Publications

A Nation Unraveled: Clothing, Culture, and Violence in the American Civil War Era (Univ. of North Carolina Press, January 2026).

During the American Civil War, clothing became central to the ways people waged war and experienced its cost. Through the clothes they made, wore, mended, lost, and stole, Americans expressed their allegiances, showed their love, confronted their social and economic challenges, subverted expectations, and, ultimately, preserved their history. As the collections they left behind make clear, Civil War Americans believed clothing was not merely a reflection of one’s class, gender, race, military rank, political ideology, or taste. Instead, Northerners and Southerners alike understood that clothing—from the weave of a fabric to the style and make of a coat—had the power to affect people’s way of living through the war’s tumult.

“A Case for Objects: Material Culture in the History Classroom,” American Historical Review 129, no. 3 (September 2024): 1129-1153.

“Mining Charity: Material Culture and Philanthropy on the Comstock Lode,” Public Historian 46, no. 2 (May 2024): 37–61.

“‘Pretty Well Fixed’: Material Culture and Occupation in Civil War Kentucky.” Ohio Valley History 22 (4): 66-79.

 “‘Make up a box to send me:’ Consumer Culture and Camp Life in the American Civil War,” in The Military and the Market, edited by Mark Wilson and Jennifer Mittelstadt.

“Cultures of Confederate Military Clothing Production,” in Clothing and Fashion in Southern History, edited by Ted Ownby and Becca Walton. Oxford: University Press of Mississippi, 2020.

“Fitted Up for Freedom: The Material Culture of Refugee Camps,” in War Matters: Material Culture in the Civil War Era, edited by Joan Cashin. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018.

“‘Peeled’ Bodies, Pillaged Homes: Looting and Material Culture in the American Civil War Era,” in Objects of War: The Material Culture of Conflict and Displacement, edited by Leora Auslander and Tara Zahra. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018.

Reviewed in LA Review of Books

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“The Dress of the Enemy: Clothing and Disease in the Civil War Era.” Civil War History vol. 63, no.2(June 2017).

“Armor, Manhood and the Politics of Mortality,” in Astride Two Worlds: Technology and the American Civil War, ed. Barton Hacker (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, 2016).

“To Look Like Men of War: Visual Transformation Narratives of African American Union Soldiers” Clio: Femmes, Genre, Histoire 40 (Objets et fabrication du genre), (Fall 2014): 137-152.