Join us for great conversation with editor Brian Matthew Jordan and featured author Michelle Krowl as they discuss their recently released book Final Resting Places: Reflections on the Meaning of Civil War Graves.
The two will share insight into the development of Final Resting Places which brings together some of the most important and innovative scholars of the Civil War era to reflect on what death and memorialization meant to the Civil War generation―and how those meanings still influence Americans today.
In each essay contained within the covers of the book, a noted historian explores a different type of gravesite―including large marble temples, unmarked graves beneath the waves, makeshift markers on battlefields, mass graves on hillsides, neat rows of military headstones, university graveyards, tombs without bodies, and small family plots. Each burial place tells a unique story of how someone lived and died; how they were mourned and remembered. Together, they help us reckon with the most tragic period of American history.
CONTRIBUTORS to Final Resting Places include Terry Alford, Melodie Andrews, Edward L. Ayers, DeAnne Blanton, Michael Burlingame, Katherine Reynolds Chaddock, John M. Coski, William C. Davis, Douglas R. Egerton, Stephen D. Engle, Barbara Gannon, Michael P. Gray, Hilary Green, Allen C. Guelzo, Anna Gibson Holloway, Vitor Izecksohn, Caroline E. Janney, Michelle A. Krowl, Glenn W. LaFantasie, Jennifer M. Murray, Barton A. Myers, Timothy J. Orr, Christopher Phillips, Mark S. Schantz, Dana B. Shoaf, Walter Stahr, Michael Vorenberg, and Ronald C. White.
Dr. Jordan is associate professor of history and chair of the Department of History at Sam Houston State University. Dr. Jordan is the author of Marching Home: Union Veterans and Their Unending Civil War (2015) and in 2020, he co-edited The War Went On: Reconsidering the Lives of Civil War Veterans (Louisiana State University Press). A Thousand May Fall: An Immigrant Regiment's Civil War followed in 2021 and most recently a volume co-edited with the Lincoln scholar Jonathan White, Final Resting Places: Reflections on the Meaning of Civil War Graves. A native of Akron, Ohio, Dr. Jordan serves as the Book Review Editor for The Civil War Monitor and is a member of the Society of Civil War Historians. He is the founding co-editor of the Veterans Book Series (University of Massachusetts Press). His more than 100 articles, reviews, or essays have appeared in The Journal of the Civil War Era, Civil War History, and The New York Times.
Michelle A. Krowl is the Civil War and Reconstruction specialist in the Manuscript Division at the Library of Congress, where she also oversees presidential papers from James K. Polk through Theodore Roosevelt. She co-curated the 2012-2014 exhibition The Civil War in America. Krowl received a B.A. in History from the University of California, Riverside, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of several articles and books on topics relating to the Civil War, as well as Quantico, Virginia, and the World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C. including a featured essay in Final Resting Places: Reflections on the Meaning of Civil War Graves. She has worked as a library assistant at the Historical Society of Washington, D.C., an assistant professor at Northern Virginia Community College, and as a research assistant for historian Doris Kearns Goodwin.