Civil War Era Mississippians Debate America’s Founding Principles

The Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi (CWRGM) project is a collection of the state’s governors’ papers that help us understand how Mississippians of all backgrounds debated the founding principles that the Civil War tested. They also show how state leaders interpreted and explained the rights that the Constitution and Declaration of Independence celebrated and protected. In this presentation, historian Susannah J. Ural, Ph.D., the Frank & Virginia Chair for Abraham Lincoln and Civil War Studies at Mississippi State University and  Co-Director of CWRGM, will share documents from the collection to help audience members understand how Mississippians remembered and fought over the nation’s founding traditions during the Civil War and Reconstruction.

Launched in 2019, CWRGM has made nearly 14,000 of the 20,000 state governors’ papers freely available online (CWRGM.org) with digitized original documents, transcriptions, annotations, lesson plans, and more.

Speakers Expertise:

Susannah J. Ural, Ph.D. is the Frank and Virginia Williams Chair for Abraham Lincoln & Civil War Studies in the Department of History at Mississippi State University. She specializes in the study of military history, especially of nineteenth-century America and the Civil War and Reconstruction era. The author of numerous publications, Ural's writing almost always ties back to the experiences of soldiers in war and peace. Her work has ranged from an analysis of the motivations of Irish-Catholic volunteers in the Union Army (The Harp and the Eagle, 2006), to the development and evolution of the Confederacy's most celebrated unit (Hood's Texas Brigade, 2017), to the common experiences of Americans in the Civil War (Don't Hurry Me Down to Hades, 2013), to the experiences of marginalized groups at war (ed. Civil War Citizens, 2010). Ural speaks regularly to local, state, and national organizations and has several talks featured on CSPAN. She has been a guest editor for a special issue focused on veterans for The Journal of the Civil War Era, she serves or has served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Military History (which she chaired from 2014-2019), War & Society, Civil War History, The Journal of the Civil War Era, and Civil War Times Illustrated, and is a past president of the Mississippi Historical Society. Ural co-directs, with Dr. Lindsey Peterson, the federally funded Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi project (CWRGM.org), which digitizes, transcribes, and annotates over 20,000 documents written by Mississippians of all backgrounds during this revolutionary era and makes them freely available online.   Her latest research focuses on Abraham Lincoln and Civil War soldiers.