Biography
From the 2024 Presidential Biography booklet
Thavolia Glymph is the Peabody Family Distinguished Professor of History, professor of law and of gender, sexuality, and feminist studies, and faculty research scholar at the Duke Population Research Institute at Duke University. She is the author of The Women’s Fight: The Civil War’s Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation (Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2020), which won the American Historical Association’s Albert J. Beveridge Award and Joan Kelly Memorial Prize; the Julia Cherry Spruill Prize from the Southern Association for Women Historians; the Tom Watson Brown Book Award awarded by the Society of Civil War Historians and the Watson Brown Foundation; the John Nau Prize awarded by the John L. Nau III Center for Civil War History at the University of Virginia; the Organization of American Historians’ Civil War and Reconstruction Book Award, Mary Nickliss Prize, and Darlene Clark Hine Award; and was a finalist for the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize.
Her book, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2008), won the Philip Taft Book Prize and was a finalist for the Frederick Douglass Prize. She is coeditor of two volumes and author of over 40 articles and essays, including “Rose’s War and the Gendered Politics of Slave Insurgency in the Civil War,” which won the 2017 George and Ann Richards Prize for the best article published in the Journal of the Civil War Era. She is currently completing two book manuscripts: “African American Women and Children Refugees in the Civil War,” supported by a National Institutes of Health grant, and “’Playing ‘Dixie’ in Egypt: A Transnational Transcript of Race, Nation, Empire and Citizenship.”
Glymph held the John Hope Franklin Visiting Professorship of American Legal History at Duke Law School in 2015 and 2018 and won a 2017 Thomas Langford Lectureship Award at Duke. She is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Society of American Historians, and the American Antiquarian Society and a past member of the Gettysburg Foundation Board of Directors. She serves on several editorial boards. She is past president of the Southern Historical Association (2019–20), an Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer, and was the 2023–24 Rogers Distinguished Fellow in Nineteenth-Century American History at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California.
Select Bibliography
Books
The Women’s Fight: The Civil War’s Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation, Littlefield History of the Civil War Era Series. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020.
Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867. Ser. 1, vol. 3, The Wartime Genesis of Free Labor: The Lower South. Co-edited with Ira Berlin, Steven Miller, Joseph P. Reidy, Julie Saville, and Leslie Rowland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867. Ser. 1, vol. 1, The Destruction of Slavery. Co-edited with Ira Berlin, Steven Miller, Joseph P. Reidy, Julie Saville, and Leslie Rowland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
Articles and Chapters
“Leadership from the Ground: Enslaved People and the Civil War.” In The Arts of Leading, edited by Michael Lamb and Edward Brooks. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2024.
“‘I’m a Radical Black Girl’: Black Women Unionists and the Politics of Civil War History.” In Unequal Sisters: A Revolutionary Reader in US Women’s History, 5th edition. New York: Routledge, 2023.
“‘She Wears the Flag of Our Country’: Women, Nation, and War.” Journal of the Civil War Era 12, no. 3 (September 2022): 305–20.
“‘There is No Silence in the Archive, There are Silencers’: Thavolia Glymph in Conversation about Gerda Lerner with Levke Harders.” Osterreichische Zeitschrift Fur Geschichtswissenschaften 33, no. 2 (January 2022): 159–70.
“The Women’s Fight: A Coda.” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History 18, no. 2 (May 2021): 83–91.
“Crying for Home.” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History 17, no. 3 (September 2020): 113–16.
“I Could Not Come in Unless over Their Dead Bodies: Dignitary Offenses.” Law and History Review 38, no. 3 (August 2020): 585–98.
“‘I’m a Radical Girl’: Black Women Unionists and the Politics of Civil War History.” Journal of the Civil War Era 8, no. 3 (September 2018): 359–87.
“‘Invisible Disabilities’: Black Women in War and in Freedom.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 160, no. 3 (September 2016): 237–46.
“Mary Elizabeth Massey: Standing with the Master Class.” Civil War History 61, no. 4 (December 2015): 412–15.
“Telling Slavery: Archives of Life and Death, Surveillance and Control.” William and Mary Quarterly 72, no. 4 (October 2015): 680–85.
“Refugee Camp at Helena, Arkansas, 1863.” In The Lens of War: Historians Reflect on Their Favorite Civil War Photographs, edited by Gary Gallagher and Matthew Gallman. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2015.
“Freedom in the American Republic.” Eric Foner’s Reconstruction at Twenty- Five Forum. Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 14, no. 1 (January 2015): 19–22.
“A New World of Women and a New Language.” Frontiers 36, no. 1 (January 2015): 21–26.
“Review of River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom.” Journal of American History 100, no. 4 (March 2014): 1170–71.
“Routes of War: The World of Movement in the Confederate South.” Slavery & Abolition 35, no. 1 (January 2014): 190–91.
“Enslaved Women and the Battle for Freedom and Democracy on the Civil War’s Home Front.” In The American Civil War at Home, edited by Scott Reynolds Nelson and Carol Sheriff. Richmond: Virginia Sesquicentennial of the American Civil War Commission, 2014.
“Rose’s War and the Gendered Politics of a Slave Insurgency in the Civil War.” Journal of the Civil War Era 3 (December 2013): 501–32.
“Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction and Slave Women’s War for Freedom.” South Atlantic Quarterly 112, no. 3 (2013): 489–505.
“Noncombatant Military Laborers in the Civil War.” OAH Magazine of History 26 (April 2012): 25–29.
“I’se Mrs. Tatum Now: Black and White Women and the Meaning of Freedom.” Phillis: The Journal for Research on African American Women 1, no. 1 (2010): 24–32.
“‘This Species of Property’: Female Slave Contrabands in the Civil War.” In The Confederate Experience Reader: Selected Documents and Essays. New York: Routledge, 2008.
“The Union Preserved/Toward Reconstruction.” In Abraham Lincoln: People, Places, Politics. New York: Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, 2006.
“’Liberty Dearly Bought’: The Making of Civil War Memory in African American Communities in the South.” In Time Longer than Rope: A Century of African American Activism, edited by Charles M. Payne and Adam Green. New York: New York University Press, 2003.
“Women in the Civil War.” In Blackwell Companion to American Women’s History, edited by Nancy Hewitt. New York: Blackwell Publishers, 2002.