Dr. Brian M. Jordan Bio

Dr. Jordan is associate professor of history and chair of the Department of History at Sam Houston State University, where he teaches courses on the Civil War and Reconstruction, American military history, historical methodology, and the U.S. history survey. A cultural and military historian of the nation’s fratricidal conflict, he is interested in the human longitude of the Civil War battles and the problem of memory. Dr. Jordan is the author of Marching Home: Union Veterans and Their Unending Civil War (Liveright/W.W. Norton, 2015), a narrative history of the men who won the war but couldn’t bear the peace. The book was a finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in History and, in its dissertation form, won the George Washington Egleston Prize (for best U.S. history dissertation at Yale) and Yale’s John Addison Porter Prize. In 2020, with Evan C. Rothera, he editedThe War Went On: Reconsidering the Lives of Civil War Veterans (Louisiana State University Press). A Thousand May Fall: An Immigrant Regiment's Civil War, followed in 2021; it earned a starred review from Publisher's Weekly, and was a selection of the History Book Club. With Chris Mackowski, he edited a daring collection of essays on the war's contingencies in 2022. A volume co-edited with the Lincoln scholar Jonathan White, Final Resting Places: Reflections on the Meaning of Civil War Graves, appeared in 2023. Liveright/W.W. Norton plans to publish his major interpretive synthesis of the Civil War era in 2026, and with Lorien Foote and Holly Pinheiro, Jr., he is bringing work on an edited volume on the Black military experience during the Civil War to a close. 

A native of Akron, Ohio, Dr. Jordan has served as the Book Review Editor for The Civil War Monitor for the last eleven years. He is the founding co-editor of the Veterans Book Series (University of Massachusetts Press). His more than 150 articles, reviews, or essays have appeared in The Journal of the Civil War Era, Civil War History, and The New York Times. He has delivered more than 150 invited lectures in thirty states, has appeared on C-SPAN eleven times, and, in 2020, was featured in the HISTORY Channel's three-part mini-series on the life of Ulysses S. Grant.