Gallman, J. Matthew (James Matthew Gallman, Matt Gallman)

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Gallman, J. Matthew (James Matthew Gallman, Matt Gallman)

PERSONAL:

Education: Princeton University, B.A., 1979; Brandeis University, Ph.D. (American history), 1986.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Department of History, University of Florida, P.O. Box 117320, Gainesville, FL 32611-7320. E-mail—[email protected]

CAREER:

Historian, educator, and writer. Loyola College, Baltimore, MD, assistant professor of history, 1986-90, associate professor of history, 1990-1996, professor of history, 1996-98; Gettysburg College, Gettysburg, PA, Henry R. Luce Professor of the Civil War Era, 1998-2003; Occidental College, Los Angeles, CA, Ray Allen Billington Visiting Professor of History, 2002-03; University of Florida, Gainesville, professor of history, 2003—, graduate coordinator, 2006—.

WRITINGS:

Mastering Wartime: A Social History of Philadelphia during the Civil War, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 1990.

The North Fights the Civil War: The Home Front, Ivan R. Dee (Chicago, IL), 1994.

Receiving Erin's Children: Philadelphia, Liverpool, and the Irish Famine Migration, 1845-1855, University of North Carolina Press (Chapel Hill, NC), 2000.

(General Editor) The Civil War Chronicle: The Only Day-by-Day Portrait of America's Tragic Conflict as Told by Soldiers, Journalists, Politicians, Farmers, Nurses, Slaves, and Other Eyewitnesses, Crown Publishers (New York, NY), 2000.

Touched with Fire? Two Philadelphia Novelists Remember the Civil War, Marquette University Press (Milwaukee, WI), 2002.

America's Joan of Arc: The Life of Anna Elizabeth Dickinson, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2006.

Contributor to the Journal of Urban History.

Contributor to numerous books, including The Civil War and Memory, University of North Carolina Press (Chapel Hill, NC), 2004; American Public Life and the Historical Imagination, University of Notre Dame Press (Notre Dame, IN), 2003; and The Experience of War: Civilians in the American Civil War, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 2002.

SIDELIGHTS:

A professor of history since 1986, J. Matthew Gallman focuses his research focuses on mid-nineteenth-century America. A number of his books concentrate on the Civil War era (1861-65), an area of significant interest to Gallman, who served for five years as the Henry R. Luce Professor of the Civil War Era at Gettysburg College. In The North Fights the Civil War: The Home Front, Gallman discusses the legislative, economic, and domestic effects that the Civil War had on the North. Booklist reviewer Gilbert Taylor considered the book a "tenable thesis, capably rendered, on aspects of the epic seldom visited." Gallman was general editor on a project of larger scope, looking at the war from both sides of the battlefield. The Civil War Chronicle: The Only Day-by-Day Portrait of America's Tragic Conflict as Told by Soldiers, Journalists, Politicians, Farmers, Nurses, Slaves, and Other Eyewitnesses includes firsthand accounts of both Northerners and Southerners, from those who fought the war to those on the periphery. The book was described by Journal of Southern History reviewer Thomas A. DeBlack as "an engrossing look at America's greatest conflict through the words of those who experienced it." Moreover, DeBlack noted that the work represented both "a serious effort to provide a truly comprehensive firsthand perspective on the entire war" and "a welcome addition to the literature on the war and an extremely valuable resource for the casual Civil War enthusiast as well as the serious student."

In Receiving Erin's Children: Philadelphia, Liverpool, and the Irish Famine Migration, 1845-1855, Gallman looks back to the migration of large numbers of Irish to two key city centers—Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Liverpool, England—and discusses how the citizens of each locale responded to the influx of these immigrants. Areas of focus also include public and private assistance, health care, environmental impact, crime, and policing. Historian contributor Gary Owens described the book as "a welcome contribution to our understanding of nineteenth-century urban history" and a "valuable and important study." Lynn Hollen Lees, writing in the Journal of Social History, regarded it as a "a well-designed study of urban institutions as they shifted in size and in scope," further noting: "Gallman designed his study carefully and cleverly."

A nineteenth-century abolitionist and suffragist is the focus of Gallman's first biography, America's Joan of Arc: The Life of Anna Elizabeth Dickinson. Born in Philadelphia in 1842, Dickinson began her career as a public advocate for women and slaves when she was in her teens and rose to national prominence as a lecturer and a campaigner for the Republican Party. America's Joan of Arc spans Dickinson's life from her early days as an unknown local radical through the height of her fame to her later years when she faded from the national spotlight. In a review for Booklist, Vanessa Bush commended Gallman's use of personal letters and news reports to depict Dickinson's life, adding: "Gallman rescues from obscurity a fascinating orator and reformer."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, April 1, 1994, Gilbert Taylor, review of The North Fights the Civil War: The Home Front, p. 1420; April 15, 2006, Vanessa Bush, review of America's Joan of Arc: The Life of Anna Elizabeth Dickinson, p. 23.

Historian, winter, 2002, Gary Owens, review of Receiving Erin's Children: Philadelphia, Liverpool, and the Irish Famine Migration, 1845-1855, p. 410.

Journal of Social History, winter, 2001, Lynn Hollen Lees, review of Receiving Erin's Children, p. 452.

Journal of Southern History, November, 2002, Thomas A. DeBlack, review of The Civil War Chronicle: The Only Day-by-Day Portrait of America's Tragic Conflict as Told by Soldiers, Journalists, Politicians, Farmers, Nurses, Slaves, and Other Eyewitnesses, p. 954.