CHANDRA MANNING

Chandra Manning is an American historian who specializes in 19th century U.S. History. A graduate of Mount Holyoke College, Chandra went on to receive her Ph.D. from Harvard in 2002. Manning teaches at Georgetown University on U.S. history, mainly of the 19th century, including classes on the Civil War, slavery and emancipation, Lincoln, citizenship, the American Revolution, and the History of Baseball. She has been at Georgetown since 2005, other than a brief leave to serve as Special Advisor to the Dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. Her first book, What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War won the Avery O. Craven Prize awarded by the Organization of American Historians, earned Honorable Mention for the Lincoln Prize and the Virginia Literary Awards for Nonfiction, and was a finalist for the Jefferson Davis Prize and the Frederick Douglass Prize. Her second book, Troubled Refuge: Struggling for Freedom in the Civil War, about Civil War refugee camps where former slaves allied with the Union Army and altered the course of the war and of emancipation, won the Jefferson Davis Prize awarded by the American Civil War Museum for best book on the Civil War. A former National Park Service Ranger, she has also advised historical sites, museums, and historical societies, as well as community groups in search of historical perspective.