 352 and HIST 352 are cross-listed.

Book Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine Harvard University Press, 2021
Book Sick From Freedom: African American Sickness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction Oxford University Press, 2012
Book Beyond Freedom: Disrupting the History of Emancipation University of Georgia Press, 2017
Book Voter Suppression in U.S. Elections University of Georgia Press, 2020
Book Connexions: Histories of Race and Sex in North America University of Illinois Press, 2016
Article How the Origins of Epidemiology Are Linked to the Transatlantic Slave Trade Time
Article The Gay Marriages of a Nineteenth-Century Prison Ship The New Yorker
Article The Epidemics America Got Wrong The Atlantic
Book Stand by Me: The Forgotten History of Gay Liberation Basic Books (Hardcover), 2016
Book Stand by Me: The Forgotten History of Gay Liberation University of Georgia Press (Paperback), 2020
Book January 6 and the Politics of History University of Georgia Press, 2024
Book Reckoning with History: Unfinished Stories of American Freedom Columbia University Press, 2021