Join us on Thursday, November 12, 2026, at 7 p.m. CT for an engaging conversation with author Dr. Jonathan S. Jones on his latest book, Opium Slavery: Civil War Veterans and America's First Opioid Crisis.

During the Civil War, the utility and widespread availability of opium and morphine made opiates essential to wartime medicine. After the war ended, thousands of ailing soldiers became addicted, or “enslaved,” as nineteenth-century Americans phrased it. Veterans, their families, and communities struggled to cope with addiction’s health and social consequences. Medical and government authorities compounded veterans' suffering and imbued the epidemic with cultural meaning by branding addiction as a matter of moral weakness, unmanliness, or mental infirmity. Framing addiction as “opium slavery” limited the efficacy of care and left many veterans to suffer needlessly for decades after the war ended. Drawing from veterans' firsthand accounts as well as mental asylum and hospital records, government and medical reports, newspaper coverage of addiction, and advertisements, Jones unearths the poorly understood stories of opiate-addicted Civil War veterans in unflinching detail, illuminating the war’s traumatic legacies. In doing so, he provides critical historical context for the modern opioid crisis, which bears tragic resemblance to that of the post–Civil War era.

Dr. Jonathan S. Jones is an assistant professor of history at James Madison University. He is the author of Opium Slavery: Civil War Veterans and America’s First Opioid Crisis (published by University of North Carolina Press, 2025). Jones’s work has been featured on PBS, NPR, BBC, HISTORY, the Washington Post, Vice, and academic journals, including The Journal of the Civil War Era, North Carolina Historical Review, and Kentucky Historical Review. Opium Slavery was shortlisted for the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize and received an honorable mention for the Organization of American Historians W.E.B. Du Bois – John Hope Franklin Award.

Jones received his PhD from Binghamton University in 2020. In 2020-21, he was a Postdoctoral Scholar at Penn State’s George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center and, in 2021-23, an assistant professor of history at Virginia Military Institute.

Register HERE.