Other Research

Lincoln

As a sequel to Lincoln's Censor, I re-examined Lincoln and the press. In an article titled “Lincoln and Civil War Press Suppression Reconsidered” published in the fall of 2009 in American Journalism. I look at Lincoln's gradual change toward a more protective attitude regarding press freedom. It is based primarily on an 1863 letter the president wrote to Major General John M. Schofield, the commander of the Department of Missouri. I conclude that Lincoln, who was basically a moderate and pragmatist, saw that the rule of law must be saved in the long run, which meant discontinuing extra-legal policies of press constraints. Otherwise, his greater goals of reunion and abolition would not occur in the democratic republic the founding fathers created.

Slavery

I am the editor of a series of books about slavery. The works for each of these three books is the result of research presented at the annual Global Meetings of Slavery Past, Present, and Future. Venues for the Global Meetings have included Oxford, England; Prague, Czech Republic; Berlin, Germany; Vienna and Innsbruck, Austria; Leiden and Amsterdam, the Netherlands; Accra, Ghana; and the 2026 meeting will be in Dublin, Ireland.

Churchill; Sachsman Symposium; Southeastern Review

My long-term interest is writing a book about Winston S. Churchill as a communicator ... I am an at-large member of the board for the Society of Nineteenth-Century Historians, which puts on the Sachsman Symposium on the 19th-Century Press, the Civil War, and Free Expression. The 2026 Symposium will be held at Augusta University on Nov. 12-14. Dr. David B. Sachsman began the conference in 1993 at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. It moved to AU after Sachsman's death in 2022. The conference has produced nine published books ... I am also the book editor of The Southeastern Review of Journalism History.