Dr. James Marten

Dr. James MartenMarquette University

MilwaukeeWI53201United States of Americajames.marten@marquette.edu

Curriculum Vitae

Professor Emeritus

History

I have written, edited, or co-edited over twenty books in two different fields: The Civil War era and the histories of children and youth. My books include The Children’s Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), a Choice “Outstanding Academic Title” and winner of the Alpha Sigma Nu Jesuit Book Award, as well as more recent books on Civil War veterans, including Sing Not War: The Lives of Union and Confederate Veterans in Gilded Age America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), America’s Corporal: James Tanner in War and Peace, a short biography of the disabled Civil War veteran and activist James “Corporal” Tanner (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2014), and Buying and Selling Civil War Memory in Gilded Age America (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2021), co-edited with Caroline E. Janney.

 My work on children and youth includes A Very Short Introduction to the History of Childhood (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018) and a co-edited volume, War and Childhood in the Era of the Two World Wars (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019), co-edited with Mischa Honeck, as well as a number of other edited collections, including the six-volume A Cultural History of Childhood and Family (co-edited with Elizabeth Foyster and published by Berg in 2010). I edited the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth from 2013-2018.

My current research is a book tentatively called A Social History of the Long Civil War: The Soldiers, Families, and Communities of the Sixth Wisconsin Volunteers, which will focus on the long-term effects of the Civil War a regiment that fought in one of the most famous units in the Union army—the Iron Brigade. 

Education

Ph.D., Texas, Austin 1986

Courses Taught

3104: The Civil War Era

4150: Childhood in America

Undergraduate and graduate seminars on childhood and the family, the sectional conflict, and memory and history.

Research Interests

United States social and cultural history

Civil War era

veterans

children and youth.

Honors and Awards

I received the 2010 Lawrence G. Haggerty Award for Excellence in Research at Marquette University.

Responsibilities

Marten has supervised ten PhD students working in a wide variety of fields, from the Civil War home front to westward expansion, from women’s history to childhood studies, and from nineteenth century race relations to twentieth century community studies. His most recent dissertators include:

 Peter Borg, “The Colored Problem”: Milwaukee’s White Protestant Churches

Respond to the Second Great Migration (2020)

 Gayle Kiszely, “The Age Demands It”: Progressivism in Zion City, Illinois, a

Conservative Protestant Theocracy (2018)

 John French (Prairie School, Racine, Wisconsin), Irish-American Identity,

Memory, and Americanism during the Eras of the Civil War and First

World War (2012)

Currently, he is supervising the dissertation of Lisa Lamson (now a full-time lecturer at UW-Green Bay) on African American education in nineteenth century Baltimore.