Manhood, Race, Failure, and Reconciliation: Charles Francis Adams Jr. and the American Civil War

Michael DeGruccio teaches at the University of Notre Dame, where he is an Edward F. Sorin postdoctoral fellow. He is currently working on a microhistory about a Union officer who, after returning home with gruesome (controversial) wounds, kills his wife's “seducer.” The project, tentatively entitled “Unmade,” explores manhood, family, and race in the Civil War era. He has also begun gathering sources for a material history of the war that will explore its “commodification” through a thick web of land speculation, trophy trading, and trafficking in intimate and macabre mementoes.