Susannah J. Ural

Susannah J. Ural, Ph.D. is the Charles W. Moorman Distinguished Alumni Professor of the Humanities and co-director of the Dale Center for the Study of War & Society in the history department at the University of Southern Mississippi. A war and society scholar by training, her work also engages with ethnic and immigration history and soldier-motivation studies. Ural is the author of several books and articles including _The Harp and the Eagle: Irish Catholic Volunteers and the Union Army, 1861-1865_ and _Don't Hurry Me Down to Hades: Soldiers and Families in America's Civil War_.

Ural's latest book, a socio-military history of soldiers and families of an elite Confederate unit, is due out in 2017 with Louisiana State University Press. In _Hood's Texas Brigade and the Southern Confederacy_, Ural argues that Confederates celebrated Hood's Texans because they represented what Southerners loved and loathed about themselves. In the Texas Brigade, white Southerners saw bold, brave, self-sacrificing, self-made, independent, and successful men. That same bravery, however, could cross over into untamed violence; self-sacrifice could become self-destructive; wavering strength threatened the success of independent, self-made men. By closely studying the soldiers and families of the Texas Brigade, scholars can track Confederate ideology from secession to the final spring of the war and through the failures of the postwar period. White Confederates saw the Texas Brigade as an example of themselves, and it was. For better and for worse. Two digital history projects accompany this book. One maps the veterans' journeys home from Appomattox. The second project tracks a sample of the Texas veterans from the brigade in the 1870s, noting how the war affected them, how they shaped Reconstruction in their local communities, and mapping continued connections between the men.

Ural's next work is a digital history project focused on the over 1800 veterans, wives, and widows who lived at the Confederate Soldier Home, Beauvoir, in Biloxi, Mississippi, from 1903 through 1957. Existing studies of Confederate veteran homes, the few that exist, argue that those who lived there were more often treated like inmates than residents and they served as monuments to the Lost Cause where the men and women became caricatures of "old times . . . not forgotten." Compounding the challenge is the fact that our knowledge of Civil War veterans is heavily based upon the men who left behind written accounts of their experiences. Most writings by Civil War soldiers, however, have been lost or destroyed, and many soldiers were illiterate or semi-literate and wrote nothing at all. As a result, historians' conclusions about the postwar lives of Civil War veterans are based largely upon the experiences of only about half that population, and we know even less about veterans' families. The Beauvoir Veteran Project investigates impoverished Mississippi veterans' and their families' to see how the war affected them and their communities and how representative they are of larger trends in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth American South. Learn more at BeauvoirVeteranProject.org

Ural has a regular column titled "Ural on URLs" that reviews Civil War digital projects for the magazine _America's Civil War_ and regularly contributes to the column "The War in Words" for _Civil War Times Illustrated_. She is chair of the editorial board of _The Journal of Military History_ and serves on the board for the journal _War & Society._

Susannah Ural lives in Petal, Mississippi, outside Hattiesburg, with her husband, John Rasberry, and son, Robby. Learn more at http://susannahjural.com/