ABOUT

Ann L. Tucker is an author, historian, and history professor, writing on the Civil War and US South through an international lens.

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Dr. Tucker’s areas of expertise include the Civil War era and US South, which she approaches through a transnational perspective.  She is interested in questions of southern identity and international influences; in particular, she wants to know how events in Europe helped shape southern identity in the Civil War era.  To answer these questions, her research studies the influence of European nationalist movements and the age of nationalist revolutions on the development of the Confederacy and southern nationalism.

 

Her first book, Newest Born of Nations:  European Nationalist Movements and the Creation of the Confederacy, is published by the University of Virginia Press (June 2020).  In Newest Born of Nations, Tucker argues that elite white southerners used their analysis of European nationalist movements to refine their vision of what a nation should be, to develop a sense that the South differed from North on issues of nationhood, and to legitimize their visions of southern nationhood during secession and the Civil War.  White southerners’ international perspectives ultimately enabled the development of the Confederacy.

 

Tucker’s in-progress second project will extend her analysis into the Reconstruction era to examine how former Confederates’ international perspective on nationhood helped them remake their own sense of nationhood in the post-Civil War era.  The first portion of this research was published as “To ‘Heal the Wounded Spirit’:  Former Confederates’ International Perspective on Reconstruction and Reconciliation,” in Reconciliation after Civil Wars: Global Perspectives, ed. Paul Quigley and James Hawdon (Routledge, 2018).

 

Ann Tucker is an associate professor of history at the University of North Georgia.  She earned her BA at Wake Forest University and MA and PhD at the University of South Carolina.