Faculty and Staff
Bruce Levine
James G. Randall Professor of History
Bruce Levine is the J. G. Randall Distinguished Professor of History. He is also affiliated with the African American Studies and Research Program. During the early 1980s, Prof. Levine served as research director of the American Social History Project, which published Who Built America? Working People and the Nation's Economy, Politics, Culture, and Society (2 vols., Random House, 1990, 1992).
Prof. Levine’s research has focused on society and politics during the Civil War, and especially on the ways in which economic change, class relations, culture, and politics 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 during the 1840s and 1850s changed the composition of the working class in the U.S. and influenced both the early labor movement and the developing struggle over chattel slavery. Writing that book later led him to re-examine the powerful anti-foreign (“nativist”) movement of the pre-Civil War era and its place in political life. 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 revising a follow-up essay, entitled “Lincoln, Nativism, and the Republican Party,” for publication.
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 the destruction of slavery. That book was an alternate selection of the History Book Club.
Prof. Levine’s most recent book is entitled Confederate Emancipation: Southern Plans to Free and Arm Slaves during the Civil War (Oxford, 2005). It explores the struggle that took place within the Confederacy over whether to emancipate slaves and enroll them in the southern army. The book uses that struggle as a lens through which to examine 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 larger processes of emancipation and Reconstruction. Confederate Emancipation also places this story in an international context, employing parallel experiences in France, Prussia, Russia, and Japan to illuminate the U.S. case. Confederate Emancipation was an alternate selection of the History Book Club, the Military Book Club, and the American Compass book club. It was a finalist for the Jefferson Davis Book Award, won the Peter Seaborg Award for Civil War Scholarship. The Washington Post named it one of the year’s best books. (Not everyone was as enthusiastic. A review in the magazine of the Sons of Confederate Veterans said, “The main thesis of this book is to show the Southern Cause in a negative light … The author does an exceptional job in this by influencing the reader with his style of writing. We can only hope that Mr. Levine is unsuccessful in sales of his book.”)
In 2006 Prof. Levine published a related essay, which examined modern claims that tens of thousands of “Black Confederate” soldiers fought for the South during the Civil War. That essay, like Confederate Emancipation, linked its subject to the larger issue of the political uses of historical memory.
Levine is now writing a book for Random House tentatively entitled The Fall of the House of Dixie: Slavery’s Destruction during the Civil War.
Bruce Levine received his B.A. from the University of Michigan and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Rochester, where he studied under the late Herbert G. Gutman. Before coming to Illinois, he taught at the University of California at Santa Cruz and the University of Cincinnati. He serves on the editorial boards of a number of academic 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.