CWRT Dec 2025 meeting:Brian Jordan on Marching Home: Union Veterans and Their Unending Civil War

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 The Civil War visited unprecedented violence on the United States. That violence was also inscribed on the bodies and minds of the nearly two million men who donned Union blue between 1861 and 1865. How did Union veterans make sense of their physical, psychological, and emotional wounds as the nation plunged into the years of Reconstruction? How did the politics of the postwar years complicate their reintegration to civilian life and personal healing? Why were so many veterans so unwilling to let go of the war and its legacy, and what urgent messages do those ex-soldiers have for us today? Brian Matthew Jordan is Associate Professor of U.S. Civil War History, Co-Director of the SHSU Civil War Consortium, and Chairperson of the History Department at Sam Houston State University, where he has taught since 2015. Professor Jordan earned his undergraduate degree in Civil War Era Studies at Gettysburg College (under the tutelage of Gabor S. Boritt and Allen C. Guelzo), and M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. degrees in History at Yale (under the direction of David W. Blight). His first book, Marching Home: Union Veterans and Their Unending Civil War, was a finalist (one of three runners-up) for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in History. In its dissertation form, that book won the George Washington Egleston Prize (for Best U.S. History Dissertation at Yale) and John Addison Porter Prize (one of Yale's highest academic honors). 2 

Presently, he is at work on Written in Blood: A New History of the U.S. Civil War, a one-volume history of the conflict for Liveright/W.W. Norton, as well as More Than An Eagle on the Button: Black Military Experiences in the Civil War Era (with Lorien Foote and Holly Pinheiro, Jr.). A short history of the battle of South Mountain for the Emerging Civil War series is set to appear next year. Dr. Jordan is a native of Akron, Ohio, and lives north of Houston with his wife and four-year old daughter, Elizabeth (who, despite her youth, has already stomped several battlefields).