Editor – Downs

GREGORY P. DOWNS

Gregory P. Downs is Professor of History at University of California-Davis.

He studies the political and cultural history of the United States in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Particularly, he investigates the transformative impact of the Civil War, the end of slavery, and the role of military force in establishing new meanings of freedom. He is the author of three monographs on the Civil War Era and Mapping Occupation, an interactive digital history of the U.S. Army’s occupation of the South (www.mappingoccupation.org).

With Kate Masur he co-edited The World the Civil War Made (2015), a collection of essays that charts new directions in the study of the post-Civil War Era. The two also co-authored The Era of Reconstruction, 1861-1900, a National Historic Landmark Theme Study published in July 2017. Downs and Masur wrote about their NPS work in The Atlantic Online and The New York Times, and they co-edited a Reconstruction special issue of The Journal of the Civil War Era that includes a forum on the future of Reconstruction studies and a roundtable conversation on Reconstruction in public history and memory.