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Lawrence T. McDonnell

Lawrence McDonnell

  • Associate Professor

Contact

lmcd@iastate.edu

515-294-1156

615 Ross
527 Farm House Ln.
Ames IA
50011-1054

Bio

My research explores nineteenth-century American history, with particular focus on the Old South, the coming of the Civil War, and the central role that conflict played in reconstructing the United States as a capitalist nation.

My first book, Performing Disunion: The Coming of the Civil War in Charleston, South Carolina considers how social contradictions at street level generated revolutionary change. In addition, I have published essays on slavery, Southern politics, honor and chivalry, masculinity, and labor history in The Journal of Social History, Labour/Le Travail, the Slavery and Antislavery digital history collection, and several edited volumes.

My research has been supported by fellowships from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Institute for Southern Studies at the University of South Carolina, and Richmond: The International American University in London. Currently, I am completing Dark Bargain: Love, Murder, and Vengeance in the Old South (co-authored with Kathleen Hilliard), a study of the social crisis one woman’s murder caused for whites and blacks in an antebellum southern community. In 2026, I will complete a microhistorical analysis of the life of a surprising Southern confidence man. Beyond that, I am at work on a study of the intersection of military and labor history—Bloody Work: The Civil War and the Making of the American Working Class.

Ask An Historian

Why did you choose your field of study?

I wanted to understand how ruling classes come to destroy themselves, and how revolutions occur. The American South offered the perfect parable.

Education

PhD, History, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2014

MA, History, The Johns Hopkins University, 1981

BA, History, University of Western Ontario, 1979

Selected Publications

  • Lawrence T. McDonnell, Performing Disunion: The Coming of the Civil War in Charleston, South Carolina (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018)
  • Lawrence T. McDonnell, “Killing Calvin Crozier: Military Occupation and Southern Honor after Appomattox,” in Reconstruction at 150: Reassessing the New Birth of Freedom, ed. J. Brent Morris and Orville Vernon Burton (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2023), 264-288 https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/191/edited_volume/chapter/3613211
  • Lawrence T. McDonnell, “Lincoln, Du Bois’ ‘General Strike’, and the Making of an American Working Class,” in Lincoln’s Unfinished Work: From Generation to Generation, ed. Orville Vernon Burton and Peter Eisenstadt (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2022), 59-81 https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/236/edited_volume/chapter/3173686
  • Lawrence T. McDonnell, “Money Knows No Master: Market Relations and the American Slave Community,” in Developing Dixie: Modernization in a Traditional Culture, ed. Winifred B. Moore, Jr., Joseph F. Tripp, and Lyon G. Tyler (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1988), 31-44.
  • Lawrence T. McDonnell, “‘You Are Too Sentimental’: Problems and Suggestions for a New Labor History,” Journal of Social History, 17 (1984): 629-654; translated as “‘Sois Demasiado Sentimentales’: Problemas y sugerencias para una nueva historia del trabajo,” Historia social, 10 (1991): 71-100. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40340277?sid=primo&seq=1 https://www.jstor.org/stable/3787386?sid=primo&seq=1

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