Fridays on the Ridge
Dr. Brian Matthew Jordan
July 18, 2025 - 3:30pm
Valentine Hall Auditorium (next to Museum)
-FREE, donations appreciated-

“Held in War’s Grasp”: The Ordeals of Union Veteranhood

Beginning where many histories end, Brian Matthew Jordan will reveal the desperate fate that awaited Union veterans after demobilization. While Confederate troops returned to homes that shared in a sense of defeat, Union veterans returned to a civilian population eager to put the war behind them. Based on prodigious research in a trove of veteran correspondence, medical records, and pension files, this lecture surveys the myriad ways in which the Civil War continued to annex the bodies and minds of its survivors. Further, it reveals how the protracted battles over the conflict’s memory and legacy further complicated the onerous task of reintegration for ordinary veterans.

Brian Matthew Jordan is Associate Professor of U.S. Civil War History and Chair of the Department of History at Sam Houston State University, where he has taught for a decade. Professor Jordan earned his undergraduate degree in Civil War Era Studies at Gettysburg College (working under the tutelage of Gabor Boritt and Allen Guelzo), and M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. degrees in History at Yale. His first book, Marching Home: Union Veterans and Their Unending Civil War, was a finalist (one of three runners- up) for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in History and, in its dissertation form, won the George Washington Egleston Prize (for Best U.S. History Dissertation at Yale) and John Addison Porter Prize. He has authored or edited five other books on Civil War soldiers, veterans, and memory, including The War Went On: Reconsidering the Lives of Civil War Veterans (with Evan Rothera); A Thousand May Fall: An Immigrant Regiment’s Civil War, and Final Resting Places: Reflections on the Meaning of Civil War Graves (with Jonathan W. White). Presently, he is at work on This War of Ours: A New History of the Civil War in the United States, a one-volume history of the conflict for Liveright/W.W. Norton. Brian is the founding co-editor of the series “Veterans” at the University of Massachusetts Press, and, for a decade, has served as Book Review Editor for The Civil War Monitor. He appears regularly on C-SPAN and was featured in the HISTORY Channel’s three-part documentary on the life of U.S. Grant. In 2024, he delivered a eulogy at the inurnment of 28 Union veterans and their spouses in Seattle, Washington. He has addressed audiences in more than thirty states.