Confederate Reckoning

A native of Belfast, Northern Ireland, Stephanie McCurry is a historian of US history, specializing in the US Civil War and the Reconstruction era. Her areas of specialty also include the experiences of women, poor white farmers, and how families interacted with governments during and immediately after the US Civil War. She received her BA in History from the University of Western Ontario (also known as Western University) in London, Ontario, in 1981, her MA in History from the University of Rochester in New York in 1983, and her PhD in History from State University of New York in Binghamton, New York in 1988. Over the course of her career, she has taught at the University of California in San Diego, Northwestern University in Chicago, and the University of Pennsylvania.

In her historical work, Stephanie McCurry focuses on what is termed “history from below.” This means her research focuses on the perspectives and experiences of marginalized groups such as women and the rural poor. This is in contrast to the more traditional concept of “Great Men (or Great Person) History,” where the focus is on political leaders, who are assumed to be the main drivers of history and change. While she does address political history, which is typically seen as a staple of traditional history, she is interested in topics such as how poor women and men interact with their governments and shape political thought. A core theme of her work in Confederate Reckoning and in her other works is that even disadvantaged and marginalized people living under undemocratic governments can affect the political landscape and the policies of their government.

Her other books are Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country from 1995, which looks at how poor farmers in South Carolina were brought over to the cause of enslavement and secession, and Women’s War: Fighting and Surviving the American Civil War, which was published in 2019 and examines the roles women played on both sides in the conflict. In 1996 and 1997, Masters of Small Worlds won the John Hope Franklin Prize of the American Studies Association, the Francis Butler Simkins Prize of the Southern Historical Association, the Charles Sydnor Prize of the Southern Historical Association, the Willie Lee Rose Prize of the Southern Association of Women Historians, and the Best Book Prize of the South Carolina Historical Association. Also, she has written articles and essays on the role of women in the US Civil War, the efforts of abolitionists to end enslavement, the presidency of Donald Trump, and the impact of enslavement on the economic realities of the present-day United States, among other historical and contemporary issues. Currently, she is the R. Gordon Hoxie Professor of American History in Honor of Dwight D. Eisenhower at Columbia College and is doing research that looks comparatively at how nations that experienced civil wars over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries reconstructed themselves in the post-war period.