Biography

A native of the Shenandoah Valley, she is the author or editor of six books, including Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation (Littlefield Fund for Southern History and University of North Carolina Press, 2013), Burying the Dead but Not the Past: Ladies’ Memorial Associations and the Lost Cause (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), Petersburg to Appomattox: The End of the War in Virginia (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), and Ends of War: The Unfinished Fight of Lee's Army after Appomattox (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021). Remembering the Civil War was selected for the History Book Club and Military Book Club and won the Charles S. Sydnor Award by the Southern Historical Association and the Jefferson Davis Award by the American Civil War Museum. Ends of War won the 2022 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize. 

An active public speaker, she has given presentations at locations such as the Lincoln Presidential Library, Clinton Presidential Library, Huntington Library, and Gettysburg College’s Civil War Institute, and she has appeared on C-SPAN as well as NPR. She is a speaker with the Organization of American Historians’ Distinguished Lectureship program and a recipient of the Kenneth T. Kofmehl Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching Award from Purdue’s College of Liberal Arts. She serves as a co-editor of the University of North Carolina Press’s Civil War America Series and is a past president of the Society of Civil War Historians.

You can reach her by email at cej4b@virginia.edu.