Faculty and Staff
Bruce Levine
James G. Randall Professor of History
Bruce Levine is the James G. Randall Professor of History. During the early 1980s he served as research director with at American Social History Project (ASHP), which published Who Built America? Working People and the Nation's Economy, Politics, Culture, and Society (2 vols., Random House, 1989, 1992). Prof. Levine’s own research has focused on the era and issues of the Civil War, and especially on the complex ways in which economic change, class structure, and culture (including ethnicity, race, and gender) interacted to shape that era.
His first book, The Spirit of 1848: German Immigrants, Labor Conflict, and the Coming of Civil War (Illinois, 1992) explored the ways in which large-scale European immigration changed the composition of the antebellum working class in the U.S. and influenced both the early labor movement and the developing struggle in the United States over chattel slavery. Writing that book later led him to re-examine the powerful anti-foreign (“nativist”) movement of the 1840s and 1850s and its place in antebellum politics. In September 2001, Prof. Levine’s essay on this subject, “Conservatism, Nativism, and Slavery: Thomas R. Whitney and the Origins of the Know Nothing Party,” appeared in the Journal of American History. He is now completing a follow-up essay entitled “Slavery, Nativism, and Abraham Lincoln’s Whiggery.”
Levine’s next book, Half Slave and Half Free: The Roots of Civil War (Hill & Wang,1992; revised edition, 2005), surveyed the trends and events that ultimately brought on the war and emancipation.
Prof. Levine’s most recent book is entitled Confederate Emancipation: Southern Plans to Free and Arm Slaves during the Civil War (Oxford, 2005). It probes the debate that took place within the Confederacy over whether to emancipate slaves and enroll them in the southern army. The book uses that dispute as a lens through which to view the nature of southern nationalism and the Confederate cause, racial and pro-slavery ideology, the role that African Americans played in the war, and the whole complex process of emancipation and Reconstruction. Confederate Emancipation also places this story in a world-wide context, employing parallel experiences in France, Prussia, Russia, and Japan to illuminate the U.S. case. A related essay, published in 2006, examined modern claims that tens of thousands of “Black Confederate” soldiers fought for the South during the Civil War. That essay, like Confederate Emancipation, links its subject to the larger issue of the political uses of historical memory.
Levine is now writing a book for Random House entitled The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Confederacy’s Defeat and Slavery’s Destruction.
Bruce Levine received his Ph.D. from the University of Rochester, where he studied with Herbert G. Gutman as well as Stanley L. Engerman, Eugene D. Genovese, and Christopher Lasch. He previously taught at the University of Cincinnati and the University of California at Santa Cruz. He serves on the editorial boards of a number of journals -- as well as North & South magazine, to which he has become a regular contributor -- and on the advisory committees of both the National Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission and the Lincoln Book Prize.
This fall, Prof. Levine is teaching a graduate seminar examining historiographical issues in the Civil War era (History 572D) and an undergraduate lecture course on the Origins of the Civil War (History 374A). In the spring he will teach a lecture course on the Civil War and Reconstruction (374B) and an honors seminar (495A) that places the U.S.’s experience with slavery and its destruction in global perspective.