Wednesday, November 9th 2022
6:30 PM
6:30 PM
Tickets HERE
Join President Lincoln’s Cottage for the next installment in our virtual speaker series, Scholar Sessions. We’ll be hosting historian Dr. Holly Pinheiro, Jr. to discuss his new book, The Families’ Civil War: Black Soldiers and the Fight for Racial Justice, in conversation with Michael Atwood Mason, our CEO & Executive Director.
President Lincoln’s Cottage members at the $100 level and above receive priority registration and two complimentary tickets for this event. Eligible members will have received a special ticket code via email. If you’re not yet a member, or need to renew your membership, you may do so here.
The Families’ Civil War tells the stories of freeborn northern African Americans in Philadelphia struggling to maintain families while fighting against racial discrimination. Taking a long view, from 1850 to the 1920s, Holly A. Pinheiro Jr. shows how Civil War military service worsened already difficult circumstances due to its negative effects on family finances, living situations, minds, and bodies. At least seventy-nine thousand African Americans served in northern USCT regiments. Many, including most of the USCT veterans examined here, remained in the North and constituted a sizable population of racial minorities living outside the former Confederacy. The book provides a compelling account of the lives of USCT soldiers and their entire families but also argues that the Civil War was but one engagement in a longer war for racial justice. By 1863 the Civil War provided African American Philadelphians with the ability to expand the theater of war beyond their metropolitan and racially oppressive city into the South to defeat Confederates and end slavery as armed combatants. But the war at home waged by white northerners never ended.
About the Speaker
Holly Pinheiro, Jr. is an Assistant Professor of African American History in the Department of History at Furman University. His research focuses on the intersectionality of race, gender, and class in the military from 1850 through the 1930s. Counter to the national narrative which championed the patriotic manhood of soldiering from the Civil War through the 1930s, Pinheiro’s research reveals that African American veterans and their families’ military experience were much more fraught. Economic and social instability introduced by military service resonated for years and even generations after soldiers left the battlefield. He has published articles in edited volumes and academic journals, in and outside of the United States. His book, The Families’ Civil War, highlights how racism, within and outside of military service, impacted the bodies, economies, family structures, and social spaces of African Americans long after the war ended.
Dr. Pinheiro has traveled the world, including being raised in Australia, due to his upbringing in a military family and academic career. After finishing graduate school, Dr. Pinheiro held a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Alabama. He previously worked at Augusta University where he taught African American History. He joined Furman University in South Carolina in 2021.
