Manning, Chandra

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Manning, Chandra

PERSONAL:

Married; children: a son. Education: Mount Holyoke College, B.A. (summa cum laude), 1993; National University of Ireland, M.Phil., 1995; Harvard University, A.M., 1997, Ph.D., 2002.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Alexandria, VA. Office—Department of History, Georgetown University, Box 571035, Washington, DC 20057. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, teaching fellow, 1997-99, lecturer in history, 2002-03; Pacific Lutheran University, Tacoma, WA, assistant professor of history, 2003-05; Georgetown University, Washington, DC, assistant professor of history, 2005—. Also worked as a national park service ranger in Boston National Historical Park and Adams National Historic Site, 1995-98, and as a museum guide and education program consultant for Constitution Hall State Historic Site in Lecompton, KS, 2000.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Kansas State Historical Society, Alfred Landon research grant, 1998; Illinois State Historical Society, King V. Hostick Award, 1998; North Caroliniana Society summer research fellowship, 1999; Oscar Handlin fellowship, Clements Library, University of Michigan, 1999; Skinner fellowship in historical research, 1999-2000.

WRITINGS:

What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War, Alfred A. Knopf (New York, NY), 2007.

Contributor to books, including Historical Encyclopedia of World Slavery, edited by Junius P. Rodriguez, ABC-Clio (Santa Barbara, CA), 1997; American National Biography, edited by John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1999; Reader's Guide to Military History, edited by Charles Messenger, Fitzroy Dearborn (London, England), 2001; Major Acts of Congress, edited by Brian K. Landsberg, Macmillan Reference (New York, NY) 2004; Encyclopedia of Reconstruction, edited by Richard Zuczek, Greenwood Press (Westport, CT), 2006; and The View from the Ground: The Experiences of Civil War Soldiers, edited by Aaron Sheehan-Dean, University of Kentucky Press (Lexington, KY), 2007. Contributor to periodicals, including North and South, Istorika, Missouri Historical Review, History Ireland, Irish Studies Review, and Kansas History. Associate editor of Southern Historian, 2000-02.

SIDELIGHTS:

Chandra Manning is a scholar of nineteenth-century United States history. In 2007 Manning published her first book, What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War. She covers the American Civil War and its root cause, slavery, through the average person's perspective of the time. She draws on diaries, personal letters, and newsletters of various regiments to capture the thoughts, fears, and general opinion of the soldiers on the issues of slavery and emancipation of the time. Writing in the Chicago Tribune, Michael S. Green commented that "Manning has crafted an engrossing study of Civil War soldiers being introduced to a new way of life and alternately welcoming and shying away from it." Library Journal contributor Elizabeth Morris liked the balance between positive and negative attitudes of the soldiers, but thought that "the chronological narrative bogs down in the repetitiveness of too many voices." Booklist critic Jay Freeman proposed that "what makes this study unique, provocative, and immensely valuable is her approach." Freeman concluded that the book was "a well-argued examination."