Andrew Donnelly for Confederate Sympathies

Overview

About the book

The archive of the Civil War era is filled with depictions of men’s same-sex affections and intimacies. Across antebellum campaign biographies, proslavery fiction, published memoirs of Confederate veterans and Union prisoners of war, Civil War novels, newspaper accounts, and the war’s historiography, homoerotic symbolism and narratives shaped the era’s politics, as well as the meaning and memory of the war. The Civil War, in turn, shaped the development of homosexuality in the United States. In a book full of surprising insights, Andrew Donnelly uncovers this deeply consequential queer history at the heart of nineteenth-century national culture.

Rather than presenting a secret or marginalized history,
Confederate Sympathies argues that male same-sex affection
was central to the nation’s political and cultural development
during and after the war—in ways that profoundly shaped race, power, and memory in America.

About the author

Andrew Donnelly is a literary and cultural historian specializing in the U.S. Civil War and Reconstruction periods and in the field of Southern Studies. He is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Memphis and received his PhD from Harvard University in 2020. His research has been supported by fellowships from the Boston Athenaeum, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Center for Mark Twain Studies, and the Library Company of Philadelphia.