About

Kate Masur is the John D. MacArthur Professor of History at Northwestern University, specializing in nineteenth-century United States history. Her principal research interests include African Diaspora and African American History, Urban History, Gender and Sexuality History, Political and Policy History, and Legal and Criminal History. Her scholarly work focuses on the Civil War and Reconstruction eras, with particular emphasis on the anti-slavery movement, slavery, emancipation, race, politics, and the state. Masur authored the award-winning book, Until Justice Be Done: America's First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History and received multiple other prestigious awards. She has also coauthored and edited several publications, including a graphic history of Reconstruction and web exhibits on Black organizing in Illinois. Her research extends to consulting with museums and arts organizations, contributing to documentary films, and engaging with media outlets on topics related to her expertise. She is actively involved in academic publishing as a co-editor of the Journal of the Civil War Era and maintains a personal website at katemasur.com.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• History
• Law
• Economic history
• Archaeology
• Literature
• Art
• Media studies

Selected publications

• What Is To Be Done? Historians of Crisis in a Moment of Crisis

  The Journal of the Civil War Era · 2026-02-14

  articleSenior author

  Abstract: This issue of the Journal of the Civil War Era departs from our normal work of publishing articles and review essays to ask, "What should historians of crisis do in a moment of crisis?" We invited these essays over the summer of 2025, when many of our historian friends and colleagues especially those who study the Civil War Era—felt disturbed by political developments and uncertain about how to respond. The tools many had previously used to engage in public discussions seemed quaint or less useful in the face of what appeared a threat not just at the margins but to the very existence of the political and cultural order we operate within. The essays published here illuminate scholars wrestling in different ways with their hopes and fears, their expertise and uncertainty, their determination and confusion. They have lifted some of the veils that often cloak us and have exposed themselves—and all of us—as vulnerable at a very vulnerable moment in the country's history. None of them offer a single trick that will save us from the present predicament. All suggest ways of clarifying our thoughts, reckoning with our limitations, and finding meaning in our work.

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• Designed to Ameliorate the Condition of People of Color: The Reconstruction Republicans and the Question of Affirmative Action

  Journal of American constitutional history. · 2024-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This article investigates whether the Republican leaders who drove passage and ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment believed the amendment required race-neutrality, and whether they would have viewed as unconstitutional race-conscious policies designed to ameliorate the condition of African Americans and potentially other groups that faced race-based subordination. Casting doubt on the versions of history offered in Chief Justice Roberts’ majority opinion and Justice Thomas’s concurrence in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023), this article argues that Reconstruction Republicans focused on counteracting white supremacy and, unlike many of their professed admirers in the twentieth-and twenty-first-centuries, readily saw the difference between race-conscious policies designed to preserve white supremacy and those designed to combat it. The article shows that congressmen who approved the amendment supported policies including the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Freedmen’s Bureau Acts to ameliorate the conditions of Black people, whether previously free or previously enslaved, and it provides context for remarks they made that are now used to suggest that they required a race-neutral approach. The piece also addresses Justice John Marshall Harlan’s frequently used quote from his dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), “Our Constitution is color-blind,” emphasizing that Harlan merged from a very different political and ideological context than the Fourteenth Amendment authors and should not be read as representing their views. The piece concludes that judges and attorneys claiming to provide accounts of American history should approach that history with greater curiosity, integrity, and contextual engagement.

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• “Democracy Is Precious, Democracy Is Fragile”

  2024-11-21

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter details how Joe Biden delivered his Inaugural Address of January 20, 2021, to a jittery nation rocked by the lethal coronavirus pandemic and a horrific assault on American democracy. Biden did not characterize Abraham Lincoln as a unifier, but instead he quoted the reminiscences of artist Francis B. Carpenter. Much of Biden’s Inaugural Address was concerned with offering reasons for optimism amid a myriad of crises. The chapter highlights Biden’s first act as president, which was to ask Americans to join him in a moment of silent prayer to remember all those lost in the past year to the pandemic. It discusses Biden’s frankness regarding where the nation stood at the time, indicating a vision of the past that was a significant change from that of his predecessor.

  PublisherDOI

• Editors Note

  The Journal of the Civil War Era · 2024-06-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Editors Note Kate Masur and Gregory P. Downs This issue demonstrates the ongoing methodological breadth of the Civil War Era, as scholars bring numerous different ways of approaching history to reckon with the turbulent mid-nineteenth century in all its facets. This issue includes one research article, a book award talk, a roundtable, and a historiographic review essay, along with the sterling book reviews that anchor the journal and the field. In her Tom Watson Brown Book Award address, R. Isabela Morales approaches the Civil War era through family history. Drawing from her prize-winning book, Happy Dreams of Liberty: An American Family in Slavery and Freedom, Morales discusses the relationship between family history and the broader political and economic dynamics that influence them. Demonstrating the sterling prose and eye for detail that the award committee noted, the essay is also a reminder of how narrative writing and individual human stories can bring the past to life. In "'We Died Here Obedient to Her Laws': The Reception of Sparta in the Lost Cause and Confederate Memorialization," Jase D. L. Sutton explores how white southerners turned to classical analogies to make sense of the Civil War and to develop the myth of the Lost Cause. Delving into under-studied but relatively common references to Sparta, Sutton argues that memory-makers utilized the Battle of Thermopylae to deflect blame for the Confederacy's losses and defend the honor of Confederate soldiers. Lost Cause purveyors also explored Spartan analogies for Confederate women's loyalty and sacrifice. He argues that such references not only advanced a specific Lost Cause narrative but also buttressed white southerners' ongoing use of classical analogies to support their conservative vision of southern values. Sarah Handley-Cousins moderated "Disability in the Civil War Era: A Roundtable." Here, several historians and literature scholars discuss the growth of interdisciplinary disability studies and how scholars have brought insights from that field to the study of the Civil War era. They argue that the disability history framework helps us better understand the Civil War era by casting new light on critical issues such as slavery, emancipation, military service, federal bureaucracy, the home front, and veteran-hood. They also point toward areas for future research in material history and disability during the postwar era. In our historiographical review essay, Brian P. Luskey analyzes scholarship on the cultural history of the North during the Civil War. In "The [End Page 155] Union's Culture Industry," Luskey helpfully discusses recent work that has emphasized the wartime production, circulation, and consumption of products like newspapers, magazines, songs, minstrel shows, and pornography. More could be done, he argues, to investigate both how mainstream cultural producers operated (for instance, by marketing directly to soldiers) and also how people and organizations with relatively little economic power—for instance, enlisted men, or Black women who worked for the US war effort—became cultural producers in their own right. In the end, the essay reveals a great deal about northern cultural production during the war and urges historians to continue the work with an emphasis on how "culture" was constituted not just by words, images, and performances but also by material relationships. This issue also includes the run of excellent book reviews that make the journal a crucial part of the field. As always, we are grateful to the editorial staff and our readers for making the issue a reality. [End Page 156] Copyright © 2024 The University of North Carolina Press

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• Editors' Note

  The Journal of the Civil War Era · 2023-08-26

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Editors' Note Kate Masur and Gregory P. Downs In this issue, the burgeoning fields of legal history and memory take center stage in our examination of the history of the Civil War Era. Sarah Barringer Gordon's "Staying in Place: Southern Methodists, the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, and Postwar Battles for Control of Church Property" draws on both legal history and church history to examine struggles over property and power in Methodist churches in the post–Civil War south. Gordon traces the history of the founding of the then-named Colored Methodist Episcopal Church (CME) in 1870, finding its legal roots in an 1868 Kentucky Supreme Court case that pitted a Black congregation against the white-controlled southern Methodist church that had previously underwritten and controlled its space. As AME and AME Zion pastors recruited Black Methodists from the southern Methodist church, white trustees—and some Black pastors—struggled for legal control of congregations and properties, eventually creating the CME as a distinct, enduring Black Methodist denomination. Gordon ably intertwines the sacred and the profane as she emphasizes the importance of law for the study of religion. In "'She Is a very Smart Woman and a Great Trader': Enslaved and Free Black Women's Property Claims and Entrepreneurship in the Antebellum South," Nicole Viglini turns to the tools of legal history to explore how Black women, both free and enslaved, claimed property in the pre-emancipation south. Viglini creatively reads applications for compensation from the Southern Claims Commission to trace antebellum Black women's networks of credit, deepening our understanding of Black women's involvement in the southern economy and the relationship between that economy and personal relationships of trust. Through establishing credit, Viglini shows, antebellum Black women became entrepreneurs and established an enduring role in the southern economy despite limitations imposed by law and culture. In our second roundtable of the year, Adam Domby and Karen L. Cox moderate a lively discussion about "Monuments and Memory: Civil War Statuary, Public Facing Scholarship, and the Future of Memory Studies." Over the past decade, and especially since the 2020 murder of George Floyd, scholars have been asked to take public roles in debates over Confederate memory. In this roundtable, eight scholars and history practitioners discuss northern monuments, African American commemorations of the war, the white male commemorative landscape, the impact of [End Page 279] protests, contemporary Civil War memories, the role of historians in public debates, the issue of "presentism" in history, and the future of Civil War memory studies. In this issue's review essay, Jennifer Oast examines the evolving scholarship on slavery's impact on universities. In "Forgotten No Longer: Universities and Slavery in Twenty-First Century Scholarship and Memory," Oast traces the explosion of interest in this topic over the past two decades, as universities have examined their roots in slave trading and profits derived from enslaved people's work. She highlights scholarly studies of universities' economic ties to slavery, roles in promoting slavery, and employment of enslaved people without compensation, and she explores contemporary demands for apologies, memorialization, and reparations. This issue also includes fourteen fine book reviews, covering both broad synthetic volumes and new monographs, on topics ranging from China to Yellowstone. The reviews—and the happily increasing flow of submissions—are tribute to the persistence of scholars and our editorial staff during these trying years. [End Page 280] Copyright © 2023 The University of North Carolina Press

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• Editors’ Note

  The Journal of the Civil War Era · 2023

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Sociology

  Editors’ Note Kate Masur and Gregory P. Downs Our June issue reinforces our sense that the field of the Civil War Era remains a wide-ranging, creative site of engaged scholarship. The pieces in this issue span from slavery to the present day, delving into concrete historical details and the persistent narratives that shape our encounters with the past. In his Tom Watson Brown Book Prize address, Sebastian Page explains the origins of his book, Black Resettlement and the American Civil War, relating his discomfort with many aspects of the historical profession. He concludes with a discussion of how received narratives of Lincoln’s presidency and of abolition itself continue to shape the questions historians ask and, by extension, the scholarship they produce. The participants in a roundtable on studying slavery on campus are likewise engaged in challenging received narratives. Historians Hilary Green and Adam Domby assembled a group of scholars who are researching and publicizing their campuses’ relationships to slavery, bringing forward histories of people and events that have been either covered up or forgotten entirely. Contributors offer reports from the field and a call to press forward with work that should, Green and Domby write, include not just research and writing but also “working with constituent communities (descendants of enslaved people, local black and other marginalized communities affected by the campus, alumni, students, faculty, et cetera) to ensure equity in admissions, scholarships, hiring, and future campus planning.” In a research article, John Quist analyzes the career of Michigan editor Theodore Foster, a Liberty Party supporter who became a Republican in the late 1850s. Quist contributes to an ongoing conversation about how to characterize the politics of white antislavery Northerners, particularly as their views changed over time. He argues that Foster shifted during wartime and its aftermath from abolitionism to an accommodation with political antislavery and racism, concluding that Foster’s evolution should lead us “to reexamine white abolitionists’ long-term commitments to racial equality, to reevaluate the distinctions between abolitionism and the Republican Party’s antislavery message, and to recognize that abolitionists could be more easily transformed than the society they hoped to change.” Frank Towers rounds out this eclectic issue with a wide-ranging historiographical essay on cities and Reconstruction. Adopting an expansive chronological frame, Towers reminds readers of interdisciplinary [End Page 145] scholarship in urban history that developed from the 1960s to the 1980s and suggests that historians of the Civil War Era could fruitfully return to that body of work for insights and ideas. That scholarship suggests, in particular, that cities can be viewed as agents in their own rights. They are not simply places where things happened but also a particular kind of human formation that, itself, produces novel dynamics, solidarities, and structures of power and inequality. We are as always indebted to associate editors Hilary Green, Luke Harlow, and Katy Shively, who are constantly soliciting essays and reviews, editing writing, and helping produce this journal, as well as to Matt Isham and Heather Carlquist Walser, who keep the wheels turning under challenging circumstances. [End Page 146] Copyright © 2023 The University of North Carolina Press

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• Editors' Note

  The Journal of the Civil War Era · 2022-08-28

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Editors' Note Kate Masur and Gregory P. Downs This issue includes one original article, two very interesting lectures, a review essay, and the usual slate of excellent book reviews that together continue to expand our understanding of the field, its key actors, and its central questions. The first of the published lectures is Thavolia Glymph's acceptance speech for her Tom Watson Brown Award–winning book, The Women's Fight: The Civil War's Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation. She delivered the speech during the Southern Historical Association's virtual annual meeting on November 5, 2021. Glymph's lecture captures her book's argument that Black women, despite assertions to the contrary in the literature, are highly visible in the archives historians already use. Glymph's essay both crystallizes one of her book's broadest arguments and offers examples of how historians can work with the existing archives of Black women's lives. The next essay is Louis P. Masur's Robert Fortenbaugh Memorial Lecture, "Abraham Lincoln and the Problem of Reconstruction." This was the Fifty-ninth Fortenbaugh Lecture, delivered at Gettysburg College's Civil War Institute on November 19, 2021. Masur draws on his books, especially Lincoln's Last Speech: Wartime Reconstruction and the Crisis of Reunion, to reexamine the Civil War history of the issues that became central during Reconstruction and to advance ideas about Lincoln's potential trajectory, had he lived. Evan Turiano's "'Prophecies of Loss': Slave Flight during Virginia's Secession Crisis" explores how slave escapes became a political issue during Virginia's struggle over secession. Through close readings of speeches, newspaper accounts, and other sources, Turiano captures how unionists, early in the debate, argued that secession would open the door to increased flight by enslaved people. Yet as the debate progressed, secessionists reconfigured the argument, drawing attention to Lincoln's critiques of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act and suggesting that he would likely be an unreliable enforcer of it. Throughout, Turiano embeds the stories of fugitive enslaved people to show how their actions, not just their invocation, mattered in the debate. Richard Bell's review essay, "Peepholes, Eels, and Pickett's Charge: Doing Microhistory Then and Now," examines the relationship between microhistory and the Civil War Era. Bell discusses the ongoing, now fifty-year-old debates about what microhistory is, beyond a tight focus on a [End Page 303] small subject. Bell also asks which works in Civil War Era scholarship are microhistory, whether they acknowledge it or not, and what the field could gain by self-consciously adopting microhistorical approaches. The book review section continues to be a source of pride for the journal, and we remain grateful for book review editor Kathryn Shively's dedication in the face of pandemic-related challenges in publishing and academia. We also thank Northwestern University's Department of History, which has provided financial support for the book review section over the past year, and Mikala Stokes, a PhD candidate at Northwestern, who has assisted Shively in producing the section. [End Page 304] Copyright © 2022 The University of North Carolina Press

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• Editors' Note

  The Journal of the Civil War Era · 2022

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Law

  Editors' Note Kate Masur and Gregory P. Downs This issue of the Journal of the Civil War contains three research articles and an historiographic review essay that reflect the field's increasing geographic and topical breadth. Together they indicate that calls to envision an expansive Civil War Era are being answered in increasingly rich and complex ways, and they suggest that we might turn to analyzing the different ways the Civil War Era is being expanded and the varying implications of those expansions. Peter Guardino's "The Constant Recurrence of Such Atrocities: Guerrilla Warfare and Counterinsurgency during the Mexican-American War" analyzes US military responses to guerrilla warfare over the course of the US-Mexico War. Guardino traces how wars against Native Americans shaped early US military actions in northern Mexico and then examines how US commanders made it official policy to attack Mexican civilians as the war moved into central Mexico. This story, important in its own right, also provides a backstory and partial contrast to anti-guerilla campaigns in the US Civil War. Vanya Eftimova Bellinger looks east to expand our sense of how mid-nineteenth-century Americans understood and changed the laws of war. She argues that the Prussian immigrant Francis Lieber was influenced by Carl von Clausewitz's On War, first published in the 1830s, but also that Lieber's time in the United States shaped his thinking about modern war and democracy. What emerged from this mix of European theory and US reality, Bellinger claims, were new and distinctive theories that are best understood when placed in their own historical context. Heading west, Jonathan Wells's "Printed Communities: Race, Respectability, and Black Newspapers in the Civil War West," examines Black editors and journalists in the US West between 1860s and 1880s as they attempted to create a distinct set of western identities for African Americans there, to engage with the complex racial politics of the West, and to construct new models of respectability to fit new spaces. Cameron Blevins and Christy Hyman's review essay, "Digital History and the Civil War Era," assesses the ways that transformations in computational methods, tools, and platforms have reshaped representations and analysis of the Civil War Era. Blevins and Hyman show that scholars have made extraordinary use of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) mapping and of less-heralded digital systems, and they encourage us all [End Page 1] to think more expansively and critically about digital technologies as they reshape historical practices. This essay's book reviews once again demonstrate book review editor Kathryn Shively's extraordinary commitment under unusually challenging publishing circumstances, and also the professionalism and dedication of our colleagues, as scholars continued to produce sharp, informative reviews during the pandemic. [End Page 2] Copyright © 2022 The University of North Carolina Press

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• Editors' Note

  The Journal of the Civil War Era · 2021-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Editors' Note Kate Masur and Gregory P. Downs As we write this editors' note in summer 2021, we are hopeful that many in-person activities will soon resume, including the conferences, seminars, workshops, and writing groups that are so important to our collective work. Our issue features three research essays about men's lives that touch on politics, ideology, and power. Daniel Crofts takes a new look at a famous diarist in "Sidney George Fisher and the Coming of the Civil War: How Southern Overreach Alarmed a Conservative Philadelphian." An elite Philadelphian, Fisher had generally conservative political instincts. Yet he became increasingly troubled by southern politicians' demands for dominance in the 1850s, eventually siding with the Republicans and, when war came, even supporting emancipation. The story of Fisher's political evolution is a reminder of the diversity and contentiousness of the Republican coalition. In "William Henry Trescot, Pardon Broker," Cynthia Nicoletti follows Trescot, a South Carolina lawyer and politician (and historian), to Washington, DC, where he lobbied President Andrew Johnson to restore land to his state's planter elite. Trescot entered directly into political negotiations about the future of land confiscated from Confederates during the war, using his legal savvy and political connections to discredit demands for land redistribution by South Carolina freedpeople and O. O. Howard, the commissioner of the Freedmen's Bureau. Tarik Yiğit explores Civil War veterans in Egypt in "Reconstructing the American under the Most Unimaginable Conditions: Civil War Veterans in the 'Arabian Nights.'" Egypt's leader, Ismail Pasha, sought American advisors after the war, and many U.S. and Confederate veterans were happy to oblige. Impelled by the chance to earn an income and an associated sense of manhood, Civil War veterans in Egypt contributed their skills in surveying, military training, and armed conflict itself. Many had known each other before the war, and Egypt became a site where Americans who had fought on both sides grappled with one another and with the Civil War's legacies. In his review essay, "The Common Soldier of the Civil War: His Rise and Fall," Gerald Prokopowicz examines evolving scholarly interest in Civil War soldiers. Historical scholarship on the rank and file has been shaped by subsequent wars and by historians' changing approaches to the past. What was once represented as a generalizable "common soldier" experience—atleast [End Page 447] for Confederate soldiers on the one hand and US ones on the other—has been shattered, but questions of why people fought endure. With this issue, we say goodbye to our editorial assistant, Megan Hildebrand, a PhD candidate at Penn State, whose term is ending and whose excellent work we have appreciated tremendously. Edward Green is the new editorial assistant, and we welcome him to the team. We also express special gratitude to the authors, peer reviewers, and book reviewers who made time to contribute to the journal during the difficult months of the pandemic. We hope they and all our readers are faring well and that we'll see one another soon. [End Page 448] Copyright © 2021 The University of North Carolina Press

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• Law and Its Limits in Albion Tourgée’s Bricks without Straw

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2021

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Law
  • Political Science

  Tourgée’s novel explores the challenges posed by the wartime abolition of slavery in the United States and the federal government’s attempt to impose a new legal order on the southern states. The Ohio-born Tourgée was an accomplished writer as well as a judge in Reconstruction North Carolina, and the novel—which is set in central North Carolina—takes up the possibilities and limits of legal reform in the wake of war. Masur argues that <italic>Bricks without Straw</italic> presents a largely pessimistic vision of law’s capacity to change deeply rooted social and political structures. Tourgée’s novel warns readers that when it comes to overcoming the legacies of slavery, the law is outmatched by white southerners’ racism and contempt. Masur situates Tourgée’s novel in the context of his political experience, which convinced him that an abstract commitment to individual rights meant little without robust federal institutions capable of protecting those rights against state and local resistance.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Gregory P. Downs

  14 shared

• Louis P. Masur

  2 shared

• Christina Greene

  University of Arizona

  1 shared

• James Oakes

  1 shared

• Evelyn Nakano Glenn

  1 shared

• Stanley Harrold

  1 shared

• Judith Giesberg

  1 shared

• Emma Jones Lapsansky-Werner

  1 shared

Labs

• Material History LabPI

Education

• Ph.D., American History

  University of Chicago

  1997

• M.A., American History

  University of Chicago

  1993

• B.A., American Studies

  University of California, Berkeley

  1990

Awards & honors

• Littleton-Griswold Prize from the American Historical Associ…
• John Phillip Reid Book Award from the American Society for L…
• John Nau Book Prize in American Civil War Era History
• Ver Steeg Award (2023)