The Nau Center is pleased to announce that Frank Cirillo and Jack Furniss have been selected as the 2018-19 Bradley Foundation Fellows. Funds from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation will allow both Cirillo and Furniss, recent graduates of UVA’s History Phd program, to revise their dissertations into book manuscripts.
Cirillo’s dissertation is titled "'The Day of Sainthood Has Passed': Abolitionists and the Golden Moment of the Civil War." His work explores the divisions among abolitionists over the Union war effort as they grappled with the question of supporting the Lincoln administration in a time of national crisis. His work demonstrates how these divisions explain both the achievements and limitations of the Union war respecting rights for African Americans.
Furniss will also revise his dissertation titled "States of the Union: The Rise and Fall of the Political Center in the Civil War North." His dissertation examined the ways in which northern governors helped sustain and shape the Lincoln administration by pioneering a centrist Union politics that allowed northern civilians to accept radical wartime measures unforeseen and undesired at the start of the conflict. Funding from the Bradley Foundation will help him further revise his book manuscript. In addition, his new research will provide the archival foundation for an article demonstrating how the profound instability in party structures served to drive politics toward the ideological center in the late-antebellum North. This article will appear in the 2019 issue of the Journal of the Civil War Era.